Voting in the USA - A flawed process?

[modeski]

I've been reading a lot about the upcoming elections in the American Senate lately, and thought that it would be interesting to consider the voting process in the USA.

Many people, myself included, believe that Bush manipulated the voting process in 2000 in order that he become President. There are still many questions surrounding the 2004 Presidential Election - these go largely unaddressed in the mainstream media.

As a springboard for discussion therefore, I present the following 20 facts about voting in the USA.


20 Facts about Voting in the USA

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.

3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.

7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates.

8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.

9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.

10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

11. Diebold is based in Ohio.

12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as senior managers and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.

13. Jeff Dean, ">Diebold's Senior Vice-President and senior programmer on Diebold's central compiler code, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree.

14. Diebold Senior Vice-President Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years.

15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.

16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it!

17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail.

18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.

19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother.

20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation.

[Thanatos]

Equally distressing is the electoral system. Our first-past-the-post rubbish, which they also use for the House of Representatives, is bad enough, but then there's the Senate: two Senators per state, regardless of its population, so that a Hawaiian effectively has dozens of times as many votes as a Californian. I'm not even going to start on that preposterous entity, the Electoral College...

[Naselus]

Yup.

To be fair, the electoral college wouldn't be that bad if it used proportional Representation, Diebold and ES&S contribute massively to BOTH parties (it was just as often the democrats who awarded them the contracts), and EVERYONE on George W. Bush's shortlist of running partners was a crook.

Fun, innit?

[HStorm]

Heh, I think the question in the title is a little like asking, "The BNP - a racist institution?" to be honest, but still, having all those facts listed off does lay the absurdities of the US electoral system bare in horrifying clarity.

This has been a furious matter for debate over in the USA for years now, of course, and the system over there is so flawed, so obsolete, so embarrassing that if its distinguishing features were found in any system outside its borders, the USA itself would be its loudest, most pompous critic, with wild and militant accusations of corruption and election-rigging.

On that note, I remember a few interesting points about when Bush got to the White House back in 2000. In the LDB newsletter I was writing at the time, I mentioned all the chaos and irregularities that plagued the election, and pointed out that had those things happened in the elections in Yugoslavia just a few months earlier, the US would have accused Milosevic of rigging and probably declared another war. (Interestingly, irregularities in the Yugoslav elections were much fewer and much farther between than in the US one; and yet the US still made bitchy remarks about the conduct. Bloody hypocrites!)

[modeski]

Funny that you mention the LDB newsletter, HStorm, I mentioned the clan in another thread a moment ago before reading this one!

The shameless hypocrisy of the situation strikes me the most; Bush constantly harps on about how the USA is a beacon of democracy, bringing the first "free" elections to Iraq, etc, yet at the same time conducts its own elections in, as you say, a fashion that it would decry in any other country.

The question begs, what is it that Bush & co fears so much about truly free and fair elections?