Rolling Stone Editorial: A Call for Investigation (Election 2004)

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Editorial: A Call for Investigation

Electronic voting machines pose a grave threat to democracy
For more, see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.

Election officials across the country are currently scrambling to install electronic voting machines in time for the midterm elections this fall. The touch-screen technology, they insist, will make voting as easy and secure as withdrawing cash from an ATM. ''This technology has been used effectively for ten to fifteen years,'' says David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold, a leading manufacturer of electronic voting machines.

There are certainly good reasons to modernize the nation's ridiculously outdated voting equipment; it was Florida's ''hanging chads,'' after all, that cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000. But mounting evidence suggests that touch-screen machines present a far graver threat to the integrity of America's elections -- and that leading Republicans have taken money from Diebold to push local election officials to adopt its technology. It is time for Congress and the Justice Department to launch a full-scale investigation into the company and its equipment.

Vote Rigging Repeated studies have shown that touch-screen machines, which provide voters with no paper record of their ballots, are highly susceptible to tampering. According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, the leading federal watchdog agency, the machines are ''eminently hackable.'' It takes only a few minutes to open the machines and insert a PC card containing malicious code that will switch votes from one candidate to another. In a demonstration conducted last year before the Board of Elections in Leon County, Florida, computer security expert Herbert Thompson cracked into an electronic machine in under sixty seconds, altering the internal code and changing the vote count.

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Undue Influence After the Florida fiasco in 2000, Diebold saw an opportunity. To persuade Rep. Bob Ney to promote its machines in a package of election reforms he was drafting called the Help America Vote Act, the company hired two lobbyists with close ties to the Ohio congressman. Diebold paid at least $180,000 to David DiStefano, Ney's former chief of staff. And it shelled out as much as $275,000 to the lobbying firm of the best-connected man on Capitol Hill: Jack Abramoff.

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http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10463874/editorial_a_call_for_investigation

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Sources and Commentary

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and ROLLING STONE spent four months investigating the 2004 election in Ohio. To assemble a conservative estimate of the number of voters in the state who were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted, we interviewed dozens of election officials, pollsters, candidates, voter advocates and political scientists, and reviewed reports by federal officials, statisticians, voter advocates and journalists.
Kennedy is president of Waterkeeper Alliance and writes frequently about issues affecting American democracy. His story ''Deadly Immunity'' appeared in RS 977/978. Additional research and reporting for this piece were provided by contributing editor Tim Dickinson, who covers politics for ROLLING STONE, and writes National Affairs Daily, where he will be exploring the article in greater depth in the coming days.

Below is a list of sources and additional materials on the 2004 election.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10463875/was_the_2004_election_stolen_sources_and_commentary

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? The Charts






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