James E. Collier and Kenneth Collier - Votescam: The Stealing of America

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Electronic Hoodwink

We can now speak the most majestic words a democracy can offer: The people have spoken

First words spoken by President-elect, George Bush, November , 1988 victory speechin Houston, Texas, : PM EST.

Once, during the time when days were darker, I made a promise. Thanks, New Hampshire!

Same speech, final words.

I t was not the People of the United States of America who did the speaking on that election day, although most of them believed it was, and still believe so.

In fact, the People did not speak at all, and George Bush may have known it or, at least, strongly suspected it.

The voices most of us really heard that day were the voices of computersstrong, loud, authoritative, unquestioned in their electronic finality. The computers counted more than million American votes in 1988 more than enough to swing election after election across the nation. In that election, a difference of just , or so votes would have put Dukakis into the White House.

The computers that spoke in November 1988 held in their inner workings small boxes that contained secret codes that only the sellers of the computers could read. The programs, or source codes, were regarded as trade secrets, The sellers of the vote-counting software zealously guarded their programs from the public, from election officials, from everyoneon the dubious grounds that competitors could steal their ideas if the source codes were open to inspection.

You may ask: What ideas does it require to count something as simple as ballots?

Can the ideas be much more complex than, lets say, a supermarket computerized cash register or an automatic bank teller machine?

The computer voting machines do not have to do anything complicated at all; they simply must be able to register votes for the correct candidate or party or proposal, tabulate them, count them up, and deliver arithmetically correct additions. People with no formal training, even children, used to do it all the time.

So why cant the public know what those secret source codes instruct the computers to do? It only makes common sense that every gear, every mechanism, every nook and cranny of every part of the voting process ought to be in the sunlight, wide open to public view.

How else can the public be reasonably assured that they are participating in an unrigged election where their vote actually means something?

Yet one of the most mysterious, low-profile, covert, shadowy, questionable mechanisms of American democracy is the American vote count.

There is so profound a public despair about keeping the vote system honest that a man with immaculate academic credentials can sound the alarm on Dan Rathers CBS Evening Newscharging that Americas elections are being compromised by computer felonsand still get only three calls about it.

Dr. Howard Strauss, a Princeton computer sciences professor and a member of a tiny nationwide group of worried citizens who call themselves Election Watch, says:

The presidential election of 1992 , without too much difficulty and with little chance of the felons getting caught, could be stolen by computers for one candidate or another. The candidate who can win by computer has worked far enough ahead to rig the election by getting his consultants to write the software that runs thousands of vote-counting computers from coast to coast. There are so many computers that use the same software now that a presidential election can be tampered within fact, may already be tampered with. Because of the trade secrecy, nobody can be the wiser.