American Electoral System: Diebold Vs. The Will of People

We pride ourselves on the notion that we have the best democracy. Our democracy is represented in voting and electing our politicians, senators, and our president. But what happens when our voting does not count? Are we still a democracy then or did we become a dictatorial nation where there is people lurking behind curtains and controlling the elections. This is of course a strong statement and allegation which I really wish was not true. However, hundreds upon hundreds of reports conclude that our voting machines are not secure. Hundreds upon hundreds of reports conclude the misuse of electoral data and outright fraud.

We all remember the tragic 2000 presidential election where Al Gore lost to George Bush even after winning the popular vote. However, not many people know that in that same election, an electronic voting machine recorded minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore in Volusia County, Florida. Ironically and sadly, this is the state which Al Gore lost. Was it a computer error? Or was someone playing with the results? And even if the fraud was never proven, what does a minus of 16,022 votes mean? It means a change of election. It means the loss of the will of the people. It means the loss of our democracy. Unfortunately this disaster does not stop there. Many computer scientists states that the software used by our voting machines, which are owned by a company called Diebold, lack the essential security features that prevent hackers or anyone who wants to tamper with the results. This means that when 87% of our voting uses the electronic voting machines it can be wrong. Thus, 87% of the voting is not true. And let me define not true by a quote from Dr. David Hill who is a professor of computer science at Stanford when he states that "there are a lot of people involved in writing the software, and lots of people who could have touched the software before it went into that machine. If one of those people put something malicious in the software and it is distributed to all the machines, then that one person could be responsible for changing tens of thousands of votes, maybe even hundreds of thousands, across the country." And there you have it. Not only can the results be wrong but they can also be tampered with so one person who is losing can win and vice versa.

In the movie "Hacking Democracy", Bev Harris, a writer and an activist delves into this subject even more and reveals amazing disturbing info. She reveals that although Diebold knew of software problems, they did not do anything to fix it. Furthermore, accounting statements reveal that they have received funding from the Republican party. And if that is not disturbing enough, Bev conducted a small mini-election experiment which showed that fraud is very much possible. In this experiment, 8 people voted in a simple yes or question. Six voted No and two voted yes. However, the final results showed seven Yes to one No. This was due to the fact that they tampered with the memory card prior to the election. Thus, fraud is a strong possibility even though Diebold claimed that it is not.

Thus, while all these results show that the voting machines are not reliable and members of the congress are fully aware of that they still do use them. No one really knows why. No one really knows what happened in the 2000 and the 2004 elections. No one knows why the Republican Party was giving money to Diebold. No one knows why John Kerry left the election when he knew fully well that the election in Ohio was stolen. What we do know is that with all these results and all this doubt regarding our voting can bring this democracy, if it exists, to its knees. I think it is our right that when we vote for someone whether he was democratic or republican then this vote should go to that person and not someone else. We need a fair election, a true election not a theatrical one. We need our democracy restored.