Funny Numbers

Whatever Dopp’s numbers mean or don’t mean, that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. There are obvious problems with a voting system run by private companies with proprietary software written in a secret code that independent analysts can’t comb through for security flaws. And whether or not you agree that the Republicans in power would be crooked enough to tinker with the results of an election, anyone who put his or her mind to it wouldn’t have such a hard time subverting democracy. Other groups, such as Verified Voting, a branch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation devoted to authenticating voting results, and Harris’ own Black Box Voting, are filing FOIAs demanding resolutions to voting-day puzzles. And on November 5, a coalition of six members of Congress, led by Michigan Democrat John Conyers, officially requested that the Government Accountability Office investigate 265 specific complaints, including a computer glitch in Sarper County, Nebraska, that added 3,000 “phantom” votes to the totals, and the 21 malfunctioning voting machines in Broward County, Florida, that “lost” 13,000 ballots.

The most encouraging plan of all, though, comes from a nonprofit group of software engineers and computer scientists called the Open Voting Consortium, who have invented an electronic voting system that can be independently verified by the voter and another independent vendor. The system has its adherents in California, where California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has mandated a voter-verifiable paper trail in all counties by 2006. But selling the technology to the red states may take finding some egregious error in the 2004 “direct-record” electronic results — preferably in a state where Kerry prevailed. Hence the Nader organization’s focus on the problems with Diebold AccuVote optical scanners. “Obviously it’s not like we’re going to find out Bush won in New Hampshire,” Kevin Zeese admitted. “But maybe we’ll come up with enough weird skewing of the results to cast doubt on the process.”