Krugman: Saving the Vote
by Paul Krugman, New York Times
…Much
of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no
paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of
these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So
there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were
properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have
to take the result on faith.
Yet the
behavior of Gov. Jeb Bush's officials with regard to other
election-related matters offers no justification for such faith. First,
there was the affair of the felon list. Florida law denies the vote to
convicted felons. But in 2000 many innocent people, a great number of
them black, couldn't vote because they were erroneously put on a list
of felons; these wrongful exclusions may have put Governor Bush's
brother in the White House.
This
year, Florida again drew up a felon list, and tried to keep it secret.
When a judge forced the list's release, it turned out that it once
again wrongly disenfranchised many people – again, largely
African-American [Democratic voters] – while including almost no Hispanics [Republican voters].
[Monday], my colleague Bob Herbert reported
on another highly suspicious Florida initiative: state police officers
have gone into the homes of elderly African-American voters – including
participants in get-out-the-vote operations – and interrogated them as
part of what the state says is a fraud investigation. But the state has
provided little information about the investigation, and, as Mr.
Herbert says, this looks remarkably like an attempt to intimidate
voters.
Given
this pattern, there will be skepticism if Florida's paperless voting
machines give [pseudo-]pResident Bush an upset, uncheckable victory. [Skepticism? That's got to be the understatement of the century.]
Congress
should have acted long ago to place the coming election above suspicion
by requiring a paper trail for votes. But legislation was bottled up in
committee [meaning, the Republican chair of the House Admin Committee intentionally prevented it from going to the floor for a vote], and it may be too late to change the hardware. Yet it is crucial that this election be credible. What can be done?
(more) Free Registration Required
Tomorrow,
Blog for Iowa will offer up some suggestions about what you can do
right here at home to ensure accurate and fair elections.
[My comments are in italics above.]
Thanks to JoyAnn in Cedar Rapids for alerting Blog for Iowa about this article.
Blog For Iowa 