Secret Centralized Voting?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Technology
Well, this sounds frightening.
Congress is about to pass an election “reform” bill, HR811 (the Holt Bill). The bill will enshrine secret computerized vote counting, controlled by the White House.The Holt bill would tempt the likes of the late Mayor Daley of Chicago and vote villain Boss Tweed of New York City’s Tammany Hall.
How will our modern vote villains resist?
A “yes” vote on the Holt bill allows the federal government to erect an impenetrable wall between American voters and their votes. It will lock in secret vote-counting technology owned by corporations. The public will be shut out for good.
That’s why our New Hampshire Secretary State, the New Hampshire City and Town Clerks Association, and the Democracy for New Hampshire (DFNH) Fair Elections Committee all oppose the bill.
Why we don’t have voting software that’s open source and transparent is beyond me. This is voting! It’s supposecd to be transparent by its very nature because we have to ensure that people’s votes count.
I’ll tell you why: money.
One of the strongest champions of HR811 is an organization called VoteTrustUSA. This “grassroots” organization has ties to one of the nation’s largest “data consolidation” companies, ChoicePoint. Remember them? They helped Katherine Harris purge the Florida 2000 voter registration rolls. Nearly 100,000 registered American voters were denied their right to vote for what journalist Greg Palast called the crime of “voting while black.” Palast claims the denied vote — and not hanging chads — is what really cost Gore that election.Last summer the Atlanta Progressive News reported that the wife of ChoicePoint’s CEO Doug Curling has contributed money to VTUSA. Doug Curling confirmed to Bev Harris of Black Box Voting that his wife Donna is a VTUSA donor “and probably a board member.” Donna Curling also had participated in leadership groups under an assumed name. She remains involved with this grassroots group, which now has a full-time Washington lobbyist working for passage of the Holt bill.
Why would a grassroots election reform organization have these ties to ChoicePoint?
Awesome! Yay democracy!
This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 and is filed under 2008 Election, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:38 pm
This sounds terrifying to me. As it is, the 2000 through 2006 elections have been rife with fraud and vote fixing, that’s the only reason the Chimperor is in charge. If this change goes into effect the sky is the limit, and the party that controls the voting machines becomes our permanent fuhrer.