Richard Brand writes an op-ed for the Miami Herald pointing out a Venezuelan connection to one of the emerging electronic voting systems threatening to alter the accuracy and security of American elections.
Why is Hugo Chavez Involved with US Voting Machines: The greater threat to our nation's security comes not from Dubai and its pro-Western government, but from Venezuela, where software engineers with links to the leftist, anti-American regime of Hugo Chávez are programming electronic voting machines that will soon power U.S. elections.The transfer of power from citizens to elected officials is the most important aspect of the American theory of just governance, therefore, the accuracy and integrity of voting should be a primary concern for the country. After the 2000 and 2004 elections a great deal of thought has gone into how to assure the validity of voting tabulations. One measure moving through Congress is HR 550 or the Holt Bill, which will require that any approved electronic voting system produces a paper trail, or in essence a cash register receipt for the voter.
Democrat grassroots activists are pushing to advance HR 550, but there are concerns about the implications of this proposed legislation even former Howard Dean staffers can identify.
What’s Wrong with the Holt Bill Part 1: The Holt Bill is well intended, but unfortunately, it is not just about paper ballots; it includes several dangerous provisions that are not good for our democracy at all. ... First: keep in mind that the US Constitution grants states rights to manage our own election systems. Those founders knew what they were talking about.We all know computers can be programmed to produce any desired output including a paper receipt that says one thing and one or more log files that can print out something else. Business operations wanting to sell machines to the government are selling the concepts of speed and ease to budget constrained officials, however, any system which eliminates the citizen marked physical ballot is to susceptible to abuse to be accepted. Hopefully this is one issue where the paranoid right and the paranoid left can agree to distrust the government.
Second: keep in mind that the EAC and the proliferation of paperless computerized voting systems both result from the Orwellian-named "Help America Vote Act (HAVA)," which was sponsored by Bob Ney, written in his office, and in large part paid for by computerized voting industry lobbyists such as Diebold...
Voting activists are excited about the Holt bill because it talks about mandating paper trails for elections. I think it goes without saying that verifiable paper audit trails belong in any democratic election, and I applaud the bill's attempt to codify this. However, the bill would be strengthened by specifically defining real paper ballots as opposed to allowing for error-prone computer printouts as the vote of record. Printers jam, receipts are not ballots, and adding technology-based printing to the act of voting unnecessarily complicates what is a simple act. But I am not going to dwell on this aspect of the legislation right now. Suffice it to say that the legislation should be revised to remove technology altogether from the act of marking ballots.
