An addendum to F9-11.
******************
Fear of Fraud
July 27, 2004
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for
the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and
observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a
voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies
him as a county official, typing instructions at computers
with access to the vote-tabulating software.
When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The
challenger demands an investigation. But there are no
ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the
incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on
whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a
recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by
Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. Mr.
Gumbel's full-length report, printed in Los Angeles City
Beat, makes hair-raising reading not just because it
reinforces concerns about touch-screen voting, but also
because it shows how easily officials can stonewall after a
suspect election.
Some states, worried about the potential for abuse with
voting machines that leave no paper trail, have banned
their use this November. But Florida, which may well decide
the presidential race, is not among those states, and last
month state officials rejected a request to allow
independent audits of the machines' integrity. A spokesman
for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those seeking audits of trying to
"undermine voters' confidence," and declared, "The governor
has every confidence in the Department of State and the
Division of Elections."
Should the public share that confidence? Consider the felon
list.
Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In 2000
the state hired a firm to purge supposed felons from the
list of registered voters; these voters were turned away
from the polls. After the election, determined by 537
votes, it became clear that thousands of people had been
wrongly disenfranchised. Since those misidentified as
felons were disproportionately Democratic-leaning
African-Americans, these errors may have put George W. Bush
in the White House.
This year, Florida again hired a private company -
Accenture, which recently got a homeland security contract
worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon list.
Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State
officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the
list released.
The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who
had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights,
were nonetheless on the banned-voter list. Then The
Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61 of more
than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list
would have wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate
African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many
Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in
Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.
After first denying any systematic problem, state officials
declared it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to
match a list of registered voters to a list of felons,
flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was the
same on both lists. They didn't realize, they said, that
this would automatically miss felons who identified
themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on
voter rolls but not in state criminal records.
But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon
lists say that they repeatedly warned state election
officials about that very problem.
Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an
independent examination of voting machines because he has
"every confidence" in his handpicked election officials.
Yet those officials have a history of slipshod performance
on other matters related to voting and somehow their errors
always end up favoring Republicans. Why should anyone trust
their verdict on the integrity of voting machines, when
another convenient mistake could deliver a Republican
victory in a high-stakes national election?
This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Think about what a
tainted election would do to America's sense of itself, and
its role in the world. In the face of official
stonewalling, doubters probably wouldn't be able to prove
one way or the other whether the vote count was distorted -
but if the result looked suspicious, most of the world and
many Americans would believe the worst. I'll write soon
about what can be done in the few weeks that remain, but
here's a first step: if Governor Bush cares at all about
the future of the nation, as well as his family's political
fortunes, he will allow that independent audit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/opinion/27krug.html?ex=1091918849&ei=1&en=bb17bb19a6f4f91e
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
)
