Free advice for Democratic leaders: Concentrate on non-Diebold districts

10.22.06 - Posted by AsiansVote

MyDD has a good rundown of the debate among Democratic leaders about which races should get the most money in order to best ensure retaking the House. My free advice:

Concentrate on the twenty most competitive House races in districts where Diebold voting machines are not being used.

Every poll indicates that the Democrats should handily retake the House. But according to Genvieve Smith's recent "American Prospect" article, about 41 percent of American voters will use electronic voting machines in the upcoming midterm elections. Five percent will use the Diebold Accuvote TS machine, which Princeton researchers just exposed as eminently hackable.

Here's an excellent overview of the problem from Dick Polman of the "Philadelpia Inquirer":

For starters, these machines can be hacked all too easily, but that's only the most dramatic finding. More often - and this has already happened in a number of states, including Maryland and New Mexico - they lose votes, fail to register votes, "switch" votes between competing candidates, count votes twice, and simply freeze before voters can vote.

Maybe these dire findings could be dismissed if they had appeared in only one report. At last count, however, there have been at least nine such reports - from places such as Princeton and Stanford, all authored by reputable computer-security experts with esteemed university pedigrees. And we also have the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, which concluded a year ago that "problems with the security and reliability of electronic voting systems" are "potentially affecting the reliability of future elections, and voter confidence in the accuracy of the vote count."

Not concerned yet? Here are a couple more articles about voting machine problems in Colorado, Ohio, Missouri, and Florida.

And the problem doesn't stop with voting machines. The threats that the campaign of California Republican congressional candidate Tan Nguyen made against immigrant voters is just the latest example of a long and ongoing history of Republican voter intimidation.

If our Democratic leaders aren't seriously factoring the likelihood of Republican election fraud into their strategies for winning the House, we need new leaders.

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10.22.06 | Civil Rights & Liberties , Issues , Strategies , Voting Rights & Responsibilities