POAC X: Secure Electronic Voting

The supposed "talking point":

Electronic voting machines are secure and there is no evidence to suspect rigged elections

There's no such thing as secure voting, but electronic voting is relatively secure in principle. I can't imagine what conservatives would laud electronic voting as a "talking point," but I'll be glad to take a look to see what I can find.

My brief survey indicated that conservatives mostly defended specific elections against allegations of fraud, and questioned studies that purported to demonstrate some type of conservative conspiracy. I'll pick up with this stuff after we see the damning counterspin to the so-called talking point.

Programmer Clint Curtis claims that four years ago Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Florida) asked his then-employer to write software to alter votes on electronic voting machines in Florida.
Evidence of rigged elections in the United States

Two URLs. First things first.

A government watchdog group is investigating allegations made by a Florida programmer that are whipping up a frenzy among bloggers and people who believe Republicans stole the recent election.

Programmer Clint Curtis claims that four years ago Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Florida) asked his then-employer to write software to alter votes on electronic voting machines in Florida.

He said his employer told him the code would be used "to control the vote" in West Palm Beach, Florida. But a fellow employee disputed the programmer's claims and said the meetings he described never took place.
(Wired)

The "Clint Curtis sez"approach.

Curtis gives the impression of an earnest enough guy. If he's a liar he's not of the Clinton style where the lies are couched in the cleverness of fine print. Here's a YouTube video of Curtis speaking before a House investigating committee.

The funniest thing about the video is how the Democratic reps keep trying to get Curtis to comment on the Ohio results in 2004. To Curtis' credit, he resists, but they eventually get him to make a comment outside his area of expertise when he suggests that a failure of the results to match exit polling shows that the (Ohio) election was probably rigged.

I have no idea to what degree Curtis' allegations are true (whether in his mind or in reality). What I do know is that nothing came of the investigation, and that the reporting about the story on the Internet may have come straight from Curtis' testimony rather than from corroborating sources. The reports read like amateur journalism where Curtis' statements are reported as though they are verified facts. BBB inductee Brad Friedman (THE BRAD BLOG), unshockingly, is involved.

I also know that Curtis opposed Feeney in the 2006 election cycle, running against Feeney in that congressional district. When Curtis lost (by a bunch), he contested the results because (he said) polling showed that he should have done better, and he took the bizarre route of canvassing neighborhoods and collecting affidavits. He took the results of his canvassing effort before Congress and asked them to accept his results as evidence that he should have won the election (one Florida news outlet called this "solid" evidence).

That's a little bit nuts, as was Curtis' election verification idea that had voters go to a Web site to register their votes.

Summary: Evidence of voter fraud? Well, yes--but not very good evidence of voter fraud, and the allegation has already been investigated (coming to nothing).
***

Next.

Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

That's how the link leads off. From there it goes to an extensive list of links to various allegations. I'll survey the first three (they wouldn't want to lead with bad examples).

First up is a Free Press story.

As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.

The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage. Click here for GAO Report

The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as "conspiracy theories" adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.
(Free Press)

The first paragraph tells you that this publication places no value on journalistic objectivity. Which is not to say that what they report is automatically wrong. That we judge on a case by case basis. For all its bombast, the rest of the article is just a spin job on the GAO report. Check late in the story for the numbered points. Pay attention to the actual quotations from the report. Each simply underscores potential vulnerabilities of electronic voting. The report does not approach the suggestion that any of the potential vulnerabilities were actualities in Ohio. "Ohio" is only mentioned once in the report: An annex that simply states that observers from OSCE were present in Ohio for the 2004 election.

In short, the report does not concur with any particular allegations in Ohio. All it does is provide a basis for saying that such allegations are plausible in principle ("They flipped my vote"=>vote flipping is possible, but no judgment of the truth of the allegation stems from that possibility).

About the authors (found at the bottom of the Free Press story):

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008

You don't say?

We're skipping John Conyers interviewing Clint Curtis, because the link is broken and we've probably already seen it (see Youtube window above).

Second Up:

An international election observer mission - from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Parliament, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the Council of Europe - released a preliminary report on Monday declaring that the election did not meet democratic standards.
The observers' findings were seconded by Republican Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Citing the disturbing fact that official results diverged sharply from a range of surveys of voters at polling places, Lugar said, "A concerted and forceful program of election-day fraud and abuse was enacted with either the leadership or cooperation of governmental authorities."
(GregPalast.com)

Greg Palast is Brad Friedman with twice the notoriety. I supplied the link since the original was broken.

There's a huge problem with this citation. It's not talking about United States elections, but elections in Ukraine. The placement of the citation seems designed to foster the impression that the report concerns U.S. elections.

Palast did find his way to mentioning U.S. elections in the story, however:

Eastern bloc observers noted that balloting in Ohio, New Mexico and Florida did not meet Ukrainian standards, but applauded America’s attempt to restore democratic institutions after the overthrow of elected government in 2000.

Methinks I detect reporter bias in the paraphrase. Unless maybe we're still talking about an overthrow of elected government in 2000 in the Ukraine.

Nothing in this one that seriously relates to U.S. elections.

Third up:

Attorney Purge = Stacking The DOJ To Suppress Voting Rights

It's a blog (Crooks and Liars.com), "Guest blogged by Logan Murphy."
Must be a fairly recent addition, what with the April 1, 2007 date appended.

It's a gigantic leap to take the replacement of 8 federal attorneys as a move to suppress voting rights. The story accompanying the blog, published by the LA Times and authored by former DOJ official Joseph D. Rich, takes a much wider swipe at the Bush administration.

Here's Rich's take, in part:

I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws — particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies — from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants.

Under the Bush administration, however, all that changed. Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections.

It has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.

At least two of the recently fired U.S. attorneys, John McKay in Seattle and David C. Iglesias in New Mexico, were targeted largely because they refused to prosecute voting fraud cases that implicated Democrats or voters likely to vote for Democrats.
(LA Times)

Why would federal prosecutors refuse to prosecute voting fraud cases that implicated Democrats or voters likely to vote for Democrats?
That sentence points up the problem with the sweep of Rich's complaint. There seems to be a left tilt in the Department of Justice among career staffers. Past administrations were okay because they did not try to bring the DOJ to heel--they allowed the innate partisanship to stand. Bush apparently departed from that by failing to do things the way his employees wanted them done.

Doesn't it somewhat turn the concept of justice on its head to suppose that emphasizing the prosecution of voter fraud cases amounts to a shirking "its legal responsibility to protect voting rights"? Apparently the right way to do that is to give voter fraud cases lower priority than voter discrimination cases.
It's almost like it never occurs to Rich that voter fraud devalues votes.

Summary: If we judge from these first three (or four) entries, this site isn't going to give us the type of evidence that POAC is claiming ("Evidence of rigged elections in the U.S.").
Some of it is evidence that electronic voting systems are vulnerable to fraud. But Democrat lawmakers seemed as enthusiastic as anybody else about introducing electronic voting. It's not like California is a traditional Republican stronghold, for example. And the push for a change in the voting system in Florida came from Democrats following the 2000 election. Electronic voting was never perfect since there is no perfect voting system.