As early voting in the US presidential

elections gets underway, ES&S iVotronics touch-screen electronic

voting machines have been observed in four separate states

flipping the votes - mostly from Barack Obama to John McCain but

sometimes to third party candidates too. This has already occurred

during early voting in the states of West Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri

and Texas.

A county clerk in West Virginia invited a video crew to watch his

demonstration of the reliability of the disputed voting machines but

instead he saw the machine flipping the votes, as critics claimed. He

put this down to the faulty calibration of the voting machine. However,

even after he recalibrated the machine it continued to flip votes.

Watch the video here:

This

is further evidence that the electronic voting machines that will be

used in the 4 November election are not reliable and accurate - that

they are prone to malfunction and may not record the actual vote

winner.

Democrats are not the only people who are worried. Stephen

Spoonamore, a Republican security expert, explains why electronic

voting is inherently unsafe in an eight part series of interviews. You

can watch Part 1, and access Parts 2 to 7, here.

Writing in the New Statesman way back in 2004, reflecting

on criticisms of the electronic voting systems used in the presidential

election that year, Michael Meacher MP pointed out that statisticians,

academics and political analysts had highlighted significant voting differences

between electoral districts that used paper ballots and those that used

electronic systems. These cannot be explained by random variation. The

investigators found a much larger variance than expected and in every

case it favoured George W Bush over John Kerry. In Wisconsin and Ohio,

the discrepancy favoured Bush by 4 per cent, in Pennsylvania by 5 per

cent, in Florida and Minnesota by 7 per cent, in North Carolina by 9

per cent and in New Hampshire by a whopping 15 per cent.

Research by the University of Berkeley, California, revealed

election irregularities in 2004 in Florida. These irregularities, all

of which were associated with electronic voting machines, appear to

have awarded between 130,000 to 260,000 additional votes to Bush.

The discrepancies between paper and electronic voting could be the

result of simple technological glitches. But some experts detect

something more sinister: outright vote fixing by interference with

voting machine and tabulation software.

Meacher

reported that Diebold company voting machines and optical scanners may

not be tamper-proof from hacking, particularly via remote modems.

Diebold machines were used in counting a substantial proportion of the

2004 votes and will be used again in next week's presidential poll.

Two US computer security experts, in their book Black Box Voting,

state that "by entering a two-digit code in a hidden location, a second

set of votes is created; and this set of votes can be changed in a

matter of seconds, so that it no longer matches the correct votes".

This is entirely possible, according to Clinton Curtis, a Florida

computer programmer. He has confirmed that in 2000 he designed an

undetectable programme for Republican congressman Tom Feeney. It was

created to rig elections by covertly switching votes from one candidate

to another to ensure a predetermined ballot outcome. See a video of his

sworn testimony here.

As Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of JFK, has exposed,

the US is one of the few democracies that allow private, partisan

companies to secretly count votes using their own proprietary software.

Moreover, the vast majority of western democracies have independent

Election Commissions to oversee voting methods and corroborate the

results. The US does not.

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Most election ballots next week will be tallied or scanned by four

private companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software

(ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic.

According to Kennedy:

Three of the four companies

have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier

corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became

the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in

twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent

of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks

among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas

Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen

times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along

with its employees and their families, has contributed at least

$300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more

than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003

fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to

deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004."

Is it right and proper for partisan pro-Republican companies to count the votes? It is certainly not objective and impartial.

Kennedy recounts how computer scientists at Johns Hopkins and Rice

universities conducted an analysis of the Diebold voting machine

software source code in July 2003. "This voting system is far below

even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts...

(it is) unsuitable for use in a general election," the scientists

concluded.

"With electronic machines, you can commit wholesale fraud with a

single alteration of software," Avi Rubin told Kennedy. He is a

computer science professor at Johns Hopkins who received $US7.5 million

from the National Science Foundation to study electronic voting. "There

are a million little tricks when you build software that allow you to

do whatever you want. If you know the precinct demographics, the

machine can be programmed to recognize its precinct and strategically

flip votes in elections that are several years in the future. No one

will ever know it happened."

Electronic voting machines not only break down frequently, their

security and integrity is also easily compromised, says Kennedy:

"In

October 2005, the US Government Accountability Office issued a damning

report on electronic voting machines. Citing widespread irregularities

and malfunctions, the government's top watchdog agency concluded that a

host of weaknesses with touch-screen and optical-scan technology 'could

damage the integrity of ballots, votes and voting-system software by

allowing unauthorized modifications'...Locks protecting computer hardware

were easy to pick. Unsecured memory cards could enable individuals to

'vote multiple times, change vote totals and produce false election

reports.'

An even more comprehensive report

released in June by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think

tank at the New York University School of Law, echoed the GAO's

findings. The report - conducted by a task force of computer scientists

and security experts from the government, universities and the private

sector - was peer-reviewed by the National Institute of Standards and

Technology. Electronic voting machines widely adopted since 2000, the

report concluded, "pose a real danger to the integrity of national,

state and local elections." While no instances of hacking have yet been

documented, the report identified 120 security threats to three widely

used machines - the easiest method of attack being to utilize corrupt

software that shifts votes from one candidate to another.

There is no evidence that the voting machine malfunctions, flaws and

security risks identified in the 2004 ballot have been fully corrected

in time for the 2008 vote. This calls into question whether the 4

November ballot will reflect the will of the American people. As Kennedy concludes:

"You

do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity

of our electoral system: The right to vote is simply too important -

and too hard won - to be surrendered without a fight. It is time for

Americans to reclaim our democracy from private interests."

To contact Peter Tatchell and for more information about his human rights campaigns visit www.petertatchell.net