The Orbis

Issue date: 2/25/08 Section: News/Features

...but did your vote count?

While the media has enthusiastically reported on the excitement of each state's presidential primary or caucus this election season, few Americans are aware of the election disputes that underscore several of these contests. Though our country claims to be a democracy where "every vote counts," several problems with the current voting system cast doubt on this claim.

The 2008 primary calendar started much earlier than the traditional process, with the first contest taking place two days after the New Year's. As of Feb. 19, almost 40 states had already cast their votes for the primaries, although the DNC and RNC will not hold their national conventions to crown the nominees until late August and early September, respectively. With the contests lined up so closely together, little time remains in between voting days to examine the validity of the results. This year, voting manipulation hit the primary season from coast to coast in a frightening display of our country's inability to hold fair and transparent elections.

Right off the bat, 2008 faced its first election dispute in New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary. Following Hillary Clinton's surprise victory in the Granite State, several concerns surfaced over the misrepresentation of voting tallies. The state had two methods for counting results: Barack Obama won most of the precincts where the votes were counted by hand, whereas Clinton won in many areas where the ballots were counted by electronic scanners. The scanners were furnished by Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems and Global Election Systems, the same company whose scanning systems were involved in the infamous 2000 Florida recounts.

Black Box Voting.Org (BBV), a nonprofit consumer protection organization for elections, found that the Diebold systems used in New Hampshire were susceptible to hacking. Since the Florida recount eight years ago, where it was discovered that a handful of electronic scan machines had faulty memory cards, BBV has been lobbying states to discontinue the use of the scanners. Princeton University recently announced that they discovered a relatively easy way to subvert electronic voting machines like Diebold's by installing a computer virus that alters votes without detection by election officials.

In January, then-presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) contested the New Hampshire results and filed for a manual recount. On the Republican side, candidate Alex Howard of Michigan also requested a recount for his party's New Hampshire contest. Neither recount overturned the victories of Clinton and John McCain, but the final results found that hundreds of paper ballots went uncounted by the electronic voting scanners and several computer memory cards were missing, disrupting the physical chain of custody of the votes. Many of the boxes that held the ballots were left unsealed or improperly secured, which meant that anyone handling the boxes from the polls to the counting stations could have tampered votes without leaving evidence behind.

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