Last week, Klickitat County contracted with a Texas-based electronic voting corporation, Hart InterCivic, to purchase equipment that counts the votes in local elections.
Hart InterCivic is one of the four biggest election companies in the United States. None of the four corporations have been willing to allow their source codes or hardware to be examined by independent election watchdog groups. Executives of the electronic voting companies assure us there is no partisanship involved, and tell us there is no way the results of our elections could be "hacked" electronically -- but there is no way to verify their claims. On the contrary.
As one industry analyst put it: "Computer experts agree that there is no way to prove that what is on the electronic voting screen agrees with the tabulation -- whether due to rigging or error."
While we fully trust our county election officials and our county election workers, we cannot trust the corporation that is supplying the equipment they will be working with.
In July 2004, one concerned former Hart InterCivic technician sent letters to the Secretary of State for Ohio and the Secretary of State for Texas. He warned in his letters that he had seen "criminal fraud, extreme negligence, and a distinct and troubling pattern of failure to uphold the public trust both in violations of the spirit of its contracts and also in concealing problems in an industry which so crucially represents the public interest."
Maybe he was a disgruntled ex-employee with an agenda of his own. Maybe warnings such as this can be dismissed as anecdotal. But glitches with these machines have been documented, and some of the problems have been extremely serious.
According to Vote Trust USA, a watchdog organization tracking the integrity of our voting processes, Hart InterCivic has a history of failings in the way it has managed elections around the nation.
Here are some examples of what can and has gone wrong with Hart InterCivic systems (From "Hart InterCivic in the News -- A Partial List of Documented Failures," compiled by VOTERSUNITE.org):
October 2004: Tarrant County, Texas: Voting machines froze instead of accepting the access code entered by voters. Voters didn't know whether their votes were lost, yet they were not given another chance to cast their ballots.
November 2004: Travis County, Texas: A "default" selection was automatically pre-set by the voting software. "Bush/Cheney" was the default choice for president/vice-president. Voters who voted a straight party Democratic Party ticket watched their presidential votes changed to Bush/Cheney on the review screen.
November 2004: Boulder County, Colorado: Bar codes on the ballots were the wrong size, causing the system not to count the ballots.
March 2006: Tarrant County, Texas: Computer programming errors added 100,000 votes to the final tallies in a primary election, leading to multiple candidate requests for recounts. A computer programming error counted some votes multiple times.
April 2006: Tom Green County, Texas: Problems with new machines during voting and later recounts showed dozens of original votes not counted, as well as ballots lost during backup procedures.
May 2006: Tarrant County, Texas. During early elections, errors in the way voting machines were set up led to flawed ballots in some precincts. About 24,000 voters may have been affected.
Maybe these problems have all been fixed and there will be no problems with Hart InterCivic's equipment in Klickitat County. We hope that will be the case. But dealing with computer software, how can we be sure that what we vote is what we get?
Citizens have a right to expect that their votes are secure -- and not subject to tampering or failure. Unfortunately, the record of this company does not spark confidence in the process.
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