We looked at each of these "benign" explanations in turn and found that none of them was true. The hand count jurisdictions were more Republican; they had voted in exact congruence with the opscan jurisdictions in the previous two (noncompetitive, and therefore not targets for rigging) US Senate races; and they had given Coakley a lower percentage than the opscan communities in her only previous statewide race. Granted Coakley, thinking she was a shoo-in, ran a very lackluster campaign; granted there was a surge of enthusiasm and a big influx of money from the right, making a tight (and riggable) race out of a blowout. But those factors do not explain why some 65,000 hand count voters, seen to be to the right of a random sample and not geographically disposed towards Coakley, came in so differently from the opscan voters. That remains entirely unexplained, unless one is willing to consider electronic vote manipulation, which we know the experts from Princeton to Johns Hopkins to NYU's Brennan Center to the US Government Accountability Office all have concluded is child's play.
One way to look at this is that we've
drawn from the limited data available strong evidence that manipulation has
most likely occurred. On the other hand there is no evidence offered supporting the official numbers tallied by the
opscans. We would "win" in a court of law but, in the case of elections, there
is what amounts to an irrefutable presumption of "innocence." The computerized
results are gospel and that's that. We've actually been told that for officials
to investigate any deeper we'd have to present them with a "smoking gun," such
as a corrupted memory card. But that stuff is precisely what is proprietary and
strictly off-limits to us as citizens. How's that for a Catch-22?
It's especially maddening that, in our forensic attempts, we are teaching those within the system what they have to hide and how better to hide it. I've already discussed the withdrawal first of authentic, and now probably all, exit poll data. But the allergy to information seekers is unbelievable. Our Coakley-Brown paper provides an example that would be hilarious if it were not so emblematic: after the paper came out, with its delineation of handcount and opscan towns sourced in a footnote to the Massachusetts Secretary of State's website, the website was "updated" by removing from the Town Directory all the information regarding the voting methods of each town. That information is now available nowhere. Our democracy in action.
I sometimes think election integrity in America is some absurd linear descendant of Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll because the Emperor Without Any Clothes is running buck-naked around Alice's Wonderland. To perpetrate an ongoing crime requires motive (obvious: the stakes couldn't be higher), means (again obvious: all the experts agree about the system's vulnerability), and the ongoing ability to escape detection. This final element is supplied by our baffling collective credulity, which in turn seems to derive from our ironic conviction that America is The Beacon Of Democracy, where such a crime simply could not occur.
The obvious question becomes, how do you explain the Democrats' disappointing refusal to examine this critical issue critically?
One word: baffling. Believe me, election integrity colleagues have debated this endlessly to no conclusion. The best I can come up with is that it's probably some combination of ignorance, naivetà �, denial, intimidation, and/or complicity.
As for ignorance, you would assume by now that the Democrats are individually and collectively aware that their political opponents effectively own and operate the voting apparatus through the far-right's control of the vendor and servicing corporations. This is true even in most Democratic "strongholds," because election administrators are pretty much at sea and in the dark when it comes to what's going on inside their own DREs, opscans, and central tabulators. They don't have the technical chops even to know what questions to ask of the corporations, so the vendors and servicers have a free hand.
Now, if you told the Democrats that the voters would be handing their votes to a little man behind a curtain who was wearing a "Palin For President" button, and he would come out at the end and announce who won, I don't think the Democrats would find that an acceptable process. It's hard to fathom that they don't see that that is exactly what they're doing.
The Democrats have also been shown plenty of analyses of the red shift, so they should know that the vulnerability to manipulation is not merely hypothetical, but is actually costing them seats and control. Their victories in 2006 and 2008 certainly caused most Democrats to stop worrying about election theft (why would the Right rig to lose?). If they were willing to look one inch deeper into the dynamics of those elections, they would see that both were the products of extraordinary developments that led to October free falls for the GOP, overwhelming a pre-calibrated rig that could not be recalibrated and redeployed in the short time frame before Election Day. Apparently such analysis, basic as it is, is too subtle for the Democrats' consideration. We've tried.
There are those in the election integrity camp who can't imagine that the Democrats, as rational actors, could be so suicidal in the absence of intimidation or some form of purchased complicity. I've been told that the word "Wellstone" is a verb in and around Washington (as in, "don't go out on that limb, pal, or you'll be wellstoned"). Add to that the highly suspicious Mike Connell (Rove's IT guru) plane crash when he was on the verge of testifying about the theft of Ohio in 2004, and several other fatal accidents along the way, and one could see how a "don't go there" fear might become widespread. I don't know.
What I think has been underestimated, though, is the extreme reluctance of those whose careers and identities are so intertwined with the stability of the power structure itself to question or risk undermining the legitimacy of that structure. If you walk around the halls and offices of Congress, you should immediately grasp that even political "enemies" in these hallows are united by their shared stature and good fortune. They belong to the marble of their elite milieu and I'm sure feel they have more in common with each other than with the masses outside those halls. Perhaps that is changing a bit with the radicalization of the GOP, but it's still a very strong ethos and I think it goes very deep.
So I think denial, and a great fear of rattling of walls, continues to play a huge role with the Democrats. There are also the chilling lines written by Yeats in 1921: "The best lack all conviction/While the worst are full of a passionate intensity." There are times like that and this seems to be one of them. Students of world history find similarly baffling the seemingly inexorable rise to power, both domestically and internationally, of Adolf Hitler, as those who could have impeded that rise, both in Germany and through Europe, seemed perpetually supine and paralyzed, grossly misreading the man and his intentions, though they were written and spoken out constantly for all to see. His would-be opponents seemed to have no conceptual framework that would accommodate a character of Hitler's deviousness and determination. My best guess is that we're seeing something similar among the Democrats, who can't grasp the lengths to which ends-justify-the-means true-believers would go to wield power and install their vision. But it's just a guess. I'm not sure we'll ever know.
Well, you and I are in agreement that electronic voting is bad news. What about internet voting? Is that an improvement or another major step backward?
From the frying pan into the fire. This whole age is characterized by an incessant push for technological advancement, a push that often seems inexorable. Internet voting opens up even more vectors of attack, as graphically demonstrated just a couple of weeks ago when the District of Columbia puts its overseas internet voting system online and invited hackers to try to subvert it. Within hours, a small team working under Professor J. Alex Halderman at the University of Michigan had broken through all levels of security, cracked the encryption code, and were able not only to change votes at will but also view individual ballots and confidential voter information. They were able to "vote" in place of voters, who would then have been informed that they had already voted. And they found that hackers in Iran and China had already gotten in to the system. Halderman then testified before an official DC committee, with I believe one committee member in attendance and the chamber eerily empty. Roger Clemens packs Congress and Senators sit with rapt attention as he testifies about Human Growth Hormone in baseball--an epic catastrophe for the nation. Need I say more?
As far as technological solutions are concerned, permit me to quote directly from our paper on the Coakley-Brown race:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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