But when the smoke had cleared, a closer look revealed that HAVA had codified, rather than fixed, Election 2000's largely unreported but most egregious trespasses of democracy (vii):
- Electronic voter registration databases: In Florida 2000, up to 94,000 eligible voters – all identified as "Democratic-leaning"- were unjustifiably purged from electronic voter databases and not allowed to vote.
- Electronic voting machines: Florida 2000's electronic voting equipment mistabulated countless votes. In Volusia County alone, computers tabulated for Candidate Al Gore negative 16,022 votes.
- Presidential appointees with powerful authority to influence election outcomes: Florida 2000's vote count was stopped by the Supreme Court, effectively deciding the election for us.
HAVA alchemy transformed these three root causes of the Election 2000 catastrophe into the law of the land:
- Electronic voter registration databases: HAVA required every state in the nation to implement electronic voter registration databases.
- Electronic voting machines: HAVA mandated accessible voting equipment, specifically recommending and funding computerized touch screen machines.
- Presidential appointees with powerful authority to influence election outcomes: HAVA created the Election Assistance Commission, four presidential appointees with broad and ever-expanding powers over the nation's election systems.
Post-HAVA elections have delivered one disaster after another - from e-voting crashes, unequal distribution of expensive computerized equipment, registration database complications and abuse (viii), electoral lawsuits, and the multi-billion dollar e-voting industry's coups over the nation's democratic election processes (ix).
Outsourced Elections and Secret Vote Counting
The Election 2000 media message was filled with butterfly ballots, pregnant chads (x), and video clips of Florida election officials staring at computer punch cards struggling to discern the "intent" of the voter.(xi)
In 2002, HAVA's message was that paper ballots caused chaos in Florida, but HAVA would take care of that, distributing nearly $3 billion to the states to buy electronic voter registration databases and paperless touch screen voting machines.
The number of American votes counted by computers went from 71.5% in 2000, to 84% in 2004, and 86% in 2006.(xii)
This was a cataclysmic change for election systems, and six years later, election officials continue to struggle with the transformation of familiar and manageable low-tech elections to the complex high-tech theatre wrought by HAVA.
The destabilizing effect on America's mechanism of democracy has been substantial. Techno-elections have caused shortages of poll workers, who, with an average age of 72 years, are averse to the complexities of e-voting(xiii). America's elections are now plagued by general confusion and the inability of our public officials to independently administer our elections without corporate support services. Corporate employees now appear at our elections to assist poll workers in using their equipment, administer "fixes" for equipment malfunctions, and to hold vote data and election results in their black box secret vaults away from public scrutiny.
Each election cycle county and municipal coffers are emptied to meet the newly enriched and empowered e-voting industry's ever-increasing demands for programming, maintenance, upgrades and training.(xiv)
What is going on here? A Republican House attorney, involved in the original drafting of HAVA, once remarked to me, "They are trying to complexify our elections to the point where citizens have no idea what is going on."
This is more than just a story of greedy corporations.
The Swiftboating of Paper Ballots and the Launch of Verifiable Voting
The truth behind the corporate media's 2000 "hanging chad" story is that Florida's much maligned "paper ballots" were really just the paper component (the computer punch cards and computer-scannable paper) of a failed computerized voting system, poorly designed and in some cases delivered on intentionally defective paper(xv).
Real paper ballots are pieces of paper with candidate names printed on them in legible human-readable letters, on which voters simply mark an "X" by the name of their candidate of choice. Real paper ballots counted by real human beings have no hanging chads obscuring voter intent.
Unlike real paper ballots, the ballots in Florida 2000, designed for computers to read, were confusing to human voters. Additionally, they were intentionally produced on defective paper to conflict with the computer operations.
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