[lbo-talk] Was Max Cleland the victim of electronic voter fraud?

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Oct 20 17:22:47 PDT 2003


[Of the sort people are afraid might be widespread in the near future?]

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=452972&host=3&dir=70

14 October 2003 The Independent (UK) Andrew Gumbel

<snip>

Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last

November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the

incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points.

In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that

Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two

to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.

Those figures were more or less what political experts would have

expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to

statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia

appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship

to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing

of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls.

Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9

to 12 points.

Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do and

launched internal investigations. Political analysts credited the

upset - part of a pattern of Republican successes around the country -

to a huge campaigning push by President Bush in the final days of the

race. They also said that Roy Barnes had lost because of a surge of

"angry white men" punishing him for eradicating all but a vestige of

the old confederate symbol from the state flag.

But something about these explanations did not make sense, and they

have made even less sense over time. When the Georgia secretary of

state's office published its demographic breakdown of the election

earlier this year, it turned out there was no surge of angry white

men; in fact, the only subgroup showing even a modest increase in

turnout was black women.

There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in

different parts of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in

line with the primary election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated

north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage

points higher than he had in the primaries. And in 74 counties in the

Democrat south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for

the Republicans than the party as a whole had won less than three

months earlier.

Now, weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections, and

the figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except

statistical anomalies worthy of further study. But in Georgia there

was an extra reason to be suspicious. Last November, the state became

the first in the country to conduct an election entirely with

touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing $54m (£33m) on a new

system that promised to deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most

voter-friendly election in the history of the republic. The machines,

however, turned out to be anything but reliable. With academic studies

showing the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of

security holes and prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar

machines from different companies being introduced at high speed

across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy's

own 21st-century nightmare.

<snip>

Alarmed and suspicious, a group of Georgia citizens began to look into

last November's election to see whether there was any chance the

results might have been deliberately or accidentally manipulated.

Their research proved unexpectedly, and disturbingly, fruitful.

<end excerpt>

Full: http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=452972&host=3&dir=70



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