Looking at the results from the US mid-terms on Wednesday, it seemed that the Democrats were going to win the Senate by the thinnest of margins – about 10,000 votes determined the result in the key polls in Montana and Virginia – but did they really win?
There is a considerable body of very credible evidence that the Republicans stole Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, and many activists expected them to try and repeat the performance in 2006. As opinion polls pointed to a late swing back to the Republicans, it looked as if the ground was being laid for another ‘surprise’. In fact, since Montana went to the Democrats by under 3,000 votes and Virginia by about 7,000, it would have been well within the bounds of possibility for a well-prepared Republican coup to fix enough votes to retain the Senate. I don’t know the geography of those two states, but a quick look at the results map confirmed that in both cases the key votes came in a few urban counties that voted Democrat – places like Lewis and Clark in Montana and Arlington in Virginia. Clearly the fate of the free world hung on a handful of voters, or, more precisely, on a handful of suspect voting machines.
In fact, there were numerous reports of problems with voting during the day, both with electronic voting machines and other parts of the system. Most serious was in Virginia, which was expected to go to a full recount – many of the electronic voting machines used in that state left no paper trail, so there was nothing to recount. The whole process was electronic, so if it was wrong the first time, there was no way to find out. Across the US, from Pennsylvania where the defeated Republican is seeking an investigation into machine failures in 27 counties, to counties in Utah where the number of voters exceeded the number of citizens in the county, to places in Ohio where election workers were videoed using their personal, unsecured laptops to update the memory cards for use electronic voting machines – the list goes on and on. It is still early, but as the months go by, we will no doubt see groups like BlackBoxVoting investigate and uncover many cases where badly designed electronic voting systems left the election open to question. In all probability, the total number of questionable votes will far exceed the Democrat margin of victory.
This, of course, poses a challenge for groups and activists who have argued for safe, reliable voting systems with a verifiable paper trail. Most of those activists were Democrats, or at least were opposed to Bush. Now that ‘their’ side has ‘won’, it must be very attractive for them to take it easy and not to dig too deeply into the failings of the system in the 2006 elections. Already, many of those who worked to expose the flaws and vote-rigging in 2000 and 2004 have promised to work as hard on the 2006 fallout, but I wonder if it will lead to enough improvements to make the 2008 election safe from accidental or deliberate tampering. If an outsider like me can see which counties needed to be targeted this time round, rest assured that there are insiders with the knowledge and motivation to target to right precincts in 2008.
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