Imagine your vote actually counted

April 9, 2006

VALLEY VOICES/Chuck Legge

Imagine you've just voted for your preferred presidential candidate. Now, imagine you have used the Diebold touch-screen voting machine.

Let's imagine further that this machine is not hack-proof. For instance, there's a port in the side of the machine that allows a wireless connection to another computer.

It's also possible to switch the voting total so the loser of a particular race becomes the winner. This means poll results could be manipulated by your brighter-than-average high school senior with a laptop. Let's imagine there's a discrepancy of 100,000 votes between the counts done from district to district and the official state count.

Well, the Alaska Democratic Party doesn't need the imagination of Steven Spielberg to imagine what happened in the last presidential election. For the 2004 election, Alaska contracted with Diebold Election Systems to use its Accuvote machines.

When the votes were counted by district, the total for George W. Bush was 292,267. However, the official state count for Bush was 190,889. That's a difference of 101,378 votes.

No one with a nodding acquaintance with reality would suggest that Kerry beat Bush in Alaska, but 101,378 is a lot of votes. That's a difference of more than a third to more than half, depending on which total you use.

Well, that's OK. We'll just gather all the votes together and do a recount.

Oops, no paper copies of individual votes with the Diebold Accuvote machines. Well, I guess we can look at the program used in the machines to try and make sense of what happened. Oops again. Diebold Election Systems won't release the file. The company's lawyers say this is proprietary information.

The Alaska Democratic Party has gone to the Division of Elections to try and force Diebold to release the files, but that body, which falls under the purview of Republican lieutenant governor Loren Leman, has said no. The state agency responsible for elections has decided, with Diebold, that while the data produced by these machines is public, the database isn't. And surrendering those files to the Democratic Party would risk the security and integrity of the Diebold system.

Let me get this straight. The Division of Elections has told us that it's all right to compromise the integrity of our voting process, but not all right to risk corporate secrets. I don't care how politically active or inactive you are, this should get your attention.

You might ask, what's the big deal? Everyone knew Bush would beat Kerry in Alaska, so who cares what the final count was? The result's the same, right?

Well, not really. What about closer contests? What about the Murkowski-Knowles U.S. Senate race? Maybe Knowles actually won. The point is, we don't really know.

We are, in theory, a self-governing people. If our ability to elect our representatives is being manipulated, we lose everything.

A fluctuation of 101,378 votes is more than a slight glitch in the system. Unfortunately, our state Division of Elections is taking the side of a large, powerful corporation from Ohio at the expense of its own Alaska voters.

Alaskans - Democrats, Republicans, nonpartisans - deserve to know what happened in the last election. We have a system that accounts for every point of view from every voter. Let's hope we don't ever have to imagine a country of, by, and for the people.

Sutton resident Chuck Legge is a free-lance cartoonist whose work appears in every edition of the Frontiersman. His Valley Voices column appears every four weeks.