The Hidden History of the War on Voting by Thom Hartmann

Author:Thom Hartmann
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2020-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Voting Machines, Hacking, and Red Shift

Given that much of the red shift that America has seen in the past three decades exploded after the passage in 2002 of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which allocated billions of dollars to the states to buy electronic voting machines from private corporate vendors, many people alarmed by widespread red shift were quick to blame the machines.

And, indeed, they are easy targets.

The 2002 senatorial election in Georgia, done entirely on electronic voting machines that produced no paper or receipts, was severely marred by accounts of lost memory cards containing votes from largely urban areas and produced a result that flipped the polls upside down.

War hero Max Cleland, who’d left three limbs in Vietnam and was nationally famous and popular (and ahead in the Georgia polls by five points a week before the election), was defeated by eight points by Saxby Chambliss, a Vietnam War–era draft dodger who’d run a bizarre campaign questioning Cleland’s patriotism.92

The Georgia governor’s race that year saw a similar reversal of poll versus outcome results favoring the Republican challenger, Sonny Perdue, who was seven points down in the polls but beat incumbent Democrat Roy Barnes with a 16 percent swing on Election Day, something unheard of in modern politics absent a last-minute scandal (and there was none).93

Similarly, in the 2018 Georgia election, the Republican lieutenant governor candidate, Geoff Duncan, beat Democrat Sarah Riggs by 123,172 votes. Inexplicably, the Georgia electronic voting machines—which still don’t have any audit ability or paper trail—registered slightly over 160,000 voters who simply chose not to vote for either of the lieutenant governor candidates. When Politico investigated, “the Georgia Secretary of State’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.”94

And when a lawsuit was filed against Secretary of State Brian Kemp (who both ran the election and ran successfully against Stacey Abrams for governor) to access the actual votes, a server was mysteriously wiped clean in a way that prevented even the NSA from recovering its data.95

Frank Bajak reported for the AP, “A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, the Associated Press has learned.” Bajak said, “It’s not clear who ordered the server’s data irretrievably erased.” The lack of data effectively killed the lawsuit, and when the AP repeatedly inquired of the agency that wiped the server, “It did not respond to the AP’s question on who ordered the action.”96

Howard Dean rather famously hacked into a Diebold election computer tabulator and changed the results of an election in 90 seconds on CNBC while filling in for Tina Brown on her Topic A show on August 8, 2004. When he was made chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the video was pretty much scrubbed off the internet, although recuts of it pop up from time to time.97,98

There was also, to add flames to the conspiracy fire, the simple reality that the two biggest voting machine vendors in the 2000s

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