Many votes still go uncounted

[Snowden]

Many votes still go uncounted
By DAVID EARNHARDT


Who cares if your vote doesn't count? In America, it's hard to tell because the mainstream media and even the politicians themselves refuse to talk about the ways in which voters are disenfranchised and elections are manipulated — despite undeniable, documented proof that millions of votes have gone uncounted in every major election of this past decade.

In many cases, election officials freely admit the votes people have cast are not counted. But instead of expressing outrage and demanding accountability and remedial action, major media organizations seem content accepting lame excuses from the people in control of elections — including the large corporations that manufacture electronic voting machines. At the same time even the politicians who would appear to have the most to gain by discussing this issue have refused to do so.

The manipulation of votes — and ultimately elections — isn't accomplished in just one way and is therefore not a simple subject to discuss. The tactics can be unethical or illegal, blatant or so subtle they might never occur to you until being pointed out. For example, strategically creating long lines at the polls because voting machines were either broken down or not provided, as happened in Ohio in 2004, was enough to discourage many people from waiting for hours to vote.

The phenomenon of "undervoting" has occurred in an astounding number of precincts around the country. Undervoting is defined as a ballot being cast which shows no selection in a particular race. At some precincts in Pennsylvania results showed that 80 percent of those who voted didn't care enough about the presidential race to select any candidate for president.

Provisional voting is yet another way U.S. citizens are eliminated from the electoral process. If a person shows up to vote but is not listed on a precinct roll, the only way they are allowed to vote is to cast a provisional ballot. In the last presidential election, nearly 2 million voters showed up at the polls to vote, but were told they had to vote on a provisional ballot. Almost one-third of those votes were rejected and not counted.

Underlying all of this is a question of who is ultimately responsible for making certain votes are counted in an open and accountable way. The answer is frightening. In the last presidential election, two companies — ES&S and Diebold — manufactured and controlled the electronic machines that counted 80 percent of the vote in America.

A lack of expertise by local election officials coupled with laws that protect the proprietary software the companies use means the tabulation of election results is ultimately and completely in the hands of people working for ES&S, Diebold and other manufacturers. In essence, corporations with political ties and with a greater accountability to stockholders than to the voting public have absolute and unchallenged power over the counting of votes.

Tennessee is far from immune to election irregularities. According to a recent non-partisan study by Common Cause and Verified Voting, we are one of only six states considered at "high risk" for having election results affected by machine malfunction or tampering. Yet, continuing election irregularities have remained largely undisclosed and undiscussed even as they unfolded before our eyes. On Super Tuesday when catastrophic tornadoes struck the area, power failures rendered electronic voting machines unusable and no paper ballots were available for backup. Power failures, however, are only the tip of an irregularity iceberg in Tennessee that includes instances of vote flipping in last fall's mayoral election in Memphis and the insufficient allocation of voting machines in East Nashville's 24th District in 2006.

Beyond their own political agendas, the candidates involved have a responsibility to bring these issues to the fore — to demand accountability because it is something they owe the voters who have reposed trust in them. Because it's the right thing to do to demand that everyone's vote gets counted.

I look forward to the day during the presidential debates when a journalist from a major news outlet asks the candidates, "What is your administration going to do to make sure everybody's vote gets properly counted?" My vote could hinge on the answer.


Murfreesboro and Rutherford County news from The Daily News Journal - www.dnj.com - Murfreesboro, Tenn.

[redtanker]

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