Staff | October 27, 2003
“[I am] committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year.” Walden O’Dell, CEO of Diebold [source]
“A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it’s over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinised control of a few large — and pro-Republican — corporations.” Andrew Gumbel, Independent, Oct. 14, 2003 [source]
More fundamental than the right to vote is the right to a free and fair election. It is a necessity that forms the center of democracy. Without fair elections the state loses its legitimacy and democracy crumbles. Today Why War? and the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons begin an active electronic civil disobedience campaign to draw America’s attention back to the center of democracy — for it is crumbling.
We have in our possession the internal memoranda of Diebold Elections Systems, the company in charge of the electronic voting machines in 37 states, and we intend to share them. These memos prove that Diebold knowingly produced an electronic election system that contained absolutely no security against voter fraud. In fact, the lead engineer from Diebold wrote over two years ago that anyone could change votes without leaving a trail: “Right now you can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log.” GEMS stands for Global Election Management System and is the central computer in each county on which the votes are stored after the election.
Diebold has filed cease and desist orders against anyone who has attempted to share these memos with the public. They have taken down hosts all over the world, including the personal website of the very journalist who broke this story, Bev Harris. We refuse to comply. We refuse to allow the suppression of evidence that proves a Diebold machine registered 16,022 negative votes for Al Gore in Precinct 216 in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. We refuse to comply with a company whose CEO has given $9,965 to Bush and the Republican National State Elections Committee since 2001, while declaring that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year.”
And we are asking you to refuse as well.
Our strategy to combat Diebold is simple. Through active, legal electronic civil disobedience we can bring to light the usually silent act of suppression. The result will be a permanent and public mirror of the memos — documents whose public existence strengthens democracy.
One journalist in Seattle has written that Dean Logan, director of records, elections and licensing services in Seattle, “decided election security was a ‘legitimate issue’ after internal company e-mail was posted on the Internet and discussed in a Salon.com article Monday.” Our goal is to force these documents back into the sunlight.
Logan should be alarmed — the depth of Diebold’s deceit extends far beyond what most Americans are comfortable believing. In fact, there are already allegations that Diebold was responsible for the highly questionable results from the 2002 election in Georgia. Andrew Gumbel writes in the Independent:
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
Why War? believes that the mere possibility that the core principle of democracy — a fair election — is under attack demands action. We believe we are afforded the right to publication of these documents because of the integral part they play in the counting of votes in America. When such action is met with legal threats, we believe the conscientious path is to engage in open, democratic, and legal electronic civil disobedience.