NYT - Fear of Fraud

["Paul Tiger" <paul.tiger@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fear of Fraud
By PAUL KRUGMAN

It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent.
Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's
campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that
identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with
access to the vote-tabulating software.

When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an
investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials
allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on
whether there was tampering with the electronic records.

This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in
Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper
The Independent. Mr. Gumbel's full-length report, printed in Los Angeles
City Beat, makes hair-raising reading not just because it reinforces
concerns about touch-screen voting, but also because it shows how easily
officials can stonewall after a suspect election.

Some states, worried about the potential for abuse with voting machines that
leave no paper trail, have banned their use this November. But Florida,
which may well decide the presidential race, is not among those states, and
last month state officials rejected a request to allow independent audits of
the machines' integrity. A spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those seeking
audits of trying to "undermine voters' confidence," and declared, "The
governor has every confidence in the Department of State and the Division of
Elections."

Should the public share that confidence? Consider the felon list.

Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In 2000 the state hired a
firm to purge supposed felons from the list of registered voters; these
voters were turned away from the polls. After the election, determined by
537 votes, it became clear that thousands of people had been wrongly
disenfranchised. Since those misidentified as felons were disproportionately
Democratic-leaning African-Americans, these errors may have put George W.
Bush in the White House.

This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which recently
got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a
felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials
stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released.

The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been granted
clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the
banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61
of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list would have
wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate African-American voters, while
wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention
that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.

After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an
innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of registered voters
to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was
the same on both lists. They didn't realize, they said, that this would
automatically miss felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because that
category exists on voter rolls but not in state criminal records.

But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say that they
repeatedly warned state election officials about that very problem.

Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an independent examination of
voting machines because he has "every confidence" in his handpicked election
officials. Yet those officials have a history of slipshod performance on
other matters related to voting and somehow their errors always end up
favoring Republicans. Why should anyone trust their verdict on the integrity
of voting machines, when another convenient mistake could deliver a
Republican victory in a high-stakes national election?

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Think about what a tainted election
would do to America's sense of itself, and its role in the world. In the
face of official stonewalling, doubters probably wouldn't be able to prove
one way or the other whether the vote count was distorted - but if the
result looked suspicious, most of the world and many Americans would believe
the worst. I'll write soon about what can be done in the few weeks that
remain, but here's a first step: if Governor Bush cares at all about the
future of the nation, as well as his family's political fortunes, he will
allow that independent audit.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company