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The Race To Preserve American
Democracy:
Last Clear Chance To Chase Down Electronic-Voting Before
Its
Security-Flaws Bring Down Our Electoral System
By Evan Augustine Peterson
III, August 19, 2004
There's really nothing new about terrorism-by-stealth, despite Mr. Bush's
frequent protestations to the contrary. [1] Indeed, when the ancient Greeks
feigned to sail away while the proud Trojans -- who'd resisted the Grecian
siege for nine long years -- wheeled the Greeks' parting gift of a huge
wooden horse inside their city's gates, the Trojans never stopped to consider
terrorism-by-stealth, or that they'd be rudely awakened to discover too
late that a lethal cargo of Greek guerrillas had been hidden inside its
belly.
Now we're facing a postmodern version of the stealthy Trojan horse. Only
this time it has appeared in the trendy form that our "In-technology-we-trust!"
culture prefers. America's latest cyber-gadget craze is the unwise nationwide
adoption of electronic-voting machines. Why? Overtly, because we're a
dyed-in-the-wool technopoly, so we irrationally believe that we should
trust e-voting machines to better record our votes at the polls; covertly,
for Machiavellian reasons that are ignoble but rational. [2]
Upon implementation, the stealth-contents
of these "e-voting machines" almost certainly would have undermined
and destroyed the integrity of our democracy's electoral system, were
it not for diligent computer-science professors like Johns Hopkins' Aviel
Rubin and Stanford's David Dill. However, Professors Rubin and Dill tested
our newfound faith in e-voting machines, whereupon they found it misplaced,
because they discovered innumerable serious security-flaws in the software
and hardware, which findings they then published to warn the USA's naive
technology-worshipping electorate.
Later, careful investigative work by activists revealed even more e-voting
machine security-flaws, as well as widespread e-voting malfunctions during
several recent primary elections. [3] Moreover, those security flaws and
breakdowns are serious enough to threaten the integrity of the USA's electoral
process, because they make it vulnerable to undetectable election-fraud.If
you're wondering if all of this is moot, because the cybernetic Trojan-horse's
stealth contents were discovered in advance, then defeated, and now everything's
just peachy, the truthful answer is: "No!" Although they were
discovered, they've been inexplicably ignored by our US Congresspersons,
who were undoubtedly in the best position to defeat them with corrective
federal legislation. Why didn't they, then?
After 2000's presidential-election debacle in Governor Jeb Bush's Floridian
version of a nepotistically-corrupted banana republic, our baffled Congress
then passed their usual techno-legislative panacea. They thought their
Help America Vote Act ("HAVA") would resolve the eruption of
corruption that occurs whenever human nature collides with too much concentrated
power. Unsurprisingly, HAVA actually proved to be much worse than the
hanging-chad disease it was meant to cure, for it recommended and funded
the nation's transition to touch-screen e-voting machines! But why hasn't
Congress fixed their undue reliance on this ill-considered techno-cure
after almost four years? In recent months, Mr. Bush has personified the
answer: American politicians will never voluntarily admit to having made
a mistake -- especially during an election year!
Overarching Conclusions: (1) The election will be held in approximately
77 days, so it no longer matters that computer scientists have been warning
us for several years about innumerable serious security flaws that inherently
exist inside e-voting systems, or that a nationwide coalition has been
publicly disseminating the truth for at least two years about the security
flaws in e-voting machines; (2) what matters is that our Republican-led
Congress was fully briefed about the extremely-serious nature of the security
flaws in e-voting machines, and knew that a clear-and-present danger exists
that undetectable election-fraud will be perpetrated through e-voting
machines on November 2nd, yet chose to end their last session without
passing any of the pending corrective legislation that could have prevented
it; and (3) as a direct consequence, all 50 states have been left to fend
for themselves without a solid fallback position, since nothing more than
a few inadequate stopgap measures can be implemented before November!
[4]
The Bottom Line: (A) Despite the fact that e-voting machines have proven
to be a legitimate Code Orange-level security threat because they render
democracy vulnerable to undetectable election-fraud by stealth, this irresponsible
Republican-dominated Congress has responded with indifference by refusing
to protect our votes from cyber-theft; (B) therefore, the best short-term
remedy that could still implemented by the states before November would
be to allow some highly-respected international election-monitoring organization
-- such as the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe ("OSCE") -- to monitor our nationwide general election
for the first time in US history, especially in pivotal battleground states
like Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania [5]; and (C) you should
promptly contact your US Congresspersons -- and the US Election Assistance
Commission's Chairman DeForest Soaries at his e-mail address, havainfo@eac.gov
-- to insist that the integrity of our voting rights must be protected
by inviting an international election-monitoring organization, like the
OSCE, to monitor your state's upcoming presidential election.
ENDNOTES
[1] Mr. Bush claims that "The 9/11 attacks
changed everything!" However,
when viewed historically, his claim is nonsensical rubbish. The stealth-attack
is an ancient technique of asymmetrical warfare that terrorists invented
thousands of years ago. Indeed, ancient terrorists even used WMD attacks
by
spreading smallpox virus through their enemy's towns. And just as Herr
Hitler used
his 1933 Reichstag fire as a pretext for implementing blatantly-illegal
policies, so too has Mr. Bush used his 9/11 attacks: (A) internationally,
his
"Doctrine of Preemptive War" pseudo-justified the war of aggression
on Iraq (that's
killed 45,000-55,000 people) and his "unofficial" torture-interrogation
policy,
all of which violates US and international law; and (B) domestically,
his
draconian "US Patriot Act" foreshadowed AG Ashcroft's suspension
of our rights to
an attorney and to the writ of habeus corpus, which resulted in the arrests
of thousands without charges, some of whom disappeared for years inside
his
gulag-archipelago prisons without so much as a hearing -- and all of which
violates US constitutional law.
[2] There are at least two covert reasons for the American rush to implement
e-voting, both of which ignoble scenarios would bring death to genuine,
while
sustaining illusory, democracy: (A) the Republican Party seeks to perpetuate
its otherwise-temporary hegemony through stealthy cyber-manipulation of
elections, achieved by planting the rigged e-voting machines made by Republican-owned
manufacturers, like Diebold Election Systems of Ohio, in every e-voting
county nationwide; or (B) the USA's apparently duopolistic political-party
system
is not truly adversarial, but is instead a mere surface facade, under
which
lies what is in reality a uniparty, run on both "sides" by plutocratic
"haves"
who are beholden to the wealthiest "have-mores," who've anticipated
that the
"have-not" electorate soon will become disillusioned with their
increasingly-obvious political stranglehold, and then try to mount a serious
third-party
challenge -- but when they do, their third-party candidates will never
win a single
race, for the plutocrats have undetectably-rigged their e-voting machines
to
record victories solely for the uniparty's candidates, irrespective of
how the
naive majority actually votes.
[3] Read about activist Bev Harris and her online watchdog organization,
BlackBoxVoting.org, in Adam Cohen's 8-17-04 CD/IHT article by: (1) clicking
on
these blue words -- Chasing
Down Flaws in Electronic Voting; or (2) pasting this URL into your
webserver -- http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0817-12.htm
[4] Read about several stopgap measures that were recommended in Princeton
U.
Professor Paul Krugman's 8-17-04 NYT op-ed piece by: (1) clicking on these
blue words --"Saving
The Vote"; or (2) pasting this URL into your webserver --
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?th
(You need to be a subsciber - it's free)
[5] Read this 8-14-04 GU article concerning the OSCE's potential role
as the
USA's election-monitor by: (1) clicking on these blue words --
"Organization
Could Monitor US Elections"; or (2) pasting this URL into your
webserver -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1280230,00.html
Author: Evan Augustine Peterson III, J.D.,
is the Executive Director of
the American Center for International Law ("ACIL").©2004EAPIII
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