Voodoo elections

I say that because election day here in America has come and gone and President George, Jr. is prepping for his State of the Union address, but for many Americans, the results of last November 2 remains a bitter bone of contention. Challengers have even gone to the US Supreme Court to contest Bush's contention that he won Ohio, the swing state that guaranteed his victory over John Kerry in the Electoral College.

Meanwhile, after three vote tallies and 58 days of waiting, Democrat Christine Gregoire was declared governor-elect of Washington state on December 30. Her Republican rival, Dino Rossi, who initially appeared to have won the election, hasn't conceded and wants to have a new special election. Gregoire won a statewide hand recount by a mere 128 votes out of the 2.8 million cast.

Even in Florida, which for the most part avoided the big embarrassing problems it had in the 2000 election, some Democrats are questioning the result, suspecting that the voting was rigged through systematic computer hacking.

These developments reflect the bitter feelings that remain from what many pundits are calling the country's nastiest election ever and indicate that serious reforms in the election process are necessary to restore faith in the system and improve our image abroad.

We are not talking about minor glitches here. In Ohio, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and Cliff Arnebeck, a lawyer with the Massachusetts based Alliance for Democracy, accused the Bush campaign of "high-handed vote stealing." Last December 13, congressional Democrats read a letter to the governor of Ohio, asking that he delay or at least consider the result unofficial until the dispute is resolved.

A coalition representing the Green Party and the Libertarian Party paid for a hand recount of each of Ohio's 88 counties, which began in mid December. Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell said the recount will end up costing taxpayers $1.5 million, but recount supporters say it's well worth the cost, given the host of problems they found in the voting. Too few voting machines in Democratic precincts, orchestrated campaigns to direct the voters to the wrong polling stations, and computer equipment problems are some of the major ones they've catalogued.

In their suit, the challengers said that "while the existence of anomalies can possibly be explained by human error or technical malfunctions, the fact that, in every case in Ohio known to the contesters, the error favoured the Bush-Cheney ticket, strongly indicates manipulation or fraud."

To cite just one incident, election officials said that an "error' with the electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 votes extra in suburban Colombia, which was more than 1,000 percent than he actually received. How can one explain such a huge error? Not without the use of sophistry.

Ohio was the key to Bush's victory last November, and Republicans have been boasting ever since that his victory was "decisive." Bush did win the popular vote by about 3 million, but he still needed Ohio to win the Electoral College and hence the presidency. Bush has said ad nauseam this "decisiveness" has given him the "political capital" to push through his radical agenda during his second term.

Bush won by about 119,000 votes. A swing of some 59,501 votes could have sent the election to John Kerry. That's about the number of people who live in my hometown. That's some mandate!

In Washington state, the governor's race won't affect the outcome for the presidency, but a victory was important to the Democrats for morale purposes and to build on for the future. Dino Rossi had won two earlier rounds by 261 and 42 votes, but more than 700 votes surfaced the third time around in Democratic King County. This allowed Gregoire to "stretch" her lead from just 10 votes to 129. Rossi said he would look closely at the election data in King County before making a decision about contesting the results.

Rossi has suggested that, to avoid a lengthy court battle, the state legislature, which convenes this January 5, pass a bill to create a new special election across the state. The Secretary of State Sam Reed, a Republican, certified Gregoire the new governor declaring "at this time there is nothing that appears fraudulent." It's been nice for a change to hear conservatives whine about this election on Fox News, the Republican news channel.

In Florida, exit polls showed Bush winning about 14 percent of the Democratic vote statewide, but, incredibly, Bush racked up more votes than the number of registered Republicans in 47 out of the 67 counties in Florida. Moreover, in four of the counties Bush tripled the number of registered Republicans, and in 15, he more than doubled the number of that number.

How does one explain these strange statistics when even Republican pollster Dick Morris concedes that "the exit polls are never wrong"? After all, the exit polls showed Kerry winning. The Bush camp would like the public to believe that the 2004 election was the most incompetently polled election in US history was the reason. They say no hanky-panky was involved; I say voodoo elections.

There have been other strange but potentially disturbing reports as well. A University of California at Berkeley study conducted by seven students and one professor concluded that Bush received more votes than he should have in Florida counties using the new touch screen voting machines. Two professors from Drexel University and one of the State University of New York branches quickly released their own study that has attempted to debunk the Berkeley study.

Then in mid-December, whistle blowing software programmer Clint Curtis claimed that representative Tom Feeney (R-Fl) asked him (he was then a Feeney employee) to write software that would alter votes on electronic voting machines in Florida.

While authorities investigate Curtis' claims, bloggers on the internet are running wild with the story, fueling more suspicions about the US electoral system. Given the questions about Election 2004 and the mistrust it has generated, clearly for the good of the country a systematic and thorough investigation is needed to clear up the air.

That isn't going to happen, but we can start the reform movement at a more basic level. A lot of mistrust has been caused by the new proprietary voting software and secrecy surrounding it. Some groups wanting electoral reform have strongly endorsed passing a law requiring that the voting software be open to public inspection to protect against fraud and to help restore the public' confidence in the electoral process. That's sounds like a damn good idea ... for starters.

Ron Chepesiuk is a Visiting Professor at Chittagong University and a Research Associate with the National Defence College in Dhaka.