black…MYstory

If you check some of my past posts, you’ll see that I am no fan of electronic voting as it is today. For the last few years, I have been telling friends, family and whoever else would listen about my concerns with this technology. The concept of e-voting is great but the implementation, as it stands today, leaves the door wide open for elections to be stolen (and, I believe this has already been done).

My concerns came to a head when Walden O’Dell, for CEO of Diebold, the largest vendor of voting machines, stated in an August 2003 fundraising letter that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” Call me paranoid but, when the guy making the voting machines is also so boldly partisan, you could easily question his actions.

So, I was heartened to get this piece of information on RawStory.com. They say that the New York Times will be reporting, today, that changes and legislation from the new incoming Congress may bring an end to paperless electronic voting.

“By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted,” write Ian Urbina and Christopher Drew, “including an end to the use of most electronic voting machines without a paper trail.”

Quoting federal voting officials and legislators, the Urbina and Drew report that new government guidelines and bills in Congress “will probably combine to make paperless voting machines obsolete.”

For the first time, the article states, vote-counting software will also be inspected by government authorities, and “the code could be made public.” Additionally, “states and counties that bought [voting] machines will have to modify them to hook them up to printers … while others are planning to scrap the machines and buy new ones.”

The article quotes the director of an elections website as saying, “In the next two years … we’ll see the kinds of sweeping changes that people expected to see right after the 2000 election. The difference now is that we have moved from politics down to policies.”

I, for one, would welcome such a change. However, I often wonder if brother Athan Gibbs were alive today, would we even be in this mess? His idea for electronic voting might just have been the remedy to what ails us today.

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