David Hoppe

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:: Counting the votes

It's not who but how many

By David Hoppe

On January 9, Indiana Secretary of State, Todd Rokita, stood on the steps of the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Indiana had just argued before the high court for its Voter ID law, legislation that requires anyone who wishes to vote here to present an approved photo ID at their polling place. This law had been challenged by civil liberties advocates and by Democrats, who claimed that it discriminates against the elderly and the disadvantaged -- people, in other words, for whom getting a photo ID might be a hardship. These are people, it should be noted, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates.

By most accounts, Indiana's case for requiring photo IDs was favorably received by the high court. Rokita, a Republican, said the nine Justices deserved our gratitude. "The questions asked displayed non-political, thoughtful consideration of this issue," he said, adding: "We will continue to demand integrity and accessibility in our elections. And we will continue to restore voter confidence in the most powerful process ever achieved in the history of the world."

Cut to New Hampshire. On January 9, people in the Granite State woke up to news that Hillary Clinton had pulled off a stunning upset victory over Barack Obama. Prior to Tuesday's vote, polls indicated that Obama held a commanding lead over Clinton. But on Wednesday morning, election results showed Clinton to be the victor by three percentage points. Keith Olbermann called this upset "titanic." Not to be outdone, Tim Russert called it "the most stunning upset in the history of politics!" Everyone wondered how the pre-election polling could have gotten things so wrong.

Then something funny happened. As people examined the vote totals they found that the pre-election polling had actually gotten almost everything right. The polls were right, for instance, about the outcomes of the Republican race. They were even right about how other Democrats finished, predicting correctly, for example, that John Edwards would get 17 percent of the vote. The only thing the pre-election polls got wrong was the Obama-Clinton outcome, a race, by the way, that most pundits said was make-or-break for Clinton 's political future.

News programs devoted extensive coverage to what had tipped the balance. Was it Hillary's display of unguarded emotion in a diner? Or had whites said they would vote for Obama and then turned against him in the secrecy of the polling booth?

What few in the media were willing to talk about was the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the problem wasn't in the pre-election polling - it was in the polling places. Brad Friedman, an electoral watchdog and blogger pointed this out before noon on January 9. Friedman observed that a substantial number of votes in New Hampshire were cast via electronic Diebold optical scan voting systems - machines notoriously easy to hack. What's more, the New Hampshire machines were programmed by LHS Associates, a company with a less than stellar reputation.

BlackBoxVoting.org, another group dedicated to consumer protection for elections, has noted a number of red flags in New Hampshire . Some ballots there are hand-counted, others machine counted. Oddly, Clinton received 52.95 percent of optical scan votes to Obama's 47.05 percent. But Clinton received 47.05 percent of hand-counted votes compared to Obama, who got -- you guessed it: a suspiciously symmetrical 52.95 percent. And machine count locations somehow took as much as four hours longer to count than smaller, hand count locations.

So far the media has chosen not to pay much attention to what's happening in New Hampshire. At this writing, a recount has begun.

Which brings us back to Todd Rokita and his campaign for "integrity and accessibility" in our elections. On that Wednesday in Washington, Rokita said that Voter ID "restores voter confidence." But vote fraud - the crime the Voter ID law is supposed to combat - has not been a problem in Indiana. Indeed, a 2006 report for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found "there is little polling-place fraud, or at least much less than is claimed, including voter impersonation, 'dead' voters, non-citizen voting and felon voters," across the country.

Meanwhile, Indiana has been cited as one of 17 states at risk of having election results compromised due to the use of electronic voting machines, according to a Common Cause study, "Malfunction and Malfeasance: A Report on the Electronic Voting Machine Debacle." Optical scan ballot card voting systems are used in 33 Indiana counties, accounting for 40 percent of the registered voters in this state. A significant number of votes here could be miscounted, transposed, or lost due to mechanical errors. Machines could also be hacked without anyone ever knowing about it.

Todd Rokita called voting "our most sacred civic transaction." He has made it more difficult; whether it's more accurate is anybody's guess.