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Which Corporation Owns Your Vote?
(Thom Hartmann, AlterNet, March 6, 2003)
Jeb Bush stole the vote in Florida in 2000 by kicking thousands of legitimately registered black voters off the voting rolls because they had similar names to Texas felons, a feat well documented by Greg Palast and the mainstream British press. In a brilliant bit of misdirection, Bush portrayed the problem as one of incompetent elderly voters, dumb minority voters, and a problem with "chads" � unreliable voting technology. . . . Bush's answer was to install touch-screen voting machines across Florida in time for the 2002 election. . . . But in the November 2002 election, when some Florida voters pressed the touch-screen "button" for Bush's Democratic opponent, votes were instead recorded for Bush. "Misaligned" touch-screen voting machines were blamed for the computer-driven vote-theft, and when a losing candidate in Palm Beach sued to inspect the software of Florida's computerized voting machines, a local judge denied the petition, citing the privacy rights of the corporation that wrote the programs. . . . Dan Spillane, a former software engineer for a voting machine company that includes a former CIA Director and Dick Cheney's former assistant on its board of directors, has sued his employer for firing him when he pointed out holes in their system that he claims could lead to vote-rigging. . . . The machines generate no paper trail that can be audited, and when voting machine companies have been challenged to produce audits of their vote or to disclose details of their software, they cite the privacy rights that come from corporations being considered "persons" in the United States. . . . But corporations have claimed the First Amendment right of persons to free speech and struck down thousands of state and federal laws against corporations giving money to politicians or influencing elections; they've claimed Fourteenth Amendment rights against discrimination to prevent communities from "discriminating" against huge out-of-town retailers or corporate criminals; and have claimed Fourth Amendment rights of privacy that will prevent voters or public officials from examining the software that runs their computerized voting machines. . . . Now corporations will be telling the citizens of Santa Clara County how they voted. And those same corporations will use the shield of corporate personhood � once valiantly disputed before the Supreme Court by the County's attorney � to withhold from the County's voters the right to "look behind the curtain" at the corporate-owned software and computerized processes that tabulate their vote.

posted by LoZo 3:28 PM