Elaine Kitchel: The Tangled Web of American Voting

"Tangled does not even begin to describe the messy web made of our voting system. It’s not only tangled; it’s matted, convoluted, and it stinks to high heaven. And dead center in the web is a dangerous little “black box” with a red hourglass on it. The black box is inside each and every voting machine, and it holds the source code for every function of encoding, decoding, identification, authentication, and tallying of votes put into it. And the source code belongs to the two companies which manufacture and sell the electronic voting machines that could be responsible for counting roughly 80% of the votes in November’s election.
What else does the black box hold? Ah, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. In the case of Diebold, which has sold electronic voting machines all over the country, including twenty counties in Ohio, a key state, the box holds a nifty little piece of code that can be opened without a password using Microsoft Access. According to Bev Harris, activist and author of Black Box Voting, this code makes three ledgers. The first ledger is the actual vote and tally. This can be sent off from a precinct to the state’s central election location. But the second ledger can be manipulated to reflect any votes and tallies one wishes. The results from this ledger can be sent instead of the first, with no one being the wiser. It’s so simple, anyone who can read can do it. Now isn’t that handy? No one knows what the third ledger does, except Diebold, and probably ES&S. Read more about this here: Inside a U.S. Election Vote Counting Program.
Another big player in election machines is ES&S. What would you say if you knew that the founders of Diebold and ES&S were brothers? That’s right; Todd and Bob Urosevich are top dogs in each of these companies. Bob Urosevich, the CEO and founder of ES&S, oversaw the development of the software that is now used in his brother’s Diebold machines. I’m betting both have a similar code inside the black boxes. Cozy, isn’t it? Both are Republicans and have influential Republicans Walden O’Dell and Chuck Hagel in the upper reaches of their corporate structures, and these men have promised to “deliver” the election to George Bush. It’s easy to see how that could happen, now that we know what’s in the black boxes. And what’s more, neither company will declare that what comes out of its machines represents the actual vote. Even so, states just keep buying the machines."