Dan Rather report highlights voting machine weaknesses
“Right now consumers in the United States have no way of knowing if products are made in sweatshop conditions,” said Kim Miller who works on legislative issues, including sweatshops, for the United Steelworkers union based in Pittsburgh. “The revelations coming out do not inspire confidence,” she said. “It should call into question faith in the voting machines and by extension the electoral process.”
By 2001, a manager brought in to improve the plant was rejecting 30 to 40 percent of the touchscreens they were receiving from Minnesota, but thousands had already been assembled into machines shipped back to the United States. In August 2006, ES&S notified Florida that there was a “software glitch” that might cause but did nothing to fix the machines. The manager told Rather that as many as 15,000 to 16,000 defective machines were shipped to the United States.
A voting systems expert from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh interviewed by Rather pointed to the public’s resistance to pay the price for accuracy.
“Touchscreens on jetfighters don’t fail, touchscreens on voting machines fail,” Michael Shamos said. “Why? Because the touchscreens on jetfighters cost a lot of money.”
Vadura’s company, whose machines received federal certification in 2004, has already gone out of business.
“We… couldn’t compete with the likes of ES&S because their cost structure is apparently almost zero,” he said, referring to the sweatshop wages in the Filipino plant. “But you know, the problem was you have customers who some of them were actually under the impression that the units were built here… because I believe that in some cases they were part of the [Requests for Proposals].”
“Quite frankly, the officials purchasing these systems, and I can’t blame them, were more interested in the cost of the unit than the security and reliability,” he said.
Shamos, who has 25 years of experience testing voting systems, referred to what happened in the 2000 presidential election as a “fiasco of gargantuan proportions.” Yet he testified in favor of electronic voting machines to a committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in March 2004.
“I am not here today as an advocate for or against electronic voting systems,” he said, but later charged that, “Paper records in voting are generally not worth the paper they’re printed on. … Any time a human has the opportunity to touch a ballot he has a chance to alter it. This was seen in Florida with punched cards.”
The recent Rather report addressed the Florida punch cards thoroughly, interviewing the frontline workers who manufactured the cards for the election that year. The workers said the company ordered a new kind of paper in 1999 that wasn’t suitable and couldn’t pass quality control. When pressmen rejected the rolls, they came back through looking like new rolls of paper. When workers refused to sign off on the job, the plant manager himself approved it. The punch cards in question? Palm Beach — the center of the storm in the 2000 election.