Photography is Not a Crime

By Carlos Miller
It’s been more than three years since George W. Bush was reelected in an election that was marred with voting machine errors, especially in Florida and Ohio, two states that tipped the election in his favor.

Now the mainstream media is finally addressing the issue.

In today’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “Can you count on voting machines,” Clive Thompson writes that “the earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government.”

Well count me among the “fringe” because I knew there was something fishy the moment the media announced that Bush had won on Nov. 2rd, 2004.

I had spent that day working the exit polls at a Miami precinct where one person out of 20 admitted to voting for Bush. I had remained glued to the radio throughout the day, listening to AP reports of how Kerry was trouncing Bush in exit polls in heavily conservative North and Central Florida. I had no doubt that South Florida, as the most liberal enclave in the state, would go blue.

After the polls closed, I drove home, took a quick shower and headed out to celebrate because even at that time, the Associated Press was predicting Kerry was going to take Florida, judging by exit polls.

But only a few hours later, the media had announced that Bush had won Florida by more than 350,000 votes; a mind-boggling figure considering that Florida had barely elected Bush in 2000 with 538 votes. And that was before he proved to be a divider, not a uniter. Before he proved to be neither morally compassionate or fiscally conservative.

The Associated Press never mentioned the exit polls after that. However, it was later revealed - not by the mainstream media - that there were huge discrepancies between exit polls and actual results in states that used voter machines, including Florida and Ohio, but not in states that used the traditional paper ballot system.

During his first term, Bush started a war on false pretenses, ran the deficit sky-high and had basically given up on Osama bin Laden, whom he had promised to track down “dead or alive” shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. He was a lame duck president before he became a lame duck president in his second term, hardly the criteria to earn a reelection.

On the night of the election, reports of computer voting problems started popping up on the Internet even before Bush was announced the victor (as well as reports of black voter intimidation by State Troopers in North Florida, but that’s another story altogether).

And those reports of computer voting problems were hardly contained to the fringe as Wired Magazine, one of the most respectable technology magazines in the country, came out with an article titled “Researchers: Florida vote fishy” on Nov. 18th, 2004.

Many of us who preferred to remain on the fringe of oblivion sent letters to our local newspapers, urging them to investigate the matter before Inauguration Day. But the media continued its love affair with Bush by confirming that Bush, indeed, had earned a “mandate”.

Even when Clint Curtis, a Florida computer programmer and registered republican, testified before Congress that he had been ordered to create a program that could steal elections, the mainstream media turned a blind eye.

The role to distribute the news fell on the shoulders of bloggers, like The Brad Blog, who has consistently reported about the voting machines.

Those of us who remained on the fringe of journalism back then wrote detailed articles about Curtis as he attempted to run for Congress on an anti-computer voting machine platform as well as other issues relating to the computer voting machines, including the fact that Maryland held elections on uncertified, illegal, voting machines. I even pitched a story to the Miami Herald about Curtis, only to get the typical non-response.

Life ain’t easy when you live on the fringe.

In fact, it wasn’t until Bush’s blundered response to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 that the media started turning on him. But by then, it was too late. We were a nation divided that had allowed democracy to fall into the hands of a three private corporations who happened to be large republican donors (Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia).

The issue still had not been fully addressed by the 2006 midterm elections when more reports of computer glitches arose in Sarasota County after Republican Vern Buchanan beat Democrat Christine Jennings by 373 votes in an election where there were 17,811 “undervotes” - votes that were not counted by the computers for whatever reason.

And even when the media started to address these issues, they failed to point out the connections between these companies and the Bush Administration, like the fact that Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell had donated thousands of dollars to Bush prior to the 2004 election and had even sent out a letter to other donors stating that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.”

In fact, when O’Dell ended up resigning in December 2005 in the midst of these rising voting controversies, USA Today failed to point out that little detail in its story.

That little detail is also not mentioned in today’s 8,000 word New York Times story, in which the cover reads, “Your vote may be lost, destroyed, miscounted, wrongly attributed or hacked”.

In that article, Thompson still maintains the tone that any irregularities that have occurred with the voting machines are purely a result of computer mishaps and couldn’t possibly be a result of intentional tampering - despite the fact that they always seem to fall in the favor of the republican candidate:

When invisible, secretive software runs an election, it allows for endless mistrust and muttered accusations of conspiracy. The inscrutability of the software — combined with touch-screen machines’ well-documented history of weird behavior — allows critics to level almost any accusation against the machines and have it sound plausible. “It’s just like the Kennedy assassination,” Shamos, the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, laments. “There’s no matter of evidence that will stop people from spinning yarns.”

Perhaps Shamos is unaware that there are still portions of the Warren Commission that have not been released to the public, which makes some of us in the fringe very skeptical.

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