Krugman: Saving the Vote
by Paul Krugman, New York Times

...Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have to take the result on faith.

Yet the behavior of Gov. Jeb Bush's officials with regard to other election-related matters offers no justification for such faith. First, there was the affair of the felon list. Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. But in 2000 many innocent people, a great number of them black, couldn't vote because they were erroneously put on a list of felons; these wrongful exclusions may have put Governor Bush's brother in the White House.

This year, Florida again drew up a felon list, and tried to keep it secret. When a judge forced the list's release, it turned out that it once again wrongly disenfranchised many people - again, largely African-American [Democratic voters] - while including almost no Hispanics [Republican voters].

[Monday], my colleague Bob Herbert reported on another highly suspicious Florida initiative: state police officers have gone into the homes of elderly African-American voters - including participants in get-out-the-vote operations - and interrogated them as part of what the state says is a fraud investigation. But the state has provided little information about the investigation, and, as Mr. Herbert says, this looks remarkably like an attempt to intimidate voters.

Given this pattern, there will be skepticism if Florida's paperless voting machines give [pseudo-]pResident Bush an upset, uncheckable victory. [Skepticism? That's got to be the understatement of the century.]

Congress should have acted long ago to place the coming election above suspicion by requiring a paper trail for votes. But legislation was bottled up in committee [meaning, the Republican chair of the House Admin Committee intentionally prevented it from going to the floor for a vote], and it may be too late to change the hardware. Yet it is crucial that this election be credible. What can be done?

(more) Free Registration Required

Tomorrow, Blog for Iowa will offer up some suggestions about what you can do right here at home to ensure accurate and fair elections.

[My comments are in italics above.]

Thanks to JoyAnn in Cedar Rapids for alerting Blog for Iowa about this article.