All the President's votes?
news.independent.co.uk
Excerpt:
" A quiet revolution is taking
place in US politics. By the time
it's over, the integrity of
elections will be in the
unchallenged, unscrutinised
control of a few large - and
pro-Republican - corporations.
Andrew Gumbel wonders if
democracy in America can
survive"
14 October 2003
Something very odd happened in the
mid-term elections in Georgia last
November. On the eve of the vote, opinion
polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent
Democratic governor, leading by between
nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer,
keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated
that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up
for re-election, was ahead by two to five
points against his Republican challenger,
Saxby Chambliss.
Those figures were more or less what
political experts would have expected in
state with a long tradition of electing
Democrats to statewide office. But then the
results came in, and all of Georgia
appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship
to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as
much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to
Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.
Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do and
launched internal investigations. Political analysts credited the upset - part
of a pattern of Republican successes around the country - to a huge
campaigning push by President Bush in the final days of the race. They
also said that Roy Barnes had lost because of a surge of "angry white
men" punishing him for eradicating all but a vestige of the old confederate
symbol from the state flag.
But something about these explanations did not make sense, and they
have made even less sense over time. When the Georgia secretary of
state's office published its demographic breakdown of the election earlier
this year, it turned out there was no surge of angry white men; in fact, the
only subgroup showing even a modest increase in turnout was black
women.
There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in different parts
of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in line with the primary
election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated north Georgia, however,
Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage points higher than he
had in the primaries. And in 74 counties in the Democrat south, Saxby
Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for the Republicans than
the party as a whole had won less than three months earlier.
Now, weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections, and the
figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except statistical anomalies
worthy of further study. But in Georgia there was an extra reason to be
suspicious. Last November, the state became the first in the country to
conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting machines, after
lavishing $54m (£33m) on a new system that promised to deliver the
securest, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in the history of the
republic. The machines, however, turned out to be anything but reliable.
With academic studies showing the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly
programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering, and with
thousands of similar machines from different companies being introduced
at high speed across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US
democracy's own 21st-century nightmare." |
