How reliable was electronic voting?
Published 06 November, 2008, 07:00
The prospect of electoral fraud has become a widespread concern in the U.S., especially after the flawed 2000 presidential vote in Florida. So when it comes to the American electoral system, it appears that only one of its aspects isn’t raising questions – that’s the need for reform.
The questions over the fairness of the U.S. electoral system don’t seem to be marring the excitement of the majority of the American population. But that doesn’t mean these concerns don’t exist.
Bertell Ollman is a professor at New York University, one of the world’s most prestigious. He teaches the only college course in the United States titled “How to Steal an Election”. Bertell says any country – no matter how badly run – would be ashamed to have an election as rigged as in the U.S. He is convinced electronic voting machines are to blame. Still, “it isn’t that the machines are failing, it isn’t that the system is breaking down”.
The Professor accuses those who these machines serve: “It’s working perfectly for the people who run the system. This is exactly what they want it to do – to break down, to change votes, and to stop working. Their goal is to steal the election.”
There are whispers that the companies producing most machines used in the U.S. are linked to the Republicans. However, these efforts didn’t help the Republican party much in this presidential election.
Brad Friedman, a popular U.S. blogger and investigative journalist, also says the U.S. election saw extreme violations of voters’ rights.
“Whether Barack Obama ended up winning in a landslide or not doesn’t really matter,” he said. “Barack Obama was not the only important race on the ballot yesterday, there were hundreds of them around the country,” he said. “Millions of voters were forced to vote on provisional ballots, which may or may not be counted. Much of this happened after voting machines went down in various states”.
All this occurred right under the nose of respected international election-monitoring organisations. The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) never misses a chance to poke a finger at Russia. However, with a sufficient number of reports of things gone wrong in the U.S., they are being far from vocal in their concerns.
Leonid Slutsky, from Russia’s State Duma International Affairs Committee, who was following the elections in the U.S., says there was quite a lot of violations.
He said: “ODIHR, which traditionally criticises everything and everyone in the post-Soviet space, is the best example of double standards. Those who do speak about the illegitimacy of the vote are people inside the U.S. None of these authoritative organisations have dared to criticise the United States.”
