Editorial 8.5, May 2006, by Deirdre Helfferich Overcounted, Underreported, and Invalid? A week after the 2004 election, Kay Brown noticed something odd about the vote counts in Alaska. So did a few other people, among them the group that came to be known as Alaskans for Fair Elections 2004. The recount of ten percent of the precincts was requested because Diebold-owned electronic voting machines (the AccuVote scanners) were used (known for problematic recording in other states), and because of the discrepancy between exit polls that showed Tony Knowles winning by a three percent margin and the results, which favored Lisa Murkowski. The Knowles campaign did not participate in the recount effort, believing that the outcome would not change. They were right. The spot check showed essentially no change. So Alaskans for Fair Elections, somewhat grudgingly, concluded that the election must have been honest. But what Brown, and later the Democratic Party, noticed was that the totals on the Division of Elections webpage were screwy. (Brown later became the Democratic Party spokeswoman.) The totals by precinct do not match the overall totals. If one adds up the precinct totals, George Bush had better than 100,000 votes more than his official summary total. Lisa Murkowski had around 77,000 extra votes; Rita Allee, 500 extra. The DoE has been unable to explain to the satisfaction of the Democrats exactly what is going on. The party has been trying to get a copy of the actual database of votes so they can see why the results are so weird, and received a series of excuses that ran like this: no, it’s proprietary information (Diebold’s), yes, sure, wait a minute (two two-week delays), um, no, it’s a security risk (whose?), uh, sure, you can have the results but not the database, see our website. The Democrats finally filed suit in Superior Court on April 18 to get the DoE to release the records. It took the Democrats a while to start acting on the election in an official capacity, because they didn’t have their statewide convention until mid-2005, and so didn’t start looking up the precinct totals until the party needed to figure out how many delegates it needed to send to the convention. But once they did, they discovered that fully half of the precincts in the state had better than 100% turnout, and sixteen out of the total forty had better than 200% turnout. Not bad in this day of declining voter participation, eh? Since the DoE can’t really show the Democrats how they derived the actual vote totals by precinct, it’s a bit hard to tell if the summary totals are correct. The state, according to the Anchorage Daily News, explains that “Early votes for statewide candidates were not recorded by House district but rather were tallied for each of the state’s four election regions. Those regional totals then were reported for every House district, essentially inflating the vote total many times over. "The results should be reported differently next time, officials have said.” I’ll say. These totals may not be ballot stuffing, but then again, who can tell? This certainly doesn’t help people trying to figure out exactly what went on in the last election. The DoE can’t—or won’t—provide verifiable information of public records to the public. This is like saying, “Just trust us and Diebold.” Some things really ought not to be privatized. The Anchorage Daily News has been providing the main coverage of this story to the state. Reporting on what should be an enormous story has been pretty slim. When the public cannot independently verify the results of an election, how can it trust that the tally is accurate? And if we can’t trust the accuracy, particularly in these days of not-so-secure electronic systems, why bother voting? A democracy depends on the active engagement of the public and the media, and on the validity of that engagement. Otherwise, we have only a sham. Sources and further reading: Alaska Democratic Party, “Democrats File Lawsuit to Get 2004 Election Records,” press release, www.alaskademocrats.org Anchorage Daily News, “Democrats question vote results,” 12/20/05, on line at www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7301446p-7213196c.html; "State rebuffs demand to turn over Diebold voting files,” 1/24/06, on line at www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7386582p-7298824c.html; “Suit asks for vote records,” 4/19/06, on line at www.adn.com/front/story/7642480p-7553342c.html Division of Elections, letter to the Alaska Democratic Party, dated 2/22/06, on line at www.votetrustusa.org/pdfs/Alaska_Folder/feb22adpresponse.pdf Division of Elections website: http://gov.state.ak.us/ltgov/elections/ The Ester Republic, “Ten Got $10,000 in Less than Ten Days: Esteroids Spearhead Recount,” December 2004, vol. 6 no. 12. Frontiersman, editorial, “Elections division hangs credibility in the balance”, 4/9/06, on line at www.frontiersman.com/articles/2006/04/09/news/opinion/opinion1.txt | ||
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