Transcript of Remarks to be Delivered by Sander Hicks
To New York State Board of Elections
Orig. scheduled for:
12/20/05 10:00 AM Senate Building, room 1920, NYC
Greetings, and thanks in advance for listening to me today. It’s an honor to address members of the New York State Board of Elections.
I’m here because I was inspired by what I consistently heard on my recent two-week cross-country book tour of the country. I’m the author of a new book that looks behind the official story of the 9/11 attacks. The American people, left, right and center, are concerned about getting at the truth behind the “war on terror.” They are concerned that their rights have been attacked in a wave of trumped-up Federal hysteria. But one issue that my wife and I kept hearing about most consistently on this tour was electronic voting.
I have worked as an investigative journalist for the Long Island Press, the New York Press, and various muckraker websites. I have edited and published various books and have founded two publishing companies. I’m here because electronic voting is one of those issues that makes peoples’ blood boil. If we cut off the people’s ability to choose their leaders, then we are giving people no choice but the bloody revolutionary overthrow of their government. I’m a peace activist. I don’t want the revolution to be bloody. But those are the stakes. That’s why what we’re doing here today is important.
Let’s review some background on the issue. The problem didn’t start in year 2000. James & Kenneth Collier, the authors of Votescam: The Stealing of America (which came out in 1992) point to the founding of the News Election Service, or NES, in 1964 as the genesis of our problem. NES was a private company started by the Associated Press, New York Times, and the three major TV networks to predict results on election night at high speed, before they were properly tabulated.
This new crisis of legitimacy for American elections first arose in 1968, in the hotly debated Hubert Humphrey/Richard Nixon election. NES was directly implicated. Reports showed Humphrey in the lead by 54,000 votes until Nixon experienced a surprise turn-around. And no one ever investigated the haphazard results of this private company, NES, “News Election Service.” When the Colliers attempted to investigate, they were told that the policies of NES were not available for public scrutiny.
In 1980, Maxwell Air Force Base’s Air Command and Staff College published an analysis of NES in 1980. They called it a:
“Private organization [that] performs without a contract: without supervision by public officials. It makes decisions concerning its duties according to its own criteria. The question and accountability of News Election Service has not arisen in the nation's press because the responsibility NES now has in counting the nation's votes was assumed gradually over a lengthy period without ever being evaluated as an item on the public agenda.”
Let’s jump 20 years to the mysterious victory of George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988. Bush had just been slaughtered by Bob Dole in the Iowa Primary. Every single indicator and poll predicted that Bush would lose in New Hampshire by about eight points. It was “game over” for Bush, he was being mocked in the press as a “wimp.” Remember, New Hampshire undeclared independent voters can swing into the polls on primary day, become members of the party at the polls, and vote in that day’s primary So the results in New Hampshire tend to be a bit more combustible and brutally reflective of swing voters general opinion. Yet, Bush somehow won that primary and saved his entire campaign, with a shocking nine point victory over Dole. Upon taking the White House, he appointed political neophyte John Sununu as his Chief of Staff. Why?
Well, authors like the Colliers and journalist Jonathan Vankin point to the fact that Sununu was a computer expert, and a former governor there in New Hampshire. The vote was counted on machines called “Shouptronics” which could be accessed over a simple phone connection and their data modified.
Now, for a topic a bit more in the mainstream: what happened in Florida in year 2000? Even if the Supreme Court hadn’t intervened and stopped the recount, the votes of 90,000 voters would never have been counted. According to Greg Palast’s excellent book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, about 90,000 voters, mostly black and Hispanic, were illegally disqualified by private Florida company DBT. DBT deliberately confused criminal records to disqualify 95% of the minority voters they knocked off the voter registration rolls. When Florida Director of Elections Clayton Roberts was interviewed about this by Palast, Roberts was shown a copy of the Florida contract with DBT. Roberts then ended the interview by literally getting up and running away from the cameras.
A Republican-dominated ATM company saw what happened in the 2000 election and decided that election technology would be a great business for them to get into. Today, their naked violation of the law has destroyed their public company in the eyes of the public. Their shareholders are revolting, and their stock price has dropped like a stone. Just last week their CEO quit and four days ago (12/16/05) their shareholders filed a class action lawsuit. Of course, the company I’m describing is Diebold.
This is the same company whose CEO promised in a promotional letter to “deliver the state of Ohio” for Bush in 2004. That story quickly blew up into a scandal thanks to the internet and an incredulous, outraged public.
But there’s more to the Diebold implosion: In an interview with respected internet news site, The Raw Story, a Diebold insider claimed Diebold broke state election laws “many times” by “screwing with the software” as “part of their recipe for getting into the election business.” Remember, earlier this year, Diebold Election Systems decided they would rather stop doing business in North Carolina, than let state officials take a look inside the source code for their election machines.
You would think that people given the public trust would be forthcoming and strident about the source code that is programmed to count something as sacred and simple as the people’s vote. What did Diebold have to hide?
Well, according to Dr. Avi Rubin, Professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins University, and an election judge in 2004, there’s a lot to hide. Another inside source was able to slip Dr. Rubin a copy of the Diebold software program—the fabled source code.
Dr. Rubin and his students went over all 48,609 lines of code until they found this little nugget:
#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4"
[the bold emphasis is the author’s.]
What does that mean?
The DES stands for Digital Encryption Standard. It’s an encryption key, to keep this program safe and secure. But DES was hacked in 1997, and no one concerned with security uses it anymore.
The “F2654hd4” bit of the code was the key to the encryption. According to the influential blog, Daily Kos, which broke this story, “Because the KEY was IN the source code, all Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then ALL unlocked…This wasn't a mistake by any stretch of the imagination. This was a fixed election, plain and simple.
This second coup d'etat is either stopped now or America ceases to be.”
I think that blogger was hoping to reach good people like this assembly here today.
While we were out on the road this Fall, people consistently brought up the Government Accountability Office’s September 2005 report on electronic voting irregularities. The GAO, as I’m sure you know, is the US Congress’s own watchdog. They will investigate what they are told to by a member of Congress. This Fall, their report stated, among other things, that there was a problem in the 2004 elections. For example, the GAO found, "It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate."
This report received zero mainstream media attention. Perhaps the media feel guilty for tacitly approving all of the corruption and cronyism that forced the current administration into office, despite the will of the people. There’s so much the mainstream media is not reporting on in this country, they probably do not know where to start.
However, all is not lost.
I’ll conclude my remarks with several concrete recommendations to the Board of Elections on what kinds of voting machines to implement.
First of all, I’m a member of the Green Party. Our attorneys have pointed out that the Help America Vote Act has been often mis-interpreted by state politicians to mean that electronic voting machines are mandatory. This is not the case.
But if you want to look into Electronic Machines, there is a company worth looking into, and they are called SmartMatic. Their machines are electronic, but they produce what Diebold machines do not: a paper trail. SmartMatic proved itself in the recall election of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, where their machines were reliable, and the results were not contested. The only problem I think New York State could have installing SmartMatic machines is an unfortunate one of politics. There is a bias in some quarters against the Chavez regime, due to his rambunctious anti-corporate globalization politics. Although this is just fine with many New Yorkers, it might conflict with the politics of a few more conservative policy-makers. SmartMatic is based in Florida, the founders are Venezuelan. However, their association with the re-election of the Chavez government should be treated as a credential, not a superficial liability. The future of democracy in New York is at stake here.
For my third and final recommendation, I would like to recommend that the Board of Elections urge future gubernatorial administrations to make Election Day a special holiday. Only 50% of eligible voters vote in this country, and part of the problem is that as a society, we make getting to the polls difficult. New York State could lead the nation, by doing what other countries do and making Election Day a no-work, no-school holiday. It could even be a kind of “feast day” with free public concerts and other forms of celebration of democracy, and the will of the people.
Thanks for your time.
Hicks
is a playwright, journalist, songwriter and activist.
He founded Soft
Skull Press, Inc. in 1996. He was lead singer in White Collar Crime from 1996 to 2003. He lives in Brooklyn with Holley Anderson, his wife, and their son, Coleman.
