Category: Uncategorized

A Weekend Editorial
By Greg Moses

Quorum Report Morning Call Mar. 13, 2005

Last week we reported that the Republican-led contest to unseat Hubert Vo was a massive intrusion into voter privacy enabled by new voter management software (VEMACS).

The power of this software to enable partisan harassment of voters after close elections raises serious issues, especially considering that Texas faces a Jan. 1 deadline to adopt a statewide voter management system. (See Help America Vote Act (HAVA) timeline.)

On March 8, the Secretary of State for Texas announced that IBM and Hart InterCivic would be lead vendors for the statewide voter management system.

A press release from Hart InterCivic phrases the challenge of voter management in terms of preventing fraud.

In most states, voter registration data has been maintained at the local level. The increasing mobility of the population results in voter registration files that are quickly outdated, increasing the complexity of voter registration management and the possibility of voter fraud or inaccuracies.

The paragraph gives us a shiver, because it sounds so much like the baseless suspicions raised by Republican attorney Andy Taylor as he led a massive invasion of voter privacy in the HD 149 race. When busy voters went back to their old polling places and divulged their new addresses, they were NOT attempting any fraud, they were just trying to cope with their responsibilities in a rather inflexible environment.

We would rather see a paragraph like this:

As the vaunted free market system increasingly tosses workers from one home to another, local registration can add frustration and inconvenience to the experience of voting, allowing Republican attack dog lawyers the opportunity to increasingly criminalize more hard working and honest people who don’t always vote for powerful Republican incumbents. A statewide database can enable voters to more easily maintain their livelihoods, their voter registrations, and their privacy without fear of desperate partisan reprisals.

On the other hand, maybe the federal mandate for statewide registration is altogether a bad idea. It will put more power over voter registration and enforcement into fewer hands and may end up causing more trouble than it was supposed to save. If non-partisan voter registration is really non-existent, maybe it’s best to keep the partisan puzzle in smaller pieces.

Looks like we have some questions to follow next week. Stay tuned.

by Greg Moses

DissidentVoice / CounterPunch / The Rag Blog

Like fabled ruts gouged into dirt by heavy wheels, or war trenches widened by running boots, English language usage has hardened against all recent attempts to veer away from a mainline madness of selfish and violent arrogance.

Suicide pilot Joseph Stack wanted to write a note that would supply enough therapy “to fix what is really broken.” Instead, he found the process of writing “frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless.” There was a storm in his head that he could not “gracefully articulate.” And so last month he blew up his house and slaughtered a Black, federal worker in a fury of violent self-expression.

Or take the case of voters in the Texas Republican Primary who last week cast 61 percent of their ballots for the last name “Porter” because it was not a Hispanic name. Their English-only prejudice ended the promising political career of Victor G. Carrillo, the sitting Chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission.

“Given the choice between ‘Porter’ and ‘Carrillo’ — unfortunately, the Hispanic-surname was a serious setback from which I could never recover, although I did all in my power to overcome this built-in bias,” explained Carrillo in a pained letter to supporters.

These ritualized usages of English that we have seen lately in Texas can only trigger rapid-fire bursts of ignorance, aggression, and intolerance. Maybe we have the internet to thank for this? Communication as flame war? Chairman Carrillo put it this way: “political dynamics have changed some.”

What Stack and Republican voters share is a language they can’t use properly either as an adequate expression of their own feelings or as a medium of critical democratic autonomy. Whether your advanced technology is a single-engine aircraft or an electronic voting machine, if you can’t use your own language to think with, how will you make the wisest use of your tools?

Of course, the language failures of Stack and Republican voters are symptoms of something more widespread. We recall how the “great communicators” of our political life — from Reagan to Obama — can be most effective only when they work from ritualized scripts.

If we believe that Stack dedicated the life of his mind to the triumphant conquest of IRS code, then plain language would warn us right away that he was stalking the domain of the language slayer. The day Stack killed himself and IRS worker Vernon Hunter, I received a communication via federal mail from my online broker regarding the official tax accounting procedures for certain trusts: “Please note: 1099’s will never match the original cash payments received.” In plain English: my income tax for these things will never be based on my income.

As for the bramble of language that counts for Republican discourse in Texas, you could easily get hooked on the idea that Texas government is always superior to Washington government. Until they count the votes in Texas. Then you realize that Texas Republican voters don’t even know the names of Republicans who run the government of Texas.

To be sure, IRS code is imperial jargon, not a living language. And voting is little more than a lottery of jargon mongers. But whatever else might be true of the new anti-taxers or Texas secessionists, they have not proved that they are capable of transcending the jargon of their own white, racist heritage.

Stack’s note asks us to agree that against the jargons of power in America, violence is the “/only/” answer. But isn’t this jargon in its essential form as the murder-suicide of language itself?

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch

While the power of new voting technology was attracting a nationwide convergence of suspicion in the vote count reported for Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, the very same software system used to manage voter rolls there was being put to troubling new uses in Harris County, Texas where hardly a word was uttered in reply.

Yet the power of software to politically manage votes and voters is not simply the power to produce vote totals, it also lies in the power of information technology to “discipline and punish” voting populations with increasing speed and efficiency.

In the case of Harris County, a small legislative district with unique political geography became a testing ground for the power of software to criminalize and discredit voters in the aftermath of a surprising vote count. Although a rare legislative contest failed to reverse a 33-vote defeat of a powerful Republican incumbent, the process of the contest did reduce the margin of victory for the Democrat. And the tactic of using new software to identify and pursue individual voters was added to the Republican playbook as yawning observers nodded.

Thanks to the recent addition of VOTEC Election Management And Compliance System or VEMACS (the same software package used in Cuyahoga County and ten other states) the Voter Registrar of Harris County was able to deliver with unprecedented speed and precision a list of 167 suspected illegal voters shortly after Republican attorneys charged that Democratic voters had illegally stolen the election.

The production and distribution of the Registrar’s fat report was widely viewed as a normal and helpful thing to do in sorting out the facts of the election contest. However, according to documents supplied to the Texas Civil Rights Review, the Registrar’s usual investigation of voter activity in major elections takes several months to complete, and does not target specific election contests. In the case of Houston’s HD 149, it is still not clear that anything motivated the special report apart from Republican allegations that the election had been stolen by illegal Democratic voters. Media-fed allegations of voter misconduct created an environment in which a historically unique report appeared as a normal and timely contribution.

In the end, hyped-up Republican charges against Democratic voters were not supported by the evidence. But the report produced by the Registrar’s election software did enable an unprecedented invasion of voter privacy. Within a month following the release of the Registrar’s report, about 150 voters had been served with subpoenas that demanded them to reveal their votes in the election contest. And about 110 voters eventually saw their votes deducted from the race. Was the interrogation of Houston voters in January the largest voter sweep in history? We hope so. Because the Harris County precedent warns us that where powerful software is available, there will be more voter sweeps to come.

And despite the outcome, the contest for House District 149 was conducted under circumstances favorable to an election reversal. As one official explained, the district is bounded on the Southwest side by a diagonal line that represents the longest county-line boundary given to any legislative district in the state. With election laws that draw hard lines against voters who cross county lines, the likelihood of out-of-county fouls was favorable from the start.

The Texas Civil Rights Review conducted a Mapquest review of addresses reported by 19 voters who were flagged by the Registrar in one borderline precinct. Seven of the voters continued to live within a mile of their old precinct. And for one of those voters, the Mapquest star that marks the voter’s home touched the county line. On a TerraServer satellite image also, the red dot marking the voter’s address virtually hugged the imaginary county line that cut diagonally through the neighborhood. Although the voter was subpoenaed and ordered to reveal his vote in the race, the Master of Discovery for the legislative contest Rep. Will Hartnett (R-Dallas) was unable to determine a clear answer as to how he voted.

A phone call to that voter remains unreturned. As I left a message with his spouse, she explained it was a busy night at home, and I could hear the sounds of happy children in the background. As with the homes of two other voters that I have contacted by telephone, I came away with the impression that voters do not want to extend their experiences of the election contest any further. Like any trauma of life, they prefer to move on. And the circumstances make it difficult for me to feel any pushier about getting their quotes. For this reason, I worry about the long term effects that these contests may have on voters who seem dispirited enough already.

There has been virtually no journalistic interest in reporting the experiences of approximately 150 voters who were served and deposed in the Republican-led contest (unless you count the Norwegian citizen who on his voter application listed his previous residence as Oslo, checked “not a citizen” and was given a voter card anyway for his George Bush Park precinct. His case was reported as a kind of absurd comedy, and his Republican vote was subtracted.)

But what about the two young women who were citizens but who neglected to find and check the citizenship box on applications that were laid out quite differently than the one filled out by our Norwegian resident above. The citizenship box on applications given the two women was separated from the field for all other information and placed into a section that appeared above and to the right. Although the two voters eventually submitted the proper checkmarks and voted on election day, their online registrations were revised during the month of January. Following merciless post-election review of their registration histories by Republican attorneys, the two women were disqualified for the crime of completing their registrations too late, and their Democratic votes were subtracted as illegal.

As voter activists from the Ohio campaign are calling for open-source codes and paper trails to help check the power of vote counting software, there should also be a response to the newfound power of post-election review. With the increasing ability of technology to monitor where voters actually reside, the antidote for post-election harassment would appear to lie in pre-election flexibility. Let voters register later, electronically, and with instant printouts that confirm completed applications. If a checkbox is crucial to registration, voters could be prompted to complete their forms in real time.

Furthermore, why not allow voters to access their proper ballots from any polling place? Why in this world of broadband interactivity should voters be told to drive around, when ballots can be delivered to them by keystroke? Rather than drift yawning into a future of technology built by and for the few, democrats can demand from Voter Registrars the kind of lightning quick responsiveness that enables, encourages, and motivates voters. In a world of digital power, Voter Registrars should feel pressure to make tools that work for voters, not against them, before during and after election day.

Notes: Phrase “discipline and punish” coined by Michel Foucault in his 1975 book on the birth of prisons. “Management and Compliance” are trademarked terms of VOTEC.

Story first posted as top message on the morning of March 11, and revised throughout the day.