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The Privatization of Our Democracy

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The Privatization of Our Democracy THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL FEBRUARY - MARCH 2010 The Privatization of Our Democracy Eva Waskell and the Election Integrity Movement A Profile in Courage in the form of an extended conversation between Eva Waskell and Gordon Cook San Rafael, California and Ewing, New Jersey February 2010 Last updated April 1, 2010 Volume XIX, Nos. 1 and 2 April - May 2010 ISSN 1071 - 6327 © 2010 COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA PAGE 1 THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL FEBRUARY - MARCH 2010 © 2010 COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA PAGE 2 THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL FEBRUARY - MARCH 2010 Table of Contents Preface 5 Foreword: An Abdication of Trust 8 1. “You really have your work cut out for you, don’t you?” 11 2. Before Elections: Looking for Unchartered Frontiers 17 3. US Election Administration: People, Processes and Technology 20 4. Origins and Early Evolution of Computerized Voting Systems 23 5. You can’t have democratic elections if you have vote counting that’s a secret. 28 6. Quoted on the Front Page of The New YorkTimes 32 7. Entertaining Ourselves to Death? 36 8. By 1975, Roy Saltman Had Identified the Issues and Proposed Solutions 39 9. Getting to Know Saltman in Person and Witnessing the Subsequent Policy Flaws 42 10. Elections in the Great State of Texas 48 11. Policy Lesson: Don’t Confuse the Simple with the“High Fallutin” 58 12. Show Me the Ballots!! 66 13. The Role of the FEC in the Development of Voting System Standards 72 14. Testing and Certification of Voting Systems 84 15. The Importance of Location 91 16. Post-1988: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Picks Up the Ball 93 17. The 1990s: A Leap into Full-Time Work on Elections 97 18. In 1997, Jenny Appleseed Writes a Planning Grant Proposal. 101 19. Flashback 103 20. To the Victors Go the Spoils 108 21. January 2000 113 © 2010 COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA PAGE 3 THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL FEBRUARY - MARCH 2010 22. Internet Voting and other Public Policy Issues after 2000 115 23. Election Reform after 2004 119 24. First Define the Problem 123 25. How the November 2004 Ohio Recount Was Rigged 125 26. Applying the Principles of Three Cups of Tea 128 27. Because it was so very important . I just kept at it. 132 28. VoteWatch and the Election Science Institute 133 29. Evolution of My Thinking 135 30. Bottom-up Data Collection in Riverside County, CA 145 31. Inside the Last Bastion of our Democracy: the Central Computer Room 149 32. Framing a Solution for a Seemingly Intractable Problem 153 33. Progress Toward Solutions and How to Overcome Obstacles 157 © 2010 COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA PAGE 4 THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL FEBRUARY - MARCH 2010 Preface I am honored that Eva Waskell has entrusted me to present The Privatization of Our Democracy, a work that I regard as her Profile in Courage. For 25 years she has labored to correct what is possi- bly the most significant public policy failure of the computer age—the privatization of vote counting carried out under the rationale that computers are simply automatic calculators that can tabulate votes more cost effectively than old analogue machines. I have known her for 19 of those years. There were some election lawsuits before Eva got on the trail in 1985. That is true. But she was the earliest person to connect all the dots and see the much bigger picture, and she has been self- lessly laboring in the trenches ever since. While I met Eva in 1992, I first heard about her election interest only in 1994. I knew immediately what concerned her because I remembered very well reading the Ronnie Dugger article in The New Yorker. When we began talking last September about doing an “interview,” imagine my amazement at the passage of 15 years before Eva ever acknowl- edged that the work she and Terry Elkins had done was the catalyst for THAT article being written! As a friend in Holland said, “It’s a rare and precious gift to meet a true bodhisattva—a human being who has dedicated his own life and spiritual liberation to something far greater than himself or her- self.” It took me a long time to understand this as I watched Eva in 1996-1998 and stayed at her small but lovely house in Reston, Virginia when I visited Washington, DC. In those years of ram- pant materialism and worship of the private interest, Eva had but one thought—elections in the USA were being sucked inside an unknown and unknowable black box where the circumstantial evidence at the very least pointed to the possibility, if not the probability, that they were for sale. Eva’s vision was clear on this long before the disaster of November 2000. I remember trying to help. In the last years of the 1990s, I informed many, many people of her concerns and suggested that they help the citizen-based election information center she was trying to put together. But people’s minds were on other things as the Clinton “good times” rolled on. The lack of interest was palpable. But since the 2000 debacle, even public interest people expect free access to what this book will show is an encyclopedic expertise unparalleled by anyone else. It is rather tragic that the preserva- tion of free elections is a worthy cause but also one where there is no money to be made by any- one outside of an established public interest organization of some type. Therefore, any “freelance” work in this field done by citizens is especially dangerous because there is always the expectation that these people will work pro bono. And as with every endeavor within the election integrity community, there are people who expect everything for nothing. But of course there are also good people. Eva has seen both. And for her labors she deserves some assurance of financial stability that comes with basic medical care, food and housing. It is my hope that now that she has told her story for the first time, she will be able to work with those who will make sure she can devote herself full time to the cause. It is also my hope that Google, or someone like it, will understand that her archives are definitive for this field. They must be protected and then digitized. © 2010 COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA PAGE 5 THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL FEBRUARY - MARCH 2010 People think they know that something is wrong with the way elections are conducted in this coun- try. They are correct. There is. But readers only now will get access to a full history of the abuse of public trust by the elected politicians of the United States of America. That’s a large claim to make, but see for yourself. The Process In September 2009, Eva started telling me things about her election work that she never had revealed before. As readers will see, I had direct and key experience with parts of her story but most of the story I did not know. I remember reading John F Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage in about 1958 when I was still in high school. What you are about to read is a story that equals any in JFK’s classic book. A woman who has never given up because . it’s our democracy at stake. When we started this interview in early October, I interviewed Eva for more than three hours. Within a week I sent her more than 18,000 words of very rough text. I said there was no length limit. I urged her to tell her story. And while working in the midst of California’s disastrous economy on various part time jobs to continue to pay the rent for her small apartment, she has spent several hundred additional hours, as she puts it, to look back for the first time in 25 years. The result has tripled the length of the original effort. It has not been easy. In my view, it is as though I tried to tell in one extended essay everything I have learned about telecommunications within the 30 years I have been online. I at least have been doing The COOK Report for 18 of those years. Eva was just connecting and network building year after year after year. Refusing to give up because to do so would be to admit that America failed. That our national legends were only legends and no longer grounded in reality. Consequently, while continuing to work to pay the rent, she accumulated archives that are unlike anything that anyone can imagine. I visited her in San Rafael from No- vember 29 – December 3, 2009 and asked for and received an extensive 90-minute tour of these archives, which I recorded and during which I took 135 photographs. It turns out there was a good reason for doing this. The illustrations for this profile are almost entirely from that tour. Readers need to understand that this has been almost a stream of consciousness process through which Eva has made a first pass at organizing a subject just as complex as global telecommunications. It’s a work in progress. And while folks specialize all over the place, she connects the silos and weaves a fabric, a tapestry on which the betrayal of our democracy by its privatization is stitched together in exquisite detail.
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