All over the United States of America there are people who listen to the facts about computer voting and then tell horror stories of candidates, who didn’t have a prayer before election day, then slip into office by an uncheckable computer vote. Most common is the story of the computer that “breaks down” when one candidate is securely in the lead, and after the computer is “fixed,” the losing candidate pulls ahead and wins. The evil feelings left behind by such shenanigans are festering across America.
Among the wickedest recent examples of possible computerized vote fraud, of the sort that has disillusioned millions of Americans, is the 1988 New Hampshire primary that saved George Bush from getting knocked out of the race to the White House.
Was the New Hampshire Primary scenario a modern classic in computerized vote manipulation? Here is the gist of it.
The Bush campaign of 1988, as historians have since recollected it, was filled with CIA-type disinformation operations and deceptions of the sort that America used in Viet Nam, Chile and the Soviet Union. Since George Bush was one of the most admired CIA directors in the history of the organization, this was not so surprising.
Yet George Bush stood to lose the Republican Party nomination if he was beaten by Sen. Robert Dole in the snows of New Hampshire. He had suffered a terrible political wound when Dole won big by a show of hands in an unriggable Iowa caucus. Bush came to New Hampshire with all the earmarks of a loser whom the press had come to identify as a “wimp.”
Political observers were downbeat in their observations of Bush’s chances in the face of Dole’s Iowa momentum. Virtually every television and newspaper poll had Bush losing by up to eight points just hours before the balloting.
Desperate times require desperate measures. Perhaps that’s what it required for “steps to be taken,” and phone calls to be made. Then came a widely reported promise made by Bush to his campaign manager, Gov. Sununu. It happens that Sununu’s computer engineering skills approach “genius” on the tests. If Sununu could “deliver” New Hampshire, and Bush didn’t care how and didn’t want to know how — then Sununu would become his chief of staff in the White House.
When election day was over the following headline appeared in the Washington Post:
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*NEW HAMPSHIRE CONFOUNDED MOST POLLSTERS
Voters Were a Step Ahead of Tracking Measurements
By Lloyd Grove
Washington Post Staff Writer
For Vice President Bush and his supporters, Tuesday’s 9-percentage-point victory over Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) in New Hampshire was a delightful surprise; for Andrew Kohut, it was a horror story.
Kohut is president of the Gallup poll, whose final New Hampshire survey was wrong by 17 points: it had put Dole ahead by 8; Bush won by 9. “I was dismayed,” Kohut acknowledged yesterday.
This New Hampshire primary was perhaps the most polled primary election in American history, and in the end, the Republican voters in the state confounded the predictions of nearly every published survey of voter opinion.
Gallup’s glaring error and the miscalls of other polling organizations once again raise questions about the accuracy of polls, their use by the media and the impact they have on voters’ choices and the public perception of elections. In New Hampshire this year, news organizations’ use of “tracking polls” to try to follow the movement of public opinion night after night came to dominate news accounts of the campaigning and the thinking of the campaigns themselves.*
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Nothing was said in the press about the secretly programmed computer chips inside the “Shouptronic” Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines in Manchester, the state’s largest city.
These 200-pound systems were so easily tampered with that the integrity of the results they gave — and George Bush was the beneficiary of their tallies — will forever be in doubt. Consider these points:
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[li]The “Shouptronic” was purchased directly from a company whose owner, Ransom Shoup, had been twice convicted of vote fraud in Philadelphia.[/li][li]It bristled with telephone lines that made it possible for instructions from the outside to be telephoned into the machine without anyone’s dear knowledge.[/li][li]It completely lacked an “audit trail,” an independent record that could be checked in case the machine “broke down” or its results were challenged.[/li][li]Roy G. Saltman, of the federal Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology, called the Shouptronic “much more risky” than any other computerized tabulation system because “You are fundamentally required to accept the logical operation of the machine, there is no way to do an independent check.”[/li][/ol]
A year later, in June of 1989, Robert J. Naegele, who had investigated all computerized voting systems for New York State, warned: “The DRE (which the Shouptronic was) is still at least a year and possibly two away from what I would consider a marketable product. The hardware problems are relatively minor, but the software problems are conceptual and really major”.
A source close to Gov. Sununu insists that Sununu knew from his perspective as a politician, and his expertise as a computer engineer, that the Shouptronic was prime for tampering.