September 12, 2003 - It was the spring of 1948 and I was 10 years old. The polling place was at Lincoln School. It was primary election day and my mother, having decided that it was not too early for me to learn the nuts and bolts of politics collected me from class and had me accompany her as she went to vote. She gave the first lady in the long line of elections judges her name and asked for a Democratic ballot. There was a stir in the room and an electric crackling to the atmosphere as the ladies scurried around to try to find one. Finally the orange ballot was located and she took me into the booth with her. I had to crane my neck to see what she was doing as she pointed to the first name in the list and said “See, there is the President.” She marked an X in the box next to the name Harry S. Truman. “The lines of the X have to cross inside the box or they throw your vote out”, she explained and then went down the list explaining each candidate and the office that they sought. Twelve years later I would cast my first vote for John F, Kennedy in that same precinct polling place. I made sure that the lines of the X crossed inside the box.

In 1964 and again in 1968 I was Precinct Committeeman and Poll Watcher for the Democratic Party. We still used the old fashioned paper ballot. We still challenged votes that did not cross within the box. Check marks did not count. I got in a few arguments with the Republican Election Judges who were vigilant in seeing defects in votes for Democratic candidates but blind to those checkmarks next to Republican names. By 1970 the county had adopted the punch-card ballots tabulated by an IBM card reader. I, and many others opposed the change. I reasoned that using the old hand marked system it took the cooperation of a lot of people to steal an election. With the new system it only took one – the guy who programmed the counting machine.

With the punch-card system and the newer optical scanner technology there was a physical ballot to examine in case of a dispute. Even in the mechanical voting machines in use in Cook County there was a printed record of each individual vote to examine in case of a contest. It was in 1972 when we had our first recount of the punch card ballots in a local election and it was in then that I first encountered “hanging chads”. The newest electronic balloting systems networked to central counting systems via the Internet omit individual records and provide no audit trail to examine to resolve questions of irregularity. In one test use the Diebold system was found to have transmitted a premature count to the company at least an hour before the polls closed. Final tallies reported at the end of the election are said to have matched precisely the premature counts. Touted as the latest in ballot security these systems are anything but secure. In fact they facilitate rather than prevent vote fraud.

In the final analysis the integrity of elections is wholly dependent on the integrity of the people conducting them. The strength of a democratically elected government depends upon the confidence of the people in the honesty of the electoral process. Sacrifice that confidence on the altar of technology and you create a mythology in which Nixon was elected in 1960 and Al Gore is the rightful President of the United States. It all depends on who is counting.