Now Your Vote Is The Property
of a
Private Corporation
by
Thom Hartmann
Dissident Voice
March 6, 2003
"The right of voting for representatives is the
primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right
is to reduce a man to slavery...."
-- Thomas Paine
Santa
Clara County, of all jurisdictions in America, should have known better. They
could have started by looking at Florida.
Jeb Bush stole the vote in
Florida in 2000 by kicking thousands of legitimately registered black voters
off the voting rolls because they had similar names to Texas felons, a feat
well documented by Greg Palast and the mainstream British press. In a brilliant
bit of misdirection, Bush portrayed the problem as one of incompetent elderly
voters, dumb minority voters, and a problem with "chads" - unreliable
voting technology.
Bush's answer was to install
touch-screen voting machines across Florida in time for the 2002 election. (In
this, he was following a similar course as Georgia, Texas, and 30 other key
states, in large part because of $3.9 billion in federal funds offered by the
"Help America Vote Act" passed just after the 2000 election to
encourage states to replace government-run paper-trail vote systems with
no-paper-trail computerized systems from private corporate vendors.)
But in the November 2002
election, when some Florida voters pressed the touch-screen "button"
for Bush's Democratic opponent, votes were instead recorded for Bush.
"Misaligned" touch-screen voting machines were blamed for the
computer-driven vote-theft, and when a losing candidate in Palm Beach sued to
inspect the software of Florida's computerized voting machines, a local judge
denied the petition, citing the privacy rights of the corporation that wrote
the programs.
This was followed by January
2003 revelations that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel was the former head
(and a current stockholder) of the private voting machine company that
tabulated the vote in Nebraska - where he ran for office and won - and that he
had neglected to tell Senate ethics investigators about it.
And in February of 2003, Bev
Harris of www.blackboxvoting.com
noticed a wide-open FTP site. Harris had just done a Google search on the company
that tabulated most of the vote in Georgia in the 2002 election. (That was the
upset election that saw popular war-hero Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in
Vietnam, defeated by a poll-trailing draft dodger who campaigned by questioning
Cleland's patriotism.) Walking into the unsecured FTP website, she says she
found a software patch that was apparently applied statewide to Georgia's
voting machines just days before the election, and a folder titled
"rob-georgia."
And corporate control of
America's vote has reached beyond the borders of this nation. The last week of
February, New York's "Newsday" reported in a story by staff writer
Mark Harrington that: "Election.com, a struggling Garden City start-up
scheduled to provide online absentee ballots for U.S. military personnel in the
2004 federal election, has quietly sold controlling power to an investment
group with ties to unnamed Saudi nationals, according to company
correspondence."
Fast-forward a few days to
the first week of March, 2003.
Dan Spillane, a former
software engineer for a voting machine company that includes a former CIA
Director and Dick Cheney's former assistant on its board of directors, has sued
his employer for firing him when he pointed out holes in their system that he
claims could lead to vote-rigging. Although there is a certification process
for ensuring the honesty of votes tabulated by computerized, touch-screen
voting machines, according to Spillane the system works "very much like
Arthur Andersen in the Enron case." (Anderson
Consulting has renamed itself, added Microsoft's CEO to its board, and gone
into the business of helping corporations get contracts to perform previously-government-run
services.)
Spillane filed his lawsuit
the same week that Santa Clara County, California decided to hand their
electoral process over to computerized electronic voting machines programmed by
a private corporation. The machines generate no paper trail that can be
audited, and when voting machine companies have been challenged to produce
audits of their vote or to disclose details of their software, they cite the
privacy rights that come from corporations being considered "persons"
in the United States.
Of all localities in
America, Santa Clara County should have been the wariest. This is the county,
after all, that sued the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886 over non-payment of
taxes and, in losing the lawsuit, paved the way for the corporate takeover of
the United States of America.
When the railroad suggested
to the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment, which freed the slaves by
guaranteeing all persons equal protection under the law regardless of race, had
also freed corporations because they should be considered "persons"
just like humans, the attorney for Santa Clara County, Delphin M. Delmas,
fought back ferociously.
"The shield behind
which [the Southern Pacific Railroad] attacks the Constitution and laws of
California is the Fourteenth Amendment," said Delmas before the Supreme
Court. "It argues that the Amendment guarantees to every person within the
jurisdiction of the State the equal protection of the laws; that a corporation
is a person; that, therefore, it must receive the same protection as that
accorded to all other persons in like circumstances."
The entire idea was beyond
the pale, Delmas said. "The whole history of the Fourteenth
Amendment," he told the Court, "demonstrates beyond dispute that its
whole scope and object was to establish equality between men - an attainable
result - and not to establish equality between natural and artificial beings -
an impossible result."
The purpose of the
Fourteenth Amendment, passed just after the Civil War, was clear, Delmas said.
"Its mission was to raise the humble, the down-trodden, and the oppressed
to the level of the most exalted upon the broad plane of humanity - to make man
the equal of man; but not to make the creature of the State - the bodiless,
soulless, and mystic creature called a corporation - the equal of the creature
of God."
He summarized his pleadings
before the Supreme Court by saying, "Therefore, I venture to repeat that
the Fourteenth Amendment does not command equality between human beings and corporations;
that the state need not subject corporations to the same laws which govern
natural persons; that it may, without infringing the rule of equality, confer
upon corporations rights, privileges, and immunities which are not enjoyed by
natural persons; that it may, for the same reasons, impose burdens upon a
corporation, in the shape of taxation or otherwise, which are not imposed upon
natural persons."
Delmas had every reason to
assume the Court would agree with him - it already had in several similar
cases. In an 1873 decision, Justice Samuel F. Miller wrote in the majority
opinion that the Fourteenth Amendment's "one pervading purpose was the
freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom,
and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of
those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him."
And, in fact, the Court
chose to stay with its previous precedent. It ruled on the tax aspects of the
case, but explicitly avoided any decision on whether or not corporations were
persons. "There will be no occasion to consider the grave questions of
constitutional law" raised by the railroad, the Court ruled in its
majority opinion. The case was about property taxes and not personhood, and,
"As the judgment can be sustained upon this ground, it is not necessary to
consider any other questions raised by the pleadings."
But just as computerized
voting machines can be reprogrammed, so too, apparently, could a U.S. Supreme
Court decision. The Court's reporter - a former railroad president - took it
upon himself to grant corporations personhood in the commentary (headnote) he
wrote on the case, even though it explicitly contradicted the Justices' ruling
itself. (And to this day other forms of association, like unions,
unincorporated small businesses, and even governments do not have personhood
rights.)
But corporations have
claimed the First Amendment right of persons to free speech and struck down
thousands of state and federal laws against corporations giving money to
politicians or influencing elections; they've claimed Fourteenth Amendment
rights against discrimination to prevent communities from
"discriminating" against huge out-of-town retailers or corporate
criminals; and have claimed Fourth Amendment rights of privacy that will
prevent voters or public officials from examining the software that runs their
computerized voting machines.
Now corporations will be
telling the citizens of Santa Clara County how they voted. And those same
corporations will use the shield of corporate personhood - once valiantly
disputed before the Supreme Court by the County's attorney - to withhold from
the County's voters the right to "look behind the curtain" at the
corporate-owned software and computerized processes that tabulate their vote.
How sadly ironic.
Thom Hartmann is the author of Unequal Protection:
The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights: www.unequalprotection.com and www.thomhartmann.com. This article is
copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print,
email, or web media so long as this credit is attached.