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The
Business of E-Voting and How it Can
Put
the Wrong Candidate in Office
by
Jason Leopold
September
3, 2003
It
seems fitting that a president who was brought into office because of a
scandalous election would enact a law to overhaul the electoral process to make
it easier for people to choose their leaders the second time around.
But
that’s not what the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, signed into law by President
Bush in October 2002, will do. Instead, the law will force most states to
switch from paper balloting to a fully computerized system---one that is
currently rife with programming flaws and is incapable of being audited—that
could call into question the legitimacy of future local and national elections
and put the wrong candidates into office.
The
bill contains $1.515 billion to fund activities related to the Help America Vote
Act, a federal election reform bill that provides money to states for the
improvement of elections; including $15 million to the General Services
Administration to reimburse states that purchased optical scan or electronic
voting equipment prior to the November 2000 election.
Bev
Harris, a Seattle resident who runs a small public relations business, is
credited with uncovering the flaws in electronic voting machines and has
recently written a book on the subject called “Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering
in the 21st Century.”
Harris’
muckraking on electronic voting have been featured on Scoop, an award-winning
Internet news site based in New Zealand, (full disclosure: I am a regular
contributor to Scoop) that is quickly developing a reputation in the United
States for its groundbreaking investigative news stories.
Harris
recently uncovered “some 40,000 files that included user manuals, source code
and executable files for voting machines made by Diebold, a corporation based
in North Canton, Ohio,” according to an Aug. 21 feature story on Harris in the
Seattle Times, and exposed the massive flaws in Diebold’s software that can
easily be manipulated. An in-depth report on Diebold’s electronic voting
machines can be found at www.scoop.co.nz
Diebold's
chief executive, Walden O'Dell, in a fundraiser his company sponsored for
President Bush last week promised the president that his company would
"deliver" the necessary votes needed to keep Bush in the White House
for a second term, prompting Democrats in Congress to call for Diebold to
remove its machines from being used during next year's primary election.
Michelle
Griggy, a Diebold spokeswoman, dismissed any appearance of a
conflict-of-interest saying the company routinely holds fundraisers for other
political causes absent of any bias.
While
much ink has been spilled in the mainstream media on the so-called benefits of
computerized voting (cheaper, faster, more reliable), you would be hard-pressed
to find an equal number of stories highlighting the side effects that comes
from computerized voting.
The
disastrous 2000 presidential election and the subsequent ballot recount in
Florida, in which hanging chads made it nearly impossible to figure out whether
people in the Sunshine State voted for Al Gore or George Bush, led to a
full-scale campaign by lawmakers to outlaw paper balloting in favor of
user-friendly computerized voting machines.
The
problem with the Omnibus bill, according to Rebecca Mercuri, a computer science
professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and one of the most vocal opponents
of paperless balloting, is that it leaves no paper trail, making it ripe for
manipulation.
“Any
programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records
something else, and prints yet another result,” Mercuri told a reporter for
Common Dreams.org. “There is no known
way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system. No
electronic voting system has been certified to even the lowest level of the
U.S. government or international computer security standards..." The Federal
Election Commission provides only voluntary standards, and even those don't
ensure election "integrity," she says.
That’s
exactly what happened in Cleveland on May 7, 2003. Election officials said they
ran into problems with the electronic voting machines when they tried to merge
the numbers from their Lorain and Elyria offices.
The
elections board used two different kinds of ''touch-screen'' voting machines in
two Cleveland counties and the results couldn't be merged with totals from
another county, which came from more familiar punch cards.
''I
don't know exactly what happened ... we're having software people look into
that now,'' said Marilyn Jacobcik, the board of elections executive director.
''But we are assured that all the numbers are accurate.''
One
of the biggest problems, according to one election worker, was that the office
wasn't prepared to compile data from three different computer systems.
John
Blevins, a member of the board of elections, attributed the breakdown to
''growing pains.''
Because
of the Help America Vote Act passed last year, he said, elections boards are
required to install electronic voting machines by the 2004 election.
''We
were basically trying two different computer systems,'' Blevins said, noting
the county used machines provided by Diebold in North Ridgeville and MicroVote
in the Amherst race. ''I realize maybe things move a little slower but in the
end it will be a much smoother operation. We have to do this by November
2004.''
Computerized
voting and the technological problems related to the system had already been
realized before hanging chads became a household phrase. In November 1998, an
election in Hawaii was held using state-of-the-art computers designed by
Electronic Systems & Software, a company with close ties to Republican
lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
One
such lawmaker, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb, was part owner and former chairman and
chief executive of ES&S, a company that made all the equipment that counted
the votes during his last two runs for office, yet he failed to list his ties
to the company on federal disclosure forms.
Seven
of ES&S’ 361 voting machines used in Hawaii on Election Day in November
1998 malfunctioned (five units had lens occlusion, one unit had a defective
cable and one unit had a defective "read head"), which led to
Hawaii’s first ever statewide election review and a first in the history of the
United States. Hundreds of people who used the machines complained mightily to
local election officials that the candidates they picked did not register in
the computerized system.
Mercuri
said in an interview with Common Dreams last year that in order for an
electronic voting system to be foolproof, five components must be present - a
voter, a ballot, a computerized voting machine, a printer, and an optical
scanner - and three basic steps must be taken.
“First,
the voting machine registers a voter's selection both electronically and on a
paper ballot. Second, the machine then displays the paper ballot behind clear
glass or plastic so that the voter can review their selection, but not take the
ballot home by mistake. If the voter's selection doesn't agree with the ballot
or the voter makes a mistake, the voter can call a poll worker to void the
ballot, and then re-vote. And third, the paper ballot is optically scanned
(most likely at the county administration building), providing a second
electronic tally. If anything goes wrong with either the voting machines or the
optical scanner, the paper ballots can be hand-counted as a last resort or as
part of an audit. And voila! We have a fully auditable voting system with
checks and balances, review and redundancy.”
There
are dozens of other horror stories that spawned from the signing of the Omnibus
bill by President Bush and these too involve Florida and a Bush.
The
new touch-screen equipment used during the September 2002 Florida elections
wrongfully credited GOP gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush in one precinct when
votes were cast for the Democratic candidate for governor because of a
"misaligned" touch screen. No one knows how many votes were
misrecorded. Miami-Dade was still licking its wounds over the 2000 presidential
election that helped put George Bush in office. For the primary election, the
county spent $24.5 million for 7,200 voting machines, but many polling places
opened late or did not have enough machines up and running. Many poll workers
had problems collecting votes from the machines, delaying the final results of
the election for a week.
The
November general election was relatively glitch-free, but the county had to
turn the logistics of the election over to the Miami-Dade police department and
dedicate at least three county employees to each polling place.
In
May, a Miami-Dade Inspector General released the results of a seven-month
investigation into the use of the electronic voting machine that were credited
with helping Bush secure a second term in office. The results of the probe are
damning.
For
one, the company that sold the touch-screen voting machines, ES&S, to
Miami-Dade county misled county officials about the “about the equipment and
delivered goods that were ''hardly state-of-the-art technology,'' according to
the Miami Herald, which obtained a copy of the inspector general’s report.
“The
draft report by the county inspector general's office following a seven-month
investigation provides a critical account of the process leading to the $25
million purchase of a voting system that was expected to lead to trouble-free
elections. Instead, the Sept. 10, 2002, election -- a national black eye for
Miami-Dade -- was plagued with problems caused in part by the lengthy start-up
time for the machines,” the Herald reported.
Moreover,
the report found that ES&S told county officials that its electronic voting
machines would provide voters with a system that could run a trilingual ballot,
in English, Spanish and Creole. Although state certification was pending for
the trilingual ballot software, the county only considered the possibility of
having separate English/Spanish and English/Creole machines as a backup plan.
In
its oral sales presentation, ES&S told the county that having a trilingual
system would not require additional data capacity. Yet, the company's own
documentation from 2001 indicated that the type of files that would be required
for such a system would require an additional storage device.
The
report questions why the boot-up time for each machine under the software used
in the primary election was so lengthy, noting that the processor for each
machine is an Intel 386 EX processor, technology that is more than a decade
old.
Testing
by the State of Florida found numerous "anomalies and deficiencies"
in newer versions of voting machine software that would have sped up the
boot-up process. The report also cautions the county not to be "overly
reliant" on representations made by ES&S about what a highly touted
upcoming version of the software will do.
Still,
because Miami-Dade invested more than $25 million into the technology, the
inspector general did not recommend scrapping the electronic voting machines,
but rather work within the limitations of the system and “hope” that it will
pull off a successful general election come 2004.
Linda
Rodriguez-Taseff, president of the South Florida chapter of the American Civil
Liberties Union and a leading advocate of voting reform in Miami-Dade, said the
report was not surprising.
"It's
everything we said it would be," she said. "The time to act is now.
Let's scrap this system and get a new system in place."
Despite
the malfeasance, it’s become difficult for county officials to challenge the
results of tainted elections.
In
city council elections in Palm Beach last March, when a losing candidate
challenged the results, a local judge denied the challenger and his consultant
the opportunity to inspect the machines, citing the rights of the manufacturer,
Sequoia, to protect its trade secrets.
In
February 2003, Daniel Spillane blew the whistle on his former employer,
VoteHere, a privately held electronic voting machine company in Washington,
D.C., run by a former senior military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and
whose board includes former CIA Director Robert Gates, claiming the company’s
patented digital balloting software contained severe programming errors, which
could lead to, among other disasters, the massive deletion of ballots.
Spillane,
who was fired from VoteHere in 2001, alleged in a wrongful termination lawsuit
against his former employer, that VoteHere’s undertook measures to thwart an
independent review of its software. He said he voiced his concerns with company
executives and that he was fired hours before VoteHere was scheduled to meet
with representatives from the Independent Test Authority, an auditing group
that scrutinizes electronic voting equipment and software, and the U.S. General
Accounting Office.
Spillane
is one of a half-dozen experts to question the wisdom behind the Omnibus bill
and warns that the law’s true goal is to facilitate the sale of electronic
voting machines.
He
and Mercuri wrote in November about Sequoia Voting Systems, an outfit seeking
to install electronic voting booths in Santa Clara County, California. Most of
Sequoia's machines provide nothing in the way of receipts or physical audit
trails, which would facilitate a recount, ripening the prospects for electronic
election fraud. She and other experts have also been barred from examining
Sequoia's product, because it is sold under restrictive trade-secret
agreements.
Spillane,
Mercuri, and 453 other technologists have endorsed a "Resolution on
Electronic Voting" which warns of the dangers inherent in electronic
voting systems that keep only digital records of ballots cast. The resolution
states that programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering
are serious risks which call for a voter-verifiable audit trail -- a permanent,
physical, tamper-resistant record of each vote which can be checked by the
voter before casting their ballot, and retained afterward.
Despite
the resolution, Santa Clara County made its final decision on Tuesday to spend
$20 million on 5,000 touch-screen voting booths made by Sequoia, most of which
will not include a printed audit trail. Sequoia has a history of involvement
with government corruption, including the pay-off of Louisiana election
official Jerry Fowler.
The
San Francisco Chronicle is one of only a handful of news organizations that
called into question the veracity of electronic voting when it became clear
that the new technology could lead to voter fraud in Santa Clara County.
David
Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University and leader of an
anti-electronic voting campaign told the Chronicle that the electronic voting
machines Santa Clara planned to purchase “pose an unacceptable risk that errors
or deliberate election-rigging will go undetected, since they do not provide a
way for the voters to verify independently that the machine correctly records
and counts the votes they have cast.”
Dill,
in consultation with other experts and his Stanford colleagues, had voiced
their concern via a petition urging that voting machines not be purchased or
used unless they provide a voter-verifiable audit trail, according to the
Chronicle.
When
such machines are already in use, the petition stated, they should be replaced
or modified to provide such a record. And Dill had collected the signatures of
hundreds of technologists, including many of the best-known names in computer
science, security and election technology.
The
opposition movement caught the eye of Kevin Shelley, California's new secretary
of state. In January 2003, Shelley appointed a task force to advise him and the
board charged with certifying voting equipment in the state on security and
audit ability issues raised by touch-screen voting.
Peter
Coyote, who narrated a documentary film last year on the disasters surrounding
the 2000 presidential election, has launched a grassroots letter writing
campaign urging federal lawmakers to take a second look at how the Help America
Vote Act can put the wrong candidates in office.
In
his letter to California’s Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, Coyote writes:
“Last year, I narrated a film called "Unprecedented" by American
journalist Greg Palast.
This
film documents the illegal expunging of 54,000 black and overwhelmingly Democratic
voters from the Florida rolls just before the presidential election. We
interviewed the computer company that did the work, filmed their explanations
of the instructions they received and their admissions that they knew that
their instructions would produce massive error. That figure has now been
revised to 91,000. Jeb Bush was sued, and was supposed to have returned these
voters to the rolls, and did not, which explains his last re-election. The
Republicans have something far worse in mind for the next presidential election
and Democrats need to be prepared.”
”Unless
the issue of voter fraud is elevated to an issue of national importance, not
only is it highly probable that Democrats will lose again and again, but
eventually voters will "sense" even if they cannot prove, that
elections are rigged, and the current 50% of those boycotting elections will
swell to the majority. Privatization of the vote is tantamount to turning over
the control of democracy to the corporate sector. I urge you to use your
considerable powers and influence to address this issue.”
Jason Leopold, formerly the bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires, is a
freelance journalist based in California. He is currently finishing a book on
the California energy crisis. He can be contacted at jasonleopold@hotmail.com.
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