Coastal
Post Online
January,
2004
Random Notes On Voting Machine Scandals
By Eric A. Smith
snowdog@juno.ocn.ne.jp
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland, December 12th: An
internal memo has just surfaced suggesting e-vote manufacturer Diebold planned
to overcharge the state of Maryland and make voter printouts
"prohibitively expensive".
An employee named "Ken" wrote the Jan. 3 letter suggesting the
company charge Maryland "out the yin" if legislators insisted on
printouts.
Referring to a
University of Maryland study critical of the company's machines, he added:
"[The State of Maryland] already bought the system. At this point they are
just closing the barn door. Let's just hope that as a company we are smart
enough to charge out the yin if they try to change the rules now and legislate
voter receipts."
He goes
on to say "...any after-sale changes should be prohibitively
expensive."
Delegate Karen
S. Montgomery dropped the bombshell on Thursday amid negotiations with Diebold
over its touchscreen voting machines.
Montgomery, who has written a bill mandating voter-verifiable ballots,
described pressure to drop the issue, saying "scurrilous remarks"
were being leveled against proponents of the measure. She said she believes the
cost is being driven up to prevent anyone from insisting on verifiable
printouts.
Steven T. Dennis of
Gazette.net broke the story yesterday; he said spokesman David Bear deflected
criticism by claiming the comments were "the internal discussion of one
individual and [do] not reflect the sentiments or the position of the company."
Diebold, whose primary business has until
recently been ATMs and ticket-vending machines (all of which produce paper
printouts), made headlines last month when it dropped copyright-infringement
suits against Swarthmore students who had published thousands of its internal
memos on the Internet.
Prominent among the leaked memos is a missive to Global Election Systems
(now Diebold)-baldly stating that 16,000 Gore votes were
"disappeared" during the 2000 election. Author Lana Hires frantically
asks how she should explain the problem to an auditor:
"I need some answers! Our department
is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an
explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it
was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information
to give the auditor instead of standing here 'looking dumb'."
Additional memos are equally candid and
suggestive:
"For a
demonstration I suggest you fake it. Program them both so they look the same,
and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is what we did in the last
AT/AV demo.
"Right now you
can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes
the audit log. This isn't anything new."
"Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get
things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss
[sic] managed."
"Johnson County, KS will be doing Central Count for their mail in
ballots. They will also be processing these ballots in advance of the closing
of polls on election day. They would like to log into the Audit Log an entry
for Previewing any Election Total Reports. They need this, to prove to the
media, as well as, any candidates & lawyers, that they did not view or
print any Election Results before the Polls closed. However, if there is a way
that we can disable the reporting functionality, that would be even
better."
Initially brought to light by activist Bev
Harris, these and other alarming disclosures have added weight to the arguments
of computer security experts and legislators nationwide, who say that Diebold's
machines (as well as those of rivals ES&S and Sequoia) pose a grave risk to
America's elections.
Harris
received over 7,000 of the Diebold memos from an undisclosed source in early
September. For the past three years, she has been arguing for greater security
and accountability in electronic voting, last year weathering a similar
unsuccessful gag lawsuit from e-vote firm ES&S.
A month after Harris received the memos she
went public with them; Diebold immediately launched a gag lawsuit, and Harris's
ISP shut down her activist site. A group of Swarthmore students and other
activists responded by spreading the memos across the Internet.
When
Diebold threatened to sue under the auspices of the DMCA, litigators from the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU stepped in to defend activists.
Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich added significant support by hosting the
memos on his own website. Last week, Diebold withdrew its lawsuits.
With a new ISP, Harris has resumed her
activism, and her book "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st
Century," can currently be downloaded for free from the site
blackboxvoting.org.
Meanwhile,
on Capital Hill, Congressman Rush Holt has also raised the issue of security,
sponsoring the "Voter Confidence
and Increased Accountability Act of 2003" (H.R. 2239), which calls for
paper ballots, surprise recounts and auditable software in voting machines.
But while Holt's bill adds a significant
level of transparency to the process, Harris says it doesn't go far enough. In
a recent Buzzflash interview, she said:
"The problem area, and it is a whopper, is that this bill doesn't
attack the crux of the issue, which is proper auditing-and that is something
that is needed for any computerized system, including optical scan machines.
"The very first thing we
need to do is get solid input from auditors who are experienced in fraud
detection.
"While we are
designing amendments to the bill, we also must get some people with a solid
grasp of history, because we need a voting system that is in keeping with the
vision of our founding fathers-and this is a public policy issue, not a
computer issue. The most important thing that we keep forgetting is that the
founders, especially Thomas Jefferson, felt that it was critical-not
"important," but CRITICAL to democracy, to keep the vote directly in
the hands of the people themselves. Any solution which requires us to trust a
handful of experts will, sooner or later, result in the demise of our
democracy.
"That means we
need to retain (and enforce) policies to tally the votes at the polls, in front
of observers. In some countries, they let as many regular citizens as can fit
in the room in to watch the physical counting. It is this neighborhood
tallying, and the open and public nature of it, that is the embodiment of
democracy."
In July, Harris
demonstrated just how insecure a Diebold machine could be, showing in a
step-by-step expose how to reverse a federal election. New Zealand's Scoop
Media posted the illustrated account online.
Author Faun Otter and others have also raised the issue of
impartiality on the part of Diebold's board, which has contributed hundreds of
thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns. National headlines were made when
CEO Michael O'Dell, who recently hosted a $600,000 fundraiser for Vice
President Dick Cheney, announced in a Republican fundraising letter that he was
"committed to delivering Ohio's votes to the President".
But controversy doesn't end with Diebold
alone. Rival voting machine company ES&S also came under scrutiny when it
surfaced that it was run by Chuck Hagel until two weeks before his own
election. Senator Hagel won by the biggest landslide in Nebraskan history; a
victory the press characterized as a "stunning upset". His company,
ES&S, counted 83% of the votes.
Hagel left out details of his ES&S involvement in his SEC filings,
and, when the discrepancy surfaced, two days after a closed-door meeting with
Hagel SEC legal counsel Victor Baird resigned and the matter was dropped.
And Hagel, who prior to his stewardship of
ES&S was head of the Private Sector Council for George H.W. Bush, has
bigger plans: Harris says the domain name "Bush-Hagel2004.com" was
purchased last year but subsequently released and the Senator has already
bought the rights to "hagel2008.com" and
"ChuckHagel2008.com".
Meanwhile Hagel campaign manager Michael McCarthy owns over 30% of
ES&S's parent company, and even the Senator hasn't fully divested himself
of ownership -- he still has a $5 million stake in ES&S parent company the
McCarthy Group.
Harris says
there are firms offering comparatively secure systems -- competitors Avante,
Accupol and Vogue, for example -- but some activists say any machine offers an
opportunity for vote tampering. They're calling for a return to simple ballots,
though such a solution is unlikely -- Bush's Help America Vote Act mandates a
nationwide migration to electronic voting by 2006.
Secretary of state Kevin Shelley's recent
declaration that all California voting machines must provide printouts may
prompt the rest of the country to follow the west's lead. But it may end up
being a matter of too little, too late, as Diebold, ES&S and Sequioa
systems are already in place in 37 states.
Harris, for one, is calling for a legal injunction to halt the
use of any insecure systems prior to the 2004 primaries. If her instincts are
right, a fierce battle may loom on the horizon -- a battle for the very heart
and soul of America's democracy.