How E-Voting Threatens Democracy
Wired News

In January 2003, voting activist Bev Harris was holed up in the basement of her three-story house in Renton, Washington, searching the Internet for an electronic voting machine manual, when she made a startling discovery.

Clicking on a link for a file transfer protocol site belonging to voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems, Harris found about 40,000 unprotected computer files. They included source code for Diebold's AccuVote touch-screen voting machine, program files for its Global Election Management System tabulation software, a Texas voter-registration list with voters' names and addresses, and what appeared to be live vote data from 57 precincts in a 2002 California primary election.

"There was a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been there," Harris said.

The California file was time-stamped 3:31 p.m. on Election Day, indicating that Diebold might have obtained the data during voting. But polling precincts aren't supposed to release votes until after polls close at 8 p.m. So Harris began to wonder if it were possible for the company to extract votes during an election and change them without anyone knowing.

Harris discovered that she could enter the vote database using Microsoft Access -- a standard program often bundled with Microsoft Office -- and change votes without leaving a trace. Diebold hadn't password-protected the file or secured the audit log, so anyone with access to the tabulation program during an election -- Diebold employees, election staff or even hackers if the county server were connected to a phone line -- could change votes and alter the log to erase the evidence.

"It was getting scarier and scarier," Harris said. "I was thinking we have an immense problem here that's much bigger than me."

Although some Orange County voters cast the wrong electronic ballots in the March 2 primary, potentially altering the outcome of one race for a Democratic Party post, Registrar Steve Rodermund said he will certify the results of the election today.

The report said 33 voters out of 16,655 in the 69th Assembly District received the wrong ballots and were unable to vote for six open seats on the Democratic Central Committee.

The candidate who finished seventh in that contest, Art Hoffman, trailed sixth-place candidate Jim Pantone in the final count by 13 votes. However, 99.7% of Orange County ballots were cast properly in the primary, Rodermund will tell supervisors today before certifying the election results to the secretary of state.

"With the help of our poll workers, these issues will be nonissues in November," he said in a report to be made at today's board meeting.

Translation: We will be able to cover up these errors in the future so no one will be able to criticize us.

But Rodermund's report sidestepped a critical issue from Orange County's debut of electronic voting, analysts said. Although past election controversies focused on counting ballots, the problems experienced at some Orange County polling places March 2 centered on whether proper ballots were cast by eligible voters.

"At least in Florida, you had a physical object to look at, whereas when the e-voting system malfunctions, it's much harder to tell exactly what happened," said John J. Pitney, government professor at Claremont McKenna College.

Harder? Try impossible!

Two state senators already have called for Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to temporarily suspend electronic voting in the state until problems encountered March 2 in Orange and other counties are reviewed.

Sen. Don Perata (D-Oakland), who heads the Senate Elections Committee, and Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine) said they were concerned that problems with electronic voting could multiply for the November general election, when turnout is expected to exceed the third of registered voters who cast ballots in the primary.

Oh, the problems will get worse, much worse.

Although most counties reported no problems with the new systems, some of the most populous — Orange, Alameda and San Diego counties — experienced problems that sullied election day and sent ripples of outrage throughout the state.

The overall outcome of the state's first attempt at electronic voting did more to erode voters' confidence in election results with the new voting systems, Pitney said — an irony considering the systems were mandated after the debacle of the 2000 presidential election in Florida to restore voters' confidence.

The Election Center, which trains election workers and advises Congress and government agencies on election process issues, has taken donations from manufacturers of electronic voting machines even as it has issued strong statements supporting the security of the machines.

Its executive director, R. Doug Lewis, confirmed this week that the center had taken donations from makers of electronic voting machines - Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. of Oakland, Calif., and Electronic Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb. In addition, donations came from "probably Diebold" Inc. of North Canton, Ohio, Lewis said.

So, an agency which claims to be non-partisan, takes money from the people and then turns around and recommends the technology sold by those same people?

The Sequoia donations came to light on the organization's latest 990 IRS filing, a copy of which was reviewed by The Inquirer. It inadvertently revealed donations of $10,000 per year from 1997 through 2000. The IRS usually removes such names before documents are made public.

That would mean that other donations need to be disclosed. When will the amounts and donors be revealed? (I won't hold my breath on this one).

Lewis issued a report last year saying that "well-intentioned people, some of them even highly educated and respected, scare voters and public officials with claims that the voting equipment and/or its software can be manipulated to change the outcome of elections."

The report went on to say: "Do not be misled into believing that elections are reliant upon technology which can be manipulated... . It may be possible to do many things, but like time travel (which is theoretically possible), it is highly unlikely at this time."

A voting machine coming up with incorrect results as because buggy software is not like "time travel", it is like baking a cake, happens all the time. On this very site we have documented errors every election cycle.

Lewis said he did not think accepting donations from the manufacturers presented any conflict of interest or breach of ethics.

His kind never do.

"I never approved a voting system anywhere in America," Lewis said. "The systems were approved by independent testing laboratories."

As Floridians went to the polls last Tuesday, Glenda Hood, Katherine Harris's successor as secretary of state, assured the nation that Florida's voting system would not break down this year the way it did in 2000. Florida now has "the very best" technology available, she declared on CNN. "And I do feel that it's a great disservice to create the feeling that there's a problem when there is not." Hours later, results in Bay County showed that with more than 60 percent of precincts reporting, Richard Gephardt, who long before had pulled out of the presidential race, was beating John Kerry by two to one. "I'm devastated," the county's top election official said, promising a recount of his county's 19,000 votes.

Florida's official line is that its machines are so carefully tested, nothing can go wrong. But things already have gone wrong. In a January election in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, the victory margin was 12 votes, but the machines recorded more than 130 blank ballots. It is simply not believable that 130 people showed up to cast a nonvote, in an election with only one race on the ballot. The runner-up wanted a recount, but since the machines do not produce a paper record, there was nothing to recount.

In 2002, in the primary race for governor between Janet Reno and Bill McBride, electronic voting problems were so widespread they cast doubt on the outcome. Many Miami-Dade County votes were not counted on election night because machines were shut down improperly. One precinct with over 1,000 eligible voters recorded no votes, despite a 33 percent turnout statewide. Election workers spent days hunting for lost votes, while Floridians waited, in an uncomfortable replay of 2000, to see whether Mr. McBride's victory margin, which had dwindled to less than 10,000, would hold up.

This past Tuesday, even though turnout was minimal, there were problems. Voters were wrongly given computer cards that let them vote only on local issues, not in the presidential primary. Machines did not work. And there were, no doubt, other mishaps that did not come to light because of the stunning lack of transparency around voting in the state. When a Times editorial writer dropped in on one Palm Beach precinct where there were reports of malfunctioning machines, county officials called the police to remove him.

The machines WORK and if you try to say differently, we will have you arrested.

Last week, Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, filed a federal lawsuit to require paper trails. He relies on the Supreme Court's holding in Bush v. Gore that equal protection requires states to use comparable recount methods from county to county. Florida law currently requires a hand recount in close races. That is possible in most counties, but the 15 that use electronic voting machines do not produce paper records that can be recounted. Under the logic of Bush v. Gore, Representative Wexler is right.

This is a plea to the voting public: Do not let corporations and their passion for privatization trash our voting process. The counting of our votes should never be in the hands of private industry, especially the industry that makes and sells voting machines.

That's what's happening now, and it must be changed before the Nov. 2 election. At present, some people don't have a paper trail or proof of how they voted or any means of verification. That's unacceptable.

For private corporations to count the votes and tell us who won and who lost is unacceptable, unconscionable and blatantly stupid.

A book dealing with this issue -- Black Box Voting/Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, by Bev Harris with David Allen -- can be read on your computer at the Web site blackboxvoting.org.

Read Chapter 2. It will give you some idea of how widespread this fraud is and, no doubt, is just a preview of what's to come in the 2004 election.

H. Manning, Fort Worth

In response to Max McMillon's March 2 letter, "Legally elected":

The issue isn't so much that George W. Bush "won" the 2000 election despite losing in the popular vote by half a million. The real problem is that there was evidence of rampant fraud during that election, and the next one needs to be under closer scrutiny to prevent a reoccurrence.

A town in Indiana, for example, recorded 144,000 votes but had only 19,000 registered voters. There was evidence of computer hacking in some areas, double counting of votes in South Dakota and repeated computer crashes in Virginia. The list goes on.

The CEO of the Diebold Corp. stated in Ohio that his job was to deliver the vote to Bush. Diebold made the voting machines, and one would think that there might be a problem when partisan vendors can count the votes.

I think we should all vote via absentee ballot this year and keep a copy of the ballot.

I can live with the electoral vote taking precedence over the popular vote, but outright hijacking of elections should never be tolerated in a country renowned for its supposedly free and fair elections.

Edward C. Wyman, Fort Worth

McMillon tried to justify Bush's occupation of the White House by comparing the results of the 2000 election to the results of the 1992 and 1996 elections. He wrote that in both of those elections, Bill Clinton got fewer votes than his opponents.

What he didn't say is that Clinton got more votes than any other candidate in those elections -- what's known as a plurality.

In contrast, Bush didn't receive a plurality of votes in 2000. He lost the popular vote, getting fewer votes than Al Gore.

Bush won the electoral vote because of the legally and constitutionally questionable intervention of his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and five partisan Supreme Court justices.

To defend Bush's 2000 "victory" by comparing it to Clinton's real victories in 1992 and 1996 is, to put it bluntly, laughable.

If the people in a representative government don't have faith in the accuracy of their elections, it's only a matter of time until the government collapses. Fair elections are the lifeblood of democracy.

If there are reasonable doubts about the accuracy of computerized voting machines -- and I believe there are reasonable doubts about them -- we should do whatever it takes to dispel those doubts.

We can do this by simply mandating that computerized voting machines produce old-fashioned paper ballots that would be available in case of questions about the election or if a recount becomes necessary.

The state Senate's elections leaders are expected to call today on Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to suspend use of touchscreen voting machines for November.

Despite widespread acceptance of touchscreen voting in the March 2 primary, thousands of voters in three of the state's largest counties re- ceived the wrong ballot or were turned away from the polls by voting-system failures.

Senate Majority Leader Don Perata, D-Oakland, and Sen. Ross Johnson, R-Irvine, the chairman and vice chairman of the Elections and Reapportionment Committee, say the 2004 election is too important to rely on faulty e-voting machines in November.

If Shelley declines their request to decertify touchscreen machines statewide, the senators say they will sponsor legislation denying use of the machines in California.

Hundreds of precincts in Alameda and San Diego counties opened late on the morning of the March 2 primary as poll workers struggled to boot up devices--called voter-card encoders -- that were essential for calling up electronic ballots on the touchscreens.

Diebold Election Systems failed to submit its encoders for testing until too late for the primary. Ciber Inc., a Huntsville, Ala. -- based lab, performed a single, limited test of the encoder's most basic function -- producing the correct ballot code for a voter's party and precinct -- but the devices never underwent broader testing for durability and reliability.

Without the encoders, no electronic ballots could be summoned from the touchscreens and no electronic votes could be cast. That was the case at 20 percent of Alameda County precincts and, according to a new report revealing larger problems in San Diego County, 40 percent of precincts there.

Poll workers booted up the encoders on election day and were confronted by a Windows screen, not the login screen that they were trained to expect. Checklists supplied by the counties and Diebold mentioned nothing about it.

Diebold "has made a preliminary determination that the problem experienced with the (encoder) devices was caused by an unexpected discharge of the internal battery," according to Wednesday's report by San Diego County.

I BECAME EMBROILED in the national debate about electronic voting security when I co-authored a report exposing serious security flaws in Diebold Inc.'s AccuVote-TS machines.

The day before we released our report in July, Maryland officials announced that they were buying $55.6 million worth of these machines. Rather than asking me to work with them, which I offered to do several times, state officials immediately targeted me with criticism and discounted my findings. They continue to do so despite three subsequent studies, two of them paid for by the state, which confirmed our initial findings.

The main problem with electronic voting machines that do not provide voter-verifiable paper ballots is that they are entirely controlled by software.

I worked as an election judge during the March 2 primary in Baltimore County. It was the best thing I could have done to learn about election security. While some of my previous security concerns appeared less threatening given the procedures we followed, others seemed worse.

My July report suggested that a voter could create a bogus voter access card, or smart card, in a garage and cast multiple votes. The procedures in place at the polling site most likely would catch this. We counted all of the voter authorization cards every hour and compared them with the number of votes counted by the machine. We also counted the totals on the machines hourly and compared them with the totals in the registration roster that we used to check in the voters.

If any voter managed to vote multiple times, it would be detected within an hour. I have no idea what we would do in that situation, but we'd have a serious problem on our hands. But at least we would know it.

I was amazed at the number of counts and pieces of paper that we shuffled throughout the day in what was billed as a paperless electronic election.

But the way votes are tallied at the poll site and sent electronically to the central tallying location for all the precincts is much more vulnerable than I previously thought.

Each of the voting machines at the precinct contains a memory card on which votes are tallied.

When the polls close, all of the cards are removed and loaded, one at a time, onto one of the machines. This machine is then connected to a modem, and the vote tallies are transmitted to a central server at the Board of Elections.

My research team observed that the encryption of the modem connection was carried out incorrectly in the Diebold machines so that anyone able to tap the phone lines would be able to tamper with the tally and change votes. In my precinct, the phone line didn't work; the memory cards were taken to the Board of Elections office by the chief judges.

Software is highly complex. I have observed that large software packages are so complex that there is no way to successfully examine a program for malicious behavior. So if voting machine vendors wanted, they could control the outcome of the election with no one ever knowing that the results had been programmed into the voting machines.

Further, there are well-funded foreign powers that would not hesitate to bribe or threaten a programmer to rig the machines so that the outcome of the election went a certain way.

After my experience as a judge, I still believe that the Diebold machines, and ones like them from other vendors, represent a major threat to our democracy. We have put our trust in the outcome of our elections into the hands of a few companies (Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, Sequoia Voting Systems, which is based in California, and Election Systems and Software in Omaha, Neb.).

They are in a position to control the outcomes of our elections, and there's no way anyone can know if they, or someone working for them, did something underhanded. And meaningful recounts are impossible with these machines.

Voter-verifiable paper ballots could counteract these problems.

We have great people working in the trenches and on the front lines on election days. They are ordinary people, mostly elderly, who believe in our country and our democracy and work like crazy for 16 hours, starting at 6 a.m., to try to keep the mechanics of our elections running smoothly. It's a shame that the e-voting tidal wave has a near-hypnotic effect on these judges and almost all voters.

I am much better equipped after having been a judge to argue against e-voting machines. But I also greatly appreciate how hard it's going to be to fight them because of how much voters and election officials love them.

My biggest fear is that Super Tuesday on March 2 will be viewed as a big success. But the more electronic voting is viewed as successful, the more it will be adopted and the greater will be the risk when someone decides to exploit the weaknesses of these systems.

1) Diebold has hired a crisis control firm called PSI -- Public Strategies Inc., I think, something like that

2) Diebold has discussed a budget of as much as a million bucks for eight weeks, for legal work alone

3) Diebold is also looking at its options in case of criminal prosecution for its violations of the law.

Election officials in Johnson County are now demanding answers from a voting machine company at the heart of a recent I-Team investigation.

I-Team 8 has been asking "Will Your Vote Count?" Now with the primary just two months away, we’ve uncovered a new wrinkle as a respected election worker is abruptly dismissed.

Doug Orange had his contract with Election Systems and Software terminated last week. As the ES&S; Project manager, Orange helped the county set up new touch-screen voting systems. County clerk Jill Jackson was very happy with his work.

So why was Orange fired? He says the company claimed insubordination, but he says he was just doing the right thing. “I was asked by Wil Wesley, as my immediate supervisor, to implement a procedure in Johnson County that I personally felt was attacking the integrity of the future election and the security of the future elections in Johnson County. Not to mention that I felt those procedures were illegal,” said Orange.

Should I ask where the local DA is? I think a criminal investigation is called for.

Bound by a non-disclosure statement, Orange won't elaborate further. But county election officials already had concerns about unapproved and illegal ES&S; software inadvertently used in the last election.