On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.
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The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire.
About a third of the votes, 36 million, will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless, direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote directly on a touch-screen. Unlike receipted transactions at the neighborhood ATM, however, you get no paper record of your vote. Since, as a government expert says, “the ballot is embedded in the voting equipment,” there is no voter-marked paper ballot to be counted or recounted. Voting on the DRE, you never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one can tell what a computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election official “can’t watch the bits inside,” says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International and a world authority on computer-based risks.
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The integrity of the vote-counting inside DREs depends on audit logs and reports they print out, but as Neumann says, these are “not real audit trails” because they are themselves riggable. The DREs randomly store three to seven complete sets of alleged duplicates of each voter’s ballot, and sets of these images can be printed out after the election and manually counted. The companies claim that satisfies the requirement in the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that “a manual audit capacity” must be available. But as informed computer scientists unanimously agree, if the first set of ballot images is corrupted, they all are. I asked Robert Boram, the chief engineer who invented a DRE sold by the RF Shoup voting-systems company, if he could rig his DRE’s three sets of ballot images. “Give me a month,” he replied.
The United States therefore faces the likelihood that about three out of ten of the votes in the national election this November will be unverifiable, unauditable and unrecountable. The private election companies and local and state election officials, when required to carry out recounts of elections conducted inside the DREs, will order the computers to spit out second printouts of the vote totals and the computers’ wholly electronic, fakable “audit trail.” The companies and most of the election officials will then tell the voters that the second printouts are “recounts” that prove the vote-counting was “100 percent accurate,” even though a second printout is not a recount.
HAVA was supposed to solve election problems revealed in 2000; instead, it has made the situation worse. Under the act the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), appointed by President Bush, is supposed to set standards for the vote-counting process, but four months before the election the new agency had only seven full-time staff members. On June 17 the EAC sent $861 million to twenty-five states, mainly to buy computerized machines for which no new technical standards have been set. Its just-appointed fifteen-member technical standards committee does not include more than one leading critic of computerized vote-counting.
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In the US Senate seven Democrats and the one Independent are co-sponsoring a bill by Senators Bob Graham and Hillary Clinton to require paper trails on DREs by November, with a loophole for jurisdictions whose officials deem it to be technologically impossible. . . .
New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt introduced a House bill more than a year ago requiring a paper trail on DREs. It has 149 co-sponsors, including a few prominent Republicans. Holt says, “The verification has to be something that the voter herself or himself has to do”; without that, “we will never have a truly secure election.” Holt’s bill has opened up a partisan divide in the House. The chairman of the committee to which his bill is assigned, Ohio Republican Bob Ney, informed Holt that he is against the bill and would not allow a hearing on it. A few days later Graham and Holt wrote their fellow members of Congress that “without an independent, voter-verified paper trail, we will be able only to guess whether votes are accurately counted.” Last month Ney relented and scheduled two hearings. Holt plans to offer his bill as an amendment to the Treasury appropriation after Congress returns from its August recess. Graham is still mulling his strategy.
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In 2000 five out of six Georgians cast a paper ballot that could be recounted on ES&S systems. In January 2001, in a speech to the Democratic-controlled legislature, Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox, a Democrat who is expected to run for governor in 2006, declared that considering all the recent problems down in Florida, Georgia should adopt one “uniform electronic voting system by November 2004.” Upon Cox’s fervent recommendation of the just-born Diebold Election Systems, in May 2002 Georgia agreed to pay Diebold $54 million for 19,000 DRE voting systems. The counties and cities of Georgia had chosen their own voting machines for the last time, and, less obviously, Georgians had lost their ability to recount their votes in contested elections.
At once Diebold set to manufacturing 282 of its AccuVote TS voting systems a day. Some of the earliest ones arriving in Georgia, sent out for use in the training of election workers, were left in a hotel conference room overnight, stolen and never recovered. Late that June the secret vote-counting codes inside nine to fourteen more of the Diebold machines were stolen. Diebold made an uncounted number of apparently illegal changes in the election-conducting code between June and November. The memory cards on which the votes on each of the computers were recorded on election day all over Georgia had no encryption. According to Rob Behler, who served as Diebold’s production deployment manager in Georgia during the first half of that summer, those cards could be used to change the results manually, precinct by precinct.
Incumbent US Senator Max Cleland and incumbent Governor Roy Barnes, both Democrats, were odds-on favorites to win re-election. A week before the voting an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll showed Cleland ahead by five points, 49-44, but on election day he lost to his Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss, by seven points, 53-46, a twelve-point swing. The loss of Governor Barnes to Sonny Perdue was even more remarkable: a one-week switch of fourteen percentage points. These were suspicious anomalies, and subsequently in a Peach State Poll one in eight Georgia voters were “not very confident” or “not at all confident” that the DREs had produced accurate results; another 32 percent were only "somewhat confident."
In his front parlor at home in Georgia, Rob Behler told me that just before or just as he took over the Atlanta warehouse for Diebold, some of the voting machines had been sent out to “do demos,” and in one southern county “somebody broke in and stole…[nine or] fourteen of the machines and, I think, one of the servers.” He says the vote-counting programs in the stolen computers could have been completely reconstructed by reverse engineering and employed to jimmy the election.
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Citizens can stay current on election developments via several websites: electionline.org, a reliable and up-to-date source; VerifiedVoting.org, Dill’s group; notablesoftware.com, Mercuri’s site; blackboxvoting.org, Bev Harris’s site; countthevote.org, the site of the Georgia group led by Jekot; and these will key into many others. For a steady flow of news stories on this subject (and a few others) from around the country, get on the e-mail list of resist@best.com. Official information concerning each state is available online at each state’s website for its secretary of state.
