The North Coast times-eagle., January 01, 2004, Page 5, Image 5

PAGE 5
N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , JAN/FEBRUARY 2004
systems website in March 2003 by an illegal hack, the nature of
the information stolen could have been revised or manipulated.
There are two reasons why the United States is rushing
to overhaul its voting systems The first is the Florida debacle in
the Bush/Gore election; no state wants to be the center of that
kind of attention again And the second is the Help America Vote
Act (HAVA), signed by President Bush in October 2002, which
promises an unprecedented $3.9 billion to the states to replace
their old punchcard-and-lever machines. However, enthusiasm
for the new technology seems to be motivated as much by a
bureaucratic love of spending as by love of democratic account­
ability. According to Rebecca Mercuri, research fellow at John
F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a specialist
in voting systems, the shockingly high error rate of punchcard
machines (3%-5% in Florida in 2000) has been known to people
in the elections business for years. It was only after it became
public knowledge in the last Presidential election that anybody
felt moved to do anything about it.
The problem is, computer touchscreen machines and
other so-called DRE (direct recording electronic) systems are
significantly less reliable than punchcards, irrespective of their
vulnerability to interference. In a series of research papers for
the Voting Technology Project, a joint venture of the prestigious
Massachusetts and California Institutes of Technology, DREs
were found to be among the worst performing systems. No
method, the MIT/CalTech study conceded, worked more reliably
than hand-counting paper ballots — an option that U S. electoral
officials seem to consider hopelessly antiquated, or at least
impractical in elections combining multiple local, state and
national races for offices from President down to dogcatcher.
The clear disadvantages and dangers associated with
DREs have not deterred state and county authorities from throw­
ing themselves headlong into touchscreen technology.More than
40,000 machines made by Diebold alone are already in use in
37 states, and most are touchscreens. County after county is
poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on com­
puter voting before the spring Presidential primaries. “They say
this is the direction they have to go to have fair elections, but the
rush to go toward computerization is very dubious,” Dr. Mercuri
says. “One has to wonder why this is going on, because the way
it is set up takes away the checks and balances we have in a
democratic society. That’s the whole point of paper trails and
recounts.”
Anyone who has struggled with an interactive display
in a museum knows how dodgy touchscreens can be. In Dallas,
during early voting before the November 2002 election, people
found that no matter how often they tried to push a Democrat
button, the Republican candidate’s name would light up. After
a court hearing, Diebold agreed to take down 18 machines with
apparent misalignment problems. “And those were the ones
where you could visually spot a problem,” Dr. Mercuri says.
“What about what you don't see? Just because your vote shows
up on the screen for the Democrats, how do you know it is
registering inside the machine for the Democrats?”
Other problems have shown up periodically: machines
that register zero votes, or machines that indicate voters coming
to the polling station but not voting even when a single race with
just two candidates was on the ballot. Dr. Mercuri was part of a
lawsuit in Palm Beach County in which she and other plaintiffs
tried to have a suspect Sequoia machine examined, only to run
up against the brick wall of the trade-secret agreement.“ttmakes
it really hard to show their product has been tampered with,” she
says, “if it’s a felony to inspect it.”
As for the possibilities of foul play, Dr. Mercuri says they
are virtually limitless. “There are literally hundreds of ways to do
this,” she says. “There are hundreds of ways to embed a rogue
series of commands into the code and nobody would ever know
because the nature of programming is so complex.The numbers
would all tally perfectly.” Tampering with an election could be
something as simple as a “denial-of-service” attack, in which the
machines simply stop working for an extended period, deterring
voters faced with the prospect of long lines. Or it could be done
with invasive computer codes known in the trade by such nick­
names as “Trojan horses" or “Easter eggs." Detecting one of
these, Dr. Mercuri says, would be almost impossible unless the
investigator knew in advance it was there and how to trigger it.
Computer researcher Theresa Hommel, alarmed by touchscreen
systems, has constructed a simulated voting machine in which
the same candidate always wins, no matter what data you put in.
She calls her model the Fraud-O-Matic, and it is available online
at www. wheresthepaper. org.
It is not just touchscreens that are at risk from error or
malicious intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes
is vulnerable. An optical scan of ballots in Scurry County, Texas,
in November 2002 erroneously declared a landslide victory for
the Republican candidate for county commissioner; subsequent
hand recount showed the Democrat had, in fact, won. In Comal
County, Texas, a computerized optical scan found that three
different candidates had won their races with exactly 18,181
votes. There was no recount or investigation, even though
the coincidence, with those recurring 1s and 8s, looked highly
I agree that before the 2004 Presidential election we
must secure an accountable paper ballot nationwide that is
verified by the voter (not the computer) and hand dropped into
the box by the voter (with provision for the handicapped) with
recount capability.
Adding machines are for adding numbers.
Computers are for manipulating numbers.
Computers can be programmed to print out a ballot
then manipulate the vote. With the computer, we will feel the
need to recount everything it spits out. I see endless auditing,
surveillance, recounting, maintenance-protection from even
future misuse, hacking, manipulation of the computer system,
i.e., scammed elections.
The present and future threat of humungous voting
fraud is real.
The vote is very important, essential to a democracy.
What is our hurry in this nation? We can take time to count our
votes by citizens in our respective counties who are personally
responsible to each county.
~M. TAYLOR
M. Taylor lives in Astoria. She is an adamant activist
for the paper vote She says that she is aware ‘people recoil
in disbelief at the thought of computer vote fraud and that ‘the
goal must be to educate so there will be effective group action. ”
suspicious. In heavily Democrat Broward County, Florida —
which had switched to touchscreens in the wake of the hanging
chad furor — more than 100,000 votes were found to have gone
“missing" on election day. The votes were reinstated, but the
glitch was not adequately explained. One local official blamed
it on a “minor software thing.”
Most suspect of all was the Governor’s race in Alabama,
where the incumbent Democrat, Don Siegelman, was initially
declared the winner. Sometime after midnight, when polling
. station observers and most staff had gone home, the probate
judge responsible for elections in rural Baldwin County suddenly
"discovered” that Mr. Siegelman had been awarded 7,000 votes
too many. In a tight election, the change was enough to hand
victory to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley. County officials
talked vaguely of a computer tabulation error, or a lightning
strike messing up the machines, but the real reason was never
ascertained because the state's Republican attorney general
refused to authorize a recount or any independent ballot inspect­
ion.
According to an analysis by James Gundlach, sociology
professor at Auburn University in Alabama, the result in Baldwin
County was full of wild deviations from statistical norms estab­
lished both by this and preceding elections. And he adds: “There
is simply no way that electronic vote counting can produce two
sets of results without someone using computer programs in
wayS that were not intended. In other words, the fact that two
sets of results were reported is sufficient evidence in and of
itself that the vote tabulation was compromised." Although talk
of voting fraud quickly subsided, Alabama has now amended its
election laws to make recounts mandatory in close races.
The possibility of flaws in the electoral process is not
something that gets discussed much in the United States. The
attitude seems to be: we are the greatest democracy in the world
so the system must be fair. That has certainly been the prevail­
ing view in Georgia, where even the leading Democrats — their
prestige on the line for introducing touchscreen voting in the first
place — have fought tooth-and-nail to defend the integrity of the
system. In a phone interview, the head of the Georgia Technol­
ogy Authority who brought the Diebold machines to the state,
Larry Singer, blamed the growing chorus of criticism on “fear
of technology," despite the fact many prominent critics are
themselves computer scientists. He says, “Are these machines
flawless? No. Would you have more confidence if they were
completely flawless? Yes. Is there such a thing as flawless
systems? No.” Mr. Singer, who left the GTA straight after the
election and took a 50% pay cut to work for Sun Microsystems,
insists that voters are more likely to have their credit card
information stolen by a busboy in a restaurant than to have
their vote compromised by touchscreen technology.
Voting machines are sold in the United States in much
the same way as other government contracts: through intensive
lobbying, wining and dining. At a recent national conference of
clerks, election officials and treasurers in Denver, attendees
were treated to black-tie dinners and other perks, including free
expensive brief cases stamped with Sequoia's company logo
alongside the association’s own symbol. Nobody in power seems
to find this worrying, any more than they worried when Sequoia’s
southern regional sales manager, Phil Foster, was indicted in
Louisiana a few years ago for “conspiracy to commit money
laundering and malfeasance.” The charges were dropped in
exchange for his testimony against Louisiana's state commis­
sioner of elections. Similarly, in 2002, the Arkansas secretary of
state, Bill McCuen, pleaded guilty to taking bribes and kickbacks
involving a precursor company to Election Systems & Software;
the voting machine company executive who testified against
him in exchange for immunity is now an ES&S vice-president.
If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at
the Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen
companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds
of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years
The ownership issue is, of course, compounded by the lack of
transparency Or, as Dr Mercuri puts it: “If the machines were
independently verifiable, who would give a crap who owns
them?" As it is, fears that U S. democracy is being highjacked
by corporate interests are being fueled by links between the big
three and broader business interests, as well as extremist organ­
izations. Two early backers of American Information Systems, a
company later merged into ES&S, are also prominent supporters
of the Chalcedon Foundation, an organization that espouses
“theocratic governance” according to a literal reading of the
Bible (in other words a state religion) and advocates capital
punishment for blasphemy and homosexuality.
The chief executive of American Information Systems
in the early 1990s was Chuck Hagel, who went on to run for
elective office and became the first Republican in 24 years
to be elected to the Senate from Nebraska, cheered on by the
Omaha World-Herald newspaper which also happens to be
a big investor in ES&S In yet another clamorous conflict of
interest, 80% of Mr Hagel's winning votes — both in 1996
and again in 2002 — were counted, under the usual terms
of confidentiality, by his own company.
In theory, the federal government should be monitoring
the transition to computer technology and rooting out abuses
Under the Help America Vote Act, the Bush administration is
supposed to establish a sizable oversight committee, headed
by two Democrats and two Republicans, as well as a technical
panel to determine standards for new voting machinery The
four commission heads were supposed to have been in place
by February 2003, but so far just one has been appointed The
technical panel also remains unconstituted, even though the
new machines it is supposed to vet are already being sold in
large quantities — a state of affairs Dr. Mercuri denounces as
“an abomination."
One of the conditions states have to fulfill to receive
federal funding for the new voting machines, meanwhile, is
a consolidation of voter rolls at state rather than county level
This provision sends a chill down the spine of anyone who has
studied how Florida consolidated its own voter rolls just before
the 2000 election, purging the names of tens of thousands of
eligible voters, most of them African-Americans and most of
them Democrats, through misuse of ^n erroneous list of
convicted felons commissioned by Katherine Harris, the
secretary of state doubling as George Bush's Florida campaign
manager. Despite a volley of lawsuits, the incorrect list was still
in operation in the November 2002 mid-term elections, raising
all sorts of questions about what other states might do with their
own voter rolls. It is not that the Act’s consolidation provision is
in itself evidence of a conspiracy to throw elections, but it does
leave open that possibility *
Meanwhile, the Bush administration has been pushing
new voting technology of its own to help overseas citizens and
military personnel, both natural Republican constituencies, to
vote more easily over the Internet. Internet voting is notoriously
insecure and open to abuse by just about anyone with rudimen­
tary hacking skills; an experiment in Internet voting in Toronto
in January 2003 was scuppered by a Slammer worm attack.
Undeterred, the administration has gone ahead with its so-called
SERVE project for overseas voting, via a private consortium
made up of major defense contractors and a Saudi investment
group. The contract for overseeing Internet voting in the 2004
Presidential election was recently awarded to Accenture, form­
erly part of the Arthur Andersen group (whose accountancy
branch, a major contributor to President Bush, imploded as a
result of the Enron bankruptcy scandal).
Not everyone in the United States has fallen under the
spell of the big computer voting companies, and there are signs
of growing wariness. Oregon decided even before HAVA to
conduct all its voting by mail. Wisconsin has decided it wants
nothing to do with touchscreen machines without a verifiable
paper trail, and New York is considering a similar injunction,
at least for its state assembly races. In California, a Stanford
computer science professor, David Dill, is screaming from the
rooftops on the need for a paper trail in his state, so far without
result. And New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt has introduced
a bill in the House of Representatives, the Voter Confidence &
Increased Accessibility Act, asking for much the same thing. Not
everyone is heeding the warnings, though. In Ohio, publication
of the letter from Diebold’s chief executive promising to deliver
the state to President Bush in November has not deterred the
secretary of state — a Republican — from putting Diebold on a
list of preferred voting-machine vendors. Similarly, In Maryland,
officials have not taken the recent state-sponsored study identi­
fying hundreds of flaws in the Diebold software as any reason to
change their plans to use Diebold machines in the Presidential
primary in March.
The question is whether the country will come to its
senses before elections start getting distorted or tampered with
on such a scale that the system becomes unmanageable. The
sheer volume of money offered under HAVA is unlikely to be
forthcoming again in a hurry, so if things aren't done right
now it is doubtful the system can be fixed again for a long time
“This is frightening, really frightening,” says Dr. Mercuri, and a
growing number of reasonable people are beginning to agree
with her. One such is John Zogby, arguably the most reliable
pollster in the United States, who has freely admitted he “blew"
the November 2002 elections and does not exclude the possi­
bility that foul play was one of the factors knocking his calcula­
tions off course “W e’re plowing into a brave new world here,"
he says, “where there are so many variables aside from out-and-
out corruption that can change elections, especially in situations
where the races are close. We have machines that break down,
or are tampered with, or are simply misunderstood. It’s a cause
for great concern."
Roxanne Jekot, who has put much of her personal and
professional life on hold to work on the issue full time, puts it
even more strongly. “Corporate America is very close to running
this country. The only thing that is stopping them from taking
total control are the pesky voters. That’s why there is such a
drive to control the vote. What we are seeing is corporatization
of the last shred of democracy.
“I feel that unless we stop it here and stop it now,” she
says, “my kids won’t grow up to have a right to vote at all."
Andrew Gumbel wrote this article for the Independent
of London
'This is being researched in Oregon by the secretary of state's
office
“The best Italian restaurant b e tw e e n San Francisco i S eattle.”
'JO N A TH A N NICHOLS. THE OREGONIAN
"The best Italian restaurant In Astoria, evert"
-RICHARD FENCSAK. THE DAILY ASTORIAN
1149 COMMERCIAL, ASTORIA
(503) 325-9001