Monday, November 20, 2006
Electronic voting: democracy in peril
From the RoundTable blog
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David E. Scheim
Scheim, of Blacksburg, is an information systems consultant for a federal agency and author of The New York Times best-seller "Contract on America."
In Maryland, a citizens' revolt against electronic voting machines has been launched by none other than the state's Republican governor. Gov. Robert Ehrlich advised Maryland residents to vote by absentee ballot because he had no confidence in the state's voting machines. Ehrlich explained to ABC News:
"I don't care if we paid half a billion dollars or $1 billion. If it's going to put the election at risk, there's no price tag for a phony election or a fraudulent election."
As The New York Times noted in a recent editorial, this year's elections indeed "provided a lot of disturbing news about the reliability of electronic voting." And several prestigious studies have indeed recently sounded the alarm about turning over the election process, previously conducted transparently by local counties, to electronic voting machines subject to error and fraud controlled by corporations of questionable lineage.
A bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by James A. Baker III and former President Jimmy Carter, warned in 2005 that election results could be electronically manipulated by malicious software modifications. The U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a damning report last year on electronic voting machines, citing widespread irregularities in recent elections.
The Brennan Center at New York University found 120 serious vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines and concluded that they "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections." Verified voting, it determined, was necessary for reliable elections.
In September, the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy demonstrated how software could be inserted into a Diebold electronic voting machine in less than a minute that switches votes from one candidate to another, without leaving any trace of the fraud.
The software, like a virus, can propagate from machine to machine. The Princeton video demonstration, at itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting, has alarmed even former skeptics of these vulnerabilities.
By all indications, Diebold may have used exactly this technique to change the outcomes in key Georgia election races in 2002.
In October's Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. detailed how national Diebold executive Bob Urosevich personally distributed a voting machine "patch" that was installed on some 5,000 Diebold voting machines in Georgia prior to that election.
According to Diebold insider Chris Hood, "It was an unauthorized patch" of questionable purpose, installed covertly at odd hours.
Other insider sources described other suspicious patches. In fact, significant leads in pre-election polls by the Democratic candidates for Senate and governor were reversed, respectively, by 8 and 12 points to switch expected victories into losses.
The same Bob Urosevich, the first CEO of Diebold, was also the founder of ES&S, another voting machine company.
These two companies tally 80 percent of U.S. votes, while former Diebold executives control the company that produces WINvote election machines, used in several Virginia counties.
Jeff Dean, a key programmer for Diebold, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft for planting back doors in software he created for ATMs.
In a scathing 2004 editorial, The New York Times detailed the lax oversight, conflicts of interest, proprietary software and security risks characterizing electronic voting machines and their manufacturers, and contrasted this with the rigorous oversight and standards for electronic gambling machines in Nevada.
There is no federal agency to shut down Diebold, for example, for practices as described in this leaked e-mail of March 19, 1999: "For a demonstration [in Colorado] I suggest you fake it. ... That is what we did in the last AT/AV [AccuTouch/AccuVote] demo."
Among several dozen cases of electronic voting machine irregularities nationwide were 6,300 electronic votes lost in the 2002 Alabama gubernatorial race, which flipped the election outcome.
In the 2006 primary election in Tarrant County, Texas, 100,000 more votes were recorded than actually cast, with some votes counted up to six times.
In the current election, in Katherine Harris's former U.S. congressional district in Florida, Christine Jennings, the Democratic candidate, trails by 373 out of 237,861 votes because electronic voting machines lost 15,000 votes in a majority Democratic county. Hundreds of voters reported selecting Jennings without her name being registered.
Candidate names were truncated on the summary page by electronic voting machines in three Virginia counties, with the last name of one U.S. Senate candidate omitted.
And as documented by the Fairfax County Republican Committee, in a 2003 local election, at least one WINvote voting machine "subtracted one vote for every 100 cast in favor of a [Republican] candidate for the Fairfax School Board."
Momentum to mandate verified voting is building at both the state and federal levels.
Please email davids@naxs.net to join the League of Women voters and other concerned citizens in this effort.
