Sunday, September 30, 2007
The registrar has a secret lair
Christian Trejbal
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From the RoundTable blog
Montgomery County Registrar Randy Wertz has a secret lair somewhere in the New River Valley. Between elections, he stores his voting machines in an undisclosed location to help ensure no one tampers with them.
A couple of weeks ago, he let me visit.
I rode blindfolded and guarded in the back of a van. The driver took us along bumpy byways, tracing out a route full of twists and turns. We could have wound up back at the county offices or in a cave behind a waterfall along the New River.
Finally, the van stopped, someone hustled me out, and Wertz pulled the blindfold from my eyes.
OK, I exaggerate, fabricate even.
Wertz does have a secret storage facility, and I did get to visit a few weeks ago, but there were no blindfolds and no guards.
I just followed his directions to get there one sunny morning.
No, I am not going to reveal where. The secrecy of the site is one of the bulwarks against partisan ninjas slipping through the shadows and hacking the next election.
Wertz had invited me to observe the preparation of voting machines for the November election.
Many people show up at their polling places and assume everything will work. The ballot will appear on the screen, votes will be counted and the right person will win. They don't worry that a computer glitch could invalidate their votes or that a trick of computer code could throw the election one way or another.
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Wertz and I have debated the merits of the electronic voting system and its security. He likes it; I don't. By inviting me to the secret vault, he hoped to allay some of my worries and help me understand all of the safeguards he and his staff have installed.
I pulled up to the building and entered a cavernous warehouse. Discarded computers, sinks, office furniture and other business detritus crowded the place.
A small wooden building, not much larger than a shed, stood in one corner like a Russian doll, a building within a building. And inside of it, a half-dozen specialists were hard at work.
Wertz was there, another election worker, the three members of the county's electoral board and Hugh Gallagher, the election expert with whom the county contracts to handle programming and verifying the machines.
The process went something like this:
Wertz unlocked one of the cages in which the machines are stored. The workers unloaded them onto tables and inspected the seals to ensure no one had tampered with them since they were last touched in the spring.
Once the exterior exam was complete, they powered up the machines and Gallagher started the important stuff. He went from machine to machine, inserting security cards and loading the state-supplied ballots from a portable data drive.
He then checked that the machines had no votes in memory -- that they were zeroed -- and ran through a sequence of test votes following a consistent pattern. Finally, he printed the results.
The members of the electoral board verified the printouts. As the representatives of the public -- representatives of the two major political parties anyway -- they ensured there was no cheating.
Everything checked out, so Gallagher reset the machines and disabled their wireless ability.
Finally, they received a new security seal and went back into their cages.
If the board had found any errors on the printouts, the machines would have been pulled to isolate and fix the problem.
There were some other small steps along the way, but that's the gist of it.
Then they repeated the process over and over again on more than 100 machines. The whole thing took two long days, but now Montgomery County is ready to roll out its machines on Nov. 6. Between now and then, officials will check in on them periodically to make sure they are still secure.
"If we prepare properly before the election, which is what we are doing, there's a high probability things will go smoothly on Election Day," Wertz said.
He convinced me on that point at least. I can honestly report that the machines are physically safe while they hibernate and the ballot loading was honest.
Even if partisan ninjas gain access, they cannot completely cover their tracks. Few people know where they are; gaining access would require bypassing doors, locks and cages; and tampering would break a coded seal.
I still don't like electronic voting machines, but I dislike them a little less now.
Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.
