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Spirit of Ma'at: "Sacred Geometry" — Vol 4 January 2004 by Billii Roberti
On October 14, 2003, the London Independent published an exposé called "All the President's Votes?" Some American media outlets picked up the story, but it "has been treated as a technology or business story — not as a potential political scandal."[1] At issue is the security and reliability of the new electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold, which are becoming widespread across the country. Galvanized by the débacle in Florida in the 2000 election, officials have been searching for a better, more hi-tech method of counting the vote. Does Touch-Screen Voting Really Work? Even absent political hanky-panky, how reliable is electronic voting?The Voting Technology Project, a joint venture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), performed a study to answer this question. This Project found DREs to be among the worst performing systems in existence for tabulating the vote. "The problem is, computer touch-screen machines and other so-called DRE systems are significantly less reliable than punch cards," the Project states, "irrespective of their vulnerability to interference [editor's emphasis]." The Voting Technology Project actually determined that hand counting of paper ballots was the most reliable system![2] Bugs in the Software Itself Even assuming the accuracy of touch-screen recording, researchers from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discovered "stunning flaws" in the electronic election software they studied. These flaws included:
"If these vulnerabilities are exploited," the Maryland report goes on to say, "significant impact could occur on the accuracy, integrity, and availability of election results."[4] Evidence of Intent Internal Diebold email leaked on the Internet suggests that "corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to prevent their dissemination."[5]And recently, an in-house email at Diebold has been uncovered that declares the company's intent to make a paper-trail addendum to their system "prohibitively expensive" to the state.[6] Reports of software flaws are disturbing, to say the least, when so many states are moving toward the use of electronic election software. Even more disturbing is that state officials have repeatedly agreed to terms that would effectively prevent their states from even questioning the performance of voting software. In contracts with Diebold, Sequoia, and Election Systems & Software (ES&S), many states have already signed away their election supervision rights, agreeing that the vote count will be conducted, not by the State itself, but by the manufacturer of the voting software. According to the London Independent report, these contracts stipulated that the software be used "under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal — on pain of stiff criminal penalties — for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly."[7] This kind of contractual wording renders absolutely null the people's oversight of the voting process. In effect, as the situation now stands, election officials all around the country have simply handed over to corporations their responsibility for counting the vote. That being the case, might it not be naive to assume that these corporations are disinterested in the outcome of the elections they have been delegated to supervise? Suspicious Election Results Have Occurred Signs of abuse in the electronic voting system have already been detected.In Georgia, a traditionally Democratic state that relies exclusively on Diebold machines, Republicans tallied unprecedented upset victories in the 2002 elections. There were many anomalies in that 2002 vote. And although there was no hard evidence that the machines miscounted, there also was no proof — since there was no paper trail — that the machines counted correctly, either. Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard's John F, Kennedy School of Government and a specialist in voting systems, points out, "It makes it really hard to show their product has been tampered with if it's a felony to inspect it."[8] But we don't need a Harvard fellow to come to this conclusion. A six-year-old could probably figure it out. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote, "Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, found Diebold software — which the company refuses to make available for public inspection, on the grounds that it's proprietary — on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it. (The software was in a folder titled <rob-Georgia.zip>!) The server was used by employees of Diebold Election Systems to update software on its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines both the information and the opportunity to do so."[9] The Independent reported: "Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, and New Hampshire — all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party. Again, this was widely attributed to the campaigning efforts of President Bush and the demoralization of a Democratic Party too timid to speak out against the looming war in Iraq ... Strangely, however, the pollsters made no comparable howlers in lower-key races whose outcome was not seriously contested. Another anomaly, perhaps."[10] Congressional Awareness Rush Holt (D-NJ) was the first federal representative to address the issue of accountability when, on May 22, 2003, he introduced the "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003" (HR 2239). This bill requires digital voting machines to leave a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy.[11]And on December 9, 2003, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) introduced the "Protecting American Democracy Act of 2003" (S 1980). This bill has been criticized, however, because its requirements could be fulfilled with a purely electronic voter verification process. The Bottom Line Given the intensity of political partisanship these days, and the opportunity provided by flawed electronic systems to corrupt the voting process, there is nothing paranoid in suggesting that political operatives, or corporations with vested interests, might engage in "dirty tricks."As Krugman writes, "You don't have to believe in a central conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results."[14] When told that systems lacking these safeguards haven't caused problems, Rep. Holt has replied, "How do you know?"[15]
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