This article was linked in the e-version of the Chronicle of Higher Education today (a publication for educators, not at all political), so cheers to Bev and others for getting the story out there.
http://www.futurenet.org/26courage/pibel.htmSafeguarding the Vote
By Doug Pibel
Last November, I voted. At least I think I did. When I got to
my polling place, instead of the familiar ballot where I drew a
fat, black line to connect two parts of an arrow, I was handed what looked like a blank credit card. I plugged that into one of the spiffy new touch-screen voting machines and started touching the screen. When I was done, the machine showed me a summary of the votes I’d cast. I returned the magnetic card, and that was it.
<snip>
Who but a Luddite could possibly object to the
very latest whiz-bang computer voting technology?
That’s what the Supervisors of Santa Clara County, California, thought when they solicited bids for direct recording electronic (DRE) voting equipment. They discovered that a group of high-powered computer professionals think paperless voting is a bad idea, too. Computer folk, a group not noted for political engagement, are warning that a technology now being adopted nationwide threatens trust in the election process and is open to manipulation on an unprecedented scale. They are raising the disquieting idea that
this faulty technology endangers the very core of democracy—the right to cast a vote that counts.
<snip>
So why do the computer professionals have problems with DRE voting? Because they know, even better than most of us, the vulnerability of computers to error or downright sabotage.
The dark worry about unverifiable voting is that with machines all centrally programmed, vote fraud on a large scale becomes, not merely conceivable, but easy. It may already have happened.
One of those sounding the alarm is Rebecca Mercuri, an assistant professor of computer science at Bryn Mawr College and founder of Notable Software, Inc. a computer security firm, who wrote her Ph.D.
dissertation on electronic voting machines. A losing candidate in the 2002 Florida elections retained Mercuri to examine the DRE machines used in Palm Beach County. During litigation, Theresa LePore, still directing Palm Beach County elections post-butterfly-ballot, testified that, under the contract with the voting machine manufacturer, it would be a felony for her to allow Mercuri to examine the computer code running the machines.
Even basic checks of machine function are impossible. The machines are programmed to lock in results at the end of election day; they do not leave that mode until they are programmed for the next election.
<snip>
Mercuri does not claim any specific instance of vote fraud. But she says that, without paper ballots,there’s simply no way to know.
She notes, too, that voters recently lost another check of vote tally accuracy. Since 1964, Voter News Service (VNS), owned by a consortium of broadcast and print media, provided exit polling election-night
projections. Following the election fiasco of 2000, VNS undertook a complete redesign of its computers.On election day 2002, VNS announced that, due to computer problems, it would produce no projections. VNS has never released its exit-polling data from the 2002 elections. In January 2003, the owners of VNS announced that they were disbanding the service, which has a historical record of
remarkable accuracy.
A growing number of people see a sinister trend in these computer difficulties.
<snip>
In 2002, Georgia became the first state to use all-electronic voting. Georgians elected their first Republican governor since the end of the Civil War, although every pre-election poll showed the Democratic candidate leading. In the senatorial race, although polls the day before election day showed the Democratic incumbent, Max Cleland, leading by two to five points, he lost to Republican Saxby
Chambliss by seven.
Many of these stories have been unearthed by Bev Harris, a Seattle-area writer and literary publicist, who has written extensively on preventing embezzlement. When stories began to surface of the secrecy
surrounding DRE equipment, alarms went off in her head. “In accounting you look for checks and balances,” Harris says. DRE voting equipment “doesn’t even have minimal safeguards.”
Harris began investigating the world of electronic voting. She turned up the connection between Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska) and ES&S, a voting equipment manufacturer that supplies all the machines
for Nebraska elections. Hagel was formerly CEO of the company and retains major stock holdings in it.More disturbing was her discovery that Diebold, which supplies voting equipment to 31 states, maintained an internet site, accessible to anyone who found it, containing the computer files that Diebold machines use to count votes—meaning anyone could manipulate the software.
Harris maintains a website, www.blackboxvoting.com, and has written a book, Black Box Voting, due out in May, which details her findings.
<article continued>
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