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WILL THE NEXT ELECTION BE HACKED?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Posted on RollingStone.Com September 21, 2006
From the October 5th, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__wil
l_the_next_election_be_hacked
Fresh disasters at the polls -- and new evidence from an
industry insider --
prove that electronic voting machines can't be trusted.
............
The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too
apparent to
most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And
private-sector
entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting
machines,
promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as
easy and
reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready
with funds
for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade
the
nation's election systems -- with much of the money devoted to
installing
electronic voting machines in each of America's 180,000
precincts. But as
midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting
machines are
making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated
that
hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election -- and
across the
country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have
repeatedly
undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas,
electronic machines
counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000
more votes than
were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines
home for
unsupervised "sleepovers" before the vote, leaving the equipment
vulnerable
to tampering. And in Ohio -- where, as I recently reported in
"Was the 2004
Election Stolen?" [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John
Kerry the
presidency -- a government report uncovered large and
unexplained
discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga
County.
Even worse, many electronic machines don't produce a paper
record that can
be recounted when equipment malfunctions -- an omission that
practically
invites malicious tampering. "Every board of election has staff
members with
the technological ability to fix an election," Ion Sancho, an
election
supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me. "Even one corrupt
staffer can
throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under
my nose and
there is no way I'd ever find out about it. With a few key
people in the
right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential
election."
Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to
question what
was really going on in Georgia. An African-American whose
parents fought for
voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to
be working as
a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company
promote its
new electronic voting machines. During the presidential election
two years
earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in
Georgia --
almost double the national average -- and Secretary of State
Cathy Cox was
under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly.
Hood had been present in May 2002, when officials with Cox's
office signed a
contract with Diebold -- paying the company a record $54 million
to install
19,000 electronic voting machines across the state. At a
restaurant inside
Atlanta's Marriott Hotel, he noticed the firm's CEO, Walden
O'Dell, checking
Diebold's stock price on a laptop computer every five minutes,
waiting for a
bounce from the announcement.
Hood wondered why Diebold, the world's third-largest seller of
ATMs, had
been awarded the contract. The company had barely completed its
acquisition
of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the
technology
Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the
highest among
nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that
a fix was
in.
"The Diebold executives had a news conference planned on the day
of the
award," Hood recalls, "and we were instructed to stay in our
hotel rooms
until just hours before the announcement. They didn't want the
competitors
to know and possibly file a protest" about the lack of a fair
bidding
process. It certainly didn't hurt that Diebold had political
clout: Cox's
predecessor as secretary of state, Lewis Massey, was now a
lobbyist for the
company.
The problem was, Diebold had only five months to install the new
machines --
a "very narrow window of time to do such a big deployment," Hood
notes. The
old systems stored in warehouses had to be replaced with new
equipment;
dozens of state officials and poll workers had to be trained in
how to use
the touch-screen machines. "It was pretty much an impossible
task," Hood
recalls. There was only one way, he adds, that the job could be
done in time
-- if "the vendor had control over the entire environment." That
is
precisely what happened. In late July, to speed deployment of
the new
machines, Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that
effectively
privatized Georgia's entire electoral system. The company was
authorized to
put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers
across the
state -- all without any official supervision. "We ran the
election," says
Hood. "We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state.
Diebold opened
and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced
Cox that it
would be best if the company ran everything due to the time
constraints, and
in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it."
Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the
president
of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia
from his
headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was
personally
distributing a "patch," a little piece of software designed to
correct
glitches in the computer program. "We were told that it was
intended to fix
the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood says. "The
curious thing
is the very swift, covert way this was done."
Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be
certified by
the state. But thanks to Cox's agreement with Diebold, the
company was
essentially allowed to certify itself. "It was an unauthorized
patch, and
they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told
me. "We were
told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received
instructions
directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of
the company
would give an order like that and be involved at that level."
According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some
5,000 machines
in DeKalb and Fulton counties -- the state's largest Democratic
strongholds.
To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered
warehouses early in
the morning. "We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11," Hood
says. "There
was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it's easy to get
access. The
machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of
everything. The
state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they
stayed out of
our way." Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and
witnessed the patch
being applied to more than 1,200 others.
The patch comes on a memory card that is inserted into a
machine.
Eventually, all the memory cards end up on a server that
tabulates the votes
-- where the patch can be programmed to alter the outcome of an
election.
"There could be a hidden program on a memory card that adjusts
everything to
the preferred election results," Hood says. "Your program says,
'I want my
candidate to stay ahead by three or four percent or whatever.'
Those
programs can include a built-in delete that erases itself after
it's done."
It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to
alter the
election in Georgia: Diebold's machines provided no paper trail,
making a
recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November
surprised even
the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote,
polls
showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic
incumbent,
leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss -- darling of
the Christian
Coalition -- by five percentage points. In the governor's race,
Democrat Roy
Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican
Sonny
Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three
percent of the
vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent.
Diebold insists that the patch was installed "with the approval
and
oversight of the state." But after the election, the Georgia
secretary of
state's office submitted a "punch list" to Bob Urosevich of
"issues and
concerns related to the statewide voting system that we would
like Diebold
to address." One of the items referenced was
"Application/Implication of
'0808' Patch." The state was seeking confirmation that the patch
did not
require that the system "be recertified at national and state
level" as well
as "verifiable analysis of overall impact of patch to the voting
system." In
a separate letter, Secretary Cox asked Urosevich about Diebold's
use of
substitute memory cards and defective equipment as well as
widespread
problems that caused machines to freeze up and improperly record
votes. The
state threatened to delay further payments to Diebold until
"these punch
list items will be corrected and completed."
Diebold's response has not been made public -- but its machines
remain in
place for Georgia's election this fall. Hood says it was "common
knowledge"
within the company that Diebold also illegally installed
uncertified
software in machines used in the 2004 presidential primaries --
a charge the
company denies. Disturbed to see the promise of electronic
machines
subverted by private companies, Hood left the election
consulting business
and became a whistle-blower. "What I saw," he says, "was
basically a
corporate takeover of our voting system."
The United States is one of only a handful of major democracies
that allow
private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes
using their
own proprietary software. Today, eighty percent of all the
ballots in
America are tallied by four companies -- Diebold, Election
Systems &
Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. In
2004, 36
million votes were cast on their touch-screen systems, and
millions more
were recorded by optical-scan machines owned by the same
companies that use
electronic technology to tabulate paper ballots. The simple fact
is, these
machines not only break down with regularity, they are easily
compromised --
by people inside, and outside, the companies.
Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican
Party. ES&S,
in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel,
who in 1996
became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from
Nebraska in
twenty-four years -- winning a close race in which eighty-five
percent of
the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic
ranks among
its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas
Rangers from
George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times
over. And
according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its
employees and
their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP
candidates and
party funds since 1998 -- including more than $200,000 to the
Republican
National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's
then-CEO
Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush
in 2004.
That year, Diebold would count the votes in half of Ohio's
counties.
The voting-machine companies bear heavy blame for the 2000
presidential-election disaster. Fox News' fateful decision to
call Florida
for Bush -- followed minutes later by CBS and NBC -- came after
electronic
machines in Volusia County erroneously subtracted more than
16,000 votes
from Al Gore's total. Later, after an internal investigation,
CBS described
the mistake as "critical" in the network's decision. Seeing what
was an
apparent spike for Bush, Gore conceded the election -- then
reversed his
decision after a campaign staffer investigated and discovered
that Gore was
actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes.
Investigators traced the mistake to Global Election Systems, the
firm later
acquired by Diebold. Two months after the election, an internal
memo from
Talbot Iredale, the company's master programmer, blamed the
problem on a
memory card that had been improperly -- and unnecessarily --
uploaded.
"There is always the possibility," Iredale conceded, "that the
'second
memory card' or 'second upload' came from an unauthorized
source."
Amid the furor over hanging chads and butterfly ballots in
Florida, however,
the "faulty memory card" was all but forgotten. Instead of
sharing
culpability for the Florida catastrophe, voting-machine
companies used their
political clout to present their product as the solution. In
October 2002,
President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, requiring
states and
counties to upgrade their voting systems with electronic
machines and giving
vast sums of money to state officials to distribute to the
tightknit cabal
of largely Republican vendors.
The primary author and steward of HAVA was Rep. Bob Ney, the GOP
chairman of
the powerful U.S. House Administration Committee. Ney had close
ties to the
now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at
least $275,000
from Diebold to lobby for its touch-screen machines. Ney's
former chief of
staff, David DiStefano, also worked as a registered lobbyist for
Diebold,
receiving at least $180,000 from the firm to lobby for HAVA and
"other
election reform issues." Ney -- who accepted campaign
contributions from
DiStefano and counted Diebold's then-CEO O'Dell among his
constituents --
made sure that HAVA strongly favored the use of the company's
machines.
Ney also made sure that Diebold and other companies would not be
required to
equip their machines with printers to provide paper records that
could be
verified by voters. In a clever twist, HAVA effectively
pressures every
precinct to provide at least one voting device that has no paper
trail --
supposedly so that vision-impaired citizens can vote in secrecy.
The
provision was backed by two little-known advocacy groups: the
National
Federation of the Blind, which accepted $1 million from Diebold
to build a
new research institute, and the American Association of People
with
Disabilities, which pocketed at least $26,000 from
voting-machine companies.
The NFB maintained that a paper voting receipt would jeopardize
its members'
civil rights -- a position not shared by other groups that
advocate for the
blind.
Sinking in the sewage of the Abramoff scandal, Ney agreed on
September 15th
to plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges -- but he has
already done one
last favor for his friends at Diebold. When 212 congressmen from
both
parties sponsored a bill to mandate a paper trail for all votes,
Ney used
his position as chairman to prevent the measure from even
getting a hearing
before his committee.
The result was that HAVA -- the chief reform effort after the
2000 disaster
-- placed much of the nation's electoral system in the hands of
for-profit
companies. Diebold alone has sold more than 130,000 voting
machines --
raking in estimated revenues of at least $230 million. "This
whole
undertaking was never about voters," says Hood, who saw
firsthand how the
measure benefited Diebold's bottom line. "It was about
privatizing
elections. HAVA has been turned into a corporate-revenue
enhancement
scheme."
No case better demonstrates the dangers posed by electronic
voting machines
than the experience of Maryland. As in Georgia, officials there
granted
Diebold control over much of the state's election systems during
the 2002
midterm elections. (In the interests of disclosure, my sister
was a
candidate for governor that year and lost by a margin consistent
with
pre-election polls.) On Election Night, when Chris Hood
accompanied Diebold
president Bob Urosevich and marketing director Mark Radke to the
tabulation
center in Montgomery County where the votes would be added up,
he was
stunned to find the room empty. "Not a single Maryland election
official was
there to retrieve the memory cards," he recalls. As cards
containing every
vote in the county began arriving in canvas bags, the Diebold
executives
plugged them into a group of touch-screen tabulators linked into
a central
server, which was also controlled by a Diebold employee.
"It would have been very easy for any one of us to take a
contaminated card
out of our pocket, put it into the system, and download some
malicious code
that would then end up in the server, impacting every other vote
that went
in, before and after," says Hood. "We had absolute control of
the
tabulations. We could have fixed the election if we wanted. We
had access,
and that's all you need. I can honestly say that every election
I saw with
Diebold in charge was compromised -- if not in the count, at
least in the
security."
After the election, Maryland planned to install Diebold's
AccuVote-TS
electronic machines across the entire state -- until four
computer
scientists at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities released an
analysis of
the company's software source code in July 2003. "This voting
system is far
below even the most minimal security standards applicable in
other
contexts," the scientists concluded. It was, in fact,
"unsuitable for use in
a general election."
"With electronic machines, you can commit wholesale fraud with a
single
alteration of software," says Avi Rubin, a computer-science
professor at
Johns Hopkins who has received $7.5 million from the National
Science
Foundation to study electronic voting. "There are a million
little tricks
when you build software that allow you to do whatever you want.
If you know
the precinct demographics, the machine can be programmed to
recognize its
precinct and strategically flip votes in elections that are
several years in
the future. No one will ever know it happened."
In response to the study, Maryland commissioned two additional
reports on
Diebold's equipment. The first was conducted by Science
Applications
International Corporation -- a company that, along with Diebold,
was part of
an industry group that promotes electronic voting machines. SAIC
conceded
that Diebold's machines were "at high risk of compromise" -- but
concluded
that the state's "procedural controls and general voting
environment reduce
or eliminate many of the vulnerabilities identified in the Rubin
report."
Despite the lack of any real "procedural controls" during the
2002 election,
Gov. Robert Ehrlich gave the state election board the go-ahead
to pay $55.6
million for Diebold's AccuVote-TS system.
The other analysis, commissioned by the Maryland legislature,
was a
practical test of the systems by RABA Technologies, a consulting
firm
experienced in both defense and intelligence work for the
federal
government. Computer scientists hired by RABA to hack into six
of Diebold's
machines discovered a major flaw: The company had built what are
known as
"back doors" into the software that could enable a hacker to
hide an
unauthorized and malicious code in the system. William Arbaugh,
of the
University of Maryland, gave the Diebold system an "F" with "the
possibility
of raising it to a 'C' with extra credit -- that is, if they
follow the
recommendations we gave them."
But according to recent e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone,
Diebold not only
failed to follow up on most of the recommendations, it worked to
cover them
up. Michael Wertheimer, who led the RABA study, now serves as an
assistant
deputy director in the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence. "We
made numerous recommendations that would have required Diebold
to fix these
issues," he writes in one e-mail, "but were rebuffed by the
argument that
the machines were physically protected and could not be altered
by someone
outside the established chain of custody."
In another e-mail, Wertheimer says that Diebold and state
officials worked
to downplay his team's dim assessment. "We spent hours dealing
with Diebold
lobbyists and election officials who sought to minimize our
impact," he
recalls. "The results were risk-managed in favor of expediency
and potential
catastrophe."
During the 2004 presidential election, with Diebold machines in
place across
the state, things began to go wrong from the very start. A month
before the
vote, an abandoned Diebold machine was discovered in a bar in
Baltimore.
"What's really worrisome," says Hood, "is that someone could get
hold of all
the technology -- for manipulation -- if they knew the inner
workings of
just one machine."
Election Day was a complete disaster. "Countless numbers of
machines were
down because of what appeared to be flaws in Diebold's system,"
says Hood,
who was part of a crew of roving technicians charged with making
sure that
the polls were up and running. "Memory cards overloading,
machines freezing
up, poll workers afraid to turn them on or off for fear of
losing votes."
Then, after the polls closed, Diebold technicians who showed up
to collect
the memory cards containing the votes found that many were
missing. "The
machines are gone," one janitor told Hood -- picked up,
apparently, by the
vendor who had delivered them in the first place. "There was
major chaos
because there were so many cards missing," Hood says. Even
before the 2004
election, experts warned that electronic voting machines would
undermine the
integrity of the vote. "The system we have for testing and
certifying voting
equipment in this country is not only broken but is virtually
nonexistent,"
Michael Shamos, a distinguished professor of computer science at
Carnegie
Mellon University, testified before Congress that June. "It must
be
re-created from scratch."
Two months later, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team --
a division
of the Department of Homeland Security -- issued a
little-noticed
"cyber-security bulletin." The alert dealt specifically with a
database that
Diebold uses in tabulating votes. "A vulnerability exists due to
an
undocumented backdoor account," the alert warned, citing the
same kind of
weakness identified by the RABA scientists. The security flaw,
it added,
could allow "a malicious user [to] modify votes."
Such warnings, however, didn't stop states across the country
from
installing electronic voting machines for the 2004 election. In
Ohio, jammed
and inoperable machines were reported throughout Toledo. In
heavily
Democratic areas of Youngstown, nearly 100 voters pushed "Kerry"
and watched
"Bush" light up. At least twenty machines had to be recalibrated
in the
middle of the voting process for flipping Kerry votes to Bush.
Similar "vote
hopping" was reported by voters in other states.
The widespread glitches didn't deter Secretary of State J.
Kenneth Blackwell
-- who also chaired Bush's re-election campaign in Ohio -- from
cutting a
deal in 2005 that would have guaranteed Diebold a virtual
monopoly on vote
counting in the state. Local election officials alleged that the
deal, which
came only a few months after Blackwell bought nearly $10,000 in
Diebold
stock, was a violation of state rules requiring a fair and
competitive
bidding process. Facing a lawsuit, Blackwell agreed to allow
other companies
to provide machines as well. This November, voters in
forty-seven counties
will cast their ballots on Diebold machines -- in a pivotal
election in
which Blackwell is running as the Republican candidate for
governor.
Electronic voting machines also caused widespread problems in
Florida, where
Bush bested Kerry by 381,000 votes. When statistical experts
from the
University of California examined the state's official tally,
they
discovered a disturbing pattern: "The data show with 99.0
percent certainty
that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a
disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared
to counties
with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines
were
significantly more likely to show increases in support for
President Bush
between 2000 and 2004." The three counties with the most
discrepancies --
Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade -- were also the most heavily
Democratic.
Electronic voting machines, the report concluded, may have
improperly
awarded as many as 260,000 votes to Bush. "No matter how many
factors and
variables we took into consideration, the significant
correlation in the
votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be
explained," said
Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor who specializes in voter
behavior and
methodology, was initially skeptical of the study -- but was
unable to find
any flaw in the results. "You can't break it -- I've tried," he
told The
Washington Post. "There's something funky in the results from
the
electronic-machine Democratic counties."
Questions also arose in Texas in 2004. William Singer, an
election
programmer in Tarrant County, wrote the secretary of state's
office after
the vote to report that ES&S pressured officials to install
unapproved
software during the presidential primaries. "What I was expected
to do in
order to 'pull off' an election," Singer wrote, "was far beyond
the kind of
practices that I believe should be standard and accepted in the
election
industry." The company denies the charge, but in an e-mail this
month,
Singer elaborated that ES&S employees had pushed local election
officials to
pressure the secretary of state to accept "a software change at
such a last
minute there would be no choice, and effectively avoid
certification."
Despite such reports, Texas continues to rely on ES&S. In
primaries held in
Jefferson County earlier this year, electronic votes had to be
recounted
after error messages prevented workers from completing their
tabulations. In
April, with early voting in local elections only a week away,
officials
across the state were still waiting to receive the programming
from ES&S
needed to test the machines for accuracy. Calling the situation
"completely
unacceptable and disturbing," Texas director of elections Ann
McGeehan
authorized local officials to create "emergency paper ballots"
as a backup.
"We regret the unacceptable position that many political
subdivisions are in
due to poor performance by their contracted vendor," McGeehan
added.
In October 2005, the government Accountability Office issued a
damning
report on electronic voting machines. Citing widespread
irregularities and
malfunctions, the government's top watchdog agency concluded
that a host of
weaknesses with touch-screen and optical-scan technology "could
damage the
integrity of ballots, votes and voting-system software by
allowing
unauthorized modifications." Some electronic systems used
passwords that
were "easily guessed" or employed identical passwords for
numerous systems.
Software could be handled and transported with no clear chain of
custody,
and locks protecting computer hardware were easy to pick.
Unsecured memory
cards could enable individuals to "vote multiple times, change
vote totals
and produce false election reports."
An even more comprehensive report released in June by the
Brennan Center for
Justice, a nonpartisan think tank at the New York University
School of Law,
echoed the GAO's findings. The report -- conducted by a task
force of
computer scientists and security experts from the government,
universities
and the private sector -- was peer-reviewed by the National
Institute of
Standards and Technology. Electronic voting machines widely
adopted since
2000, the report concluded, "pose a real danger to the integrity
of
national, state and local elections." While no instances of
hacking have yet
been documented, the report identified 120 security threats to
three widely
used machines -- the easiest method of attack being to utilize
corrupt
software that shifts votes from one candidate to another.
Computer experts have demonstrated that a successful attack
would be
relatively simple. In a study released on September 13th,
computer
scientists at Princeton University created vote-stealing
software that can
be injected into a Diebold machine in as little as a minute,
obscuring all
evidence of its presence. They also created a virus that can
"infect" other
units in a voting system, committing "widespread fraud" from a
single
machine. Within sixty seconds, a lone hacker can own an
election.
And touch-screen technology continues to create chaos at the
polls. On
September 12th, in Maryland's first all-electronic election,
voters were
turned away from the polls because election officials had failed
to
distribute the electronic access cards needed to operate Diebold
machines.
By the time the cards were found on a warehouse shelf and
delivered to every
precinct, untold numbers of voters had lost the chance to cast
ballots.
It seems insane that such clear threats to our election system
have not
stopped the proliferation of touch-screen technology. In 2004,
twenty-three
percent of Americans cast their votes on electronic ballots --
an increase
of twelve percent over 2000. This year, more than one-third of
the nation's
8,000 voting jurisdictions are expected to use electronic voting
technology
for the first time.
The heartening news is, citizens are starting to fight back.
Voting-rights
activists with the Brad Blog and Black Box Voting are getting
the word out.
Voter Action, a nonprofit group, has helped file lawsuits in
Arizona, New
York, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico to stop the
proliferation of
touch-screen systems. In California, voters filed suit last
March to
challenge the use of a Diebold touch-screen system -- a move
that has
already prompted eight counties to sign affidavits saying they
won't use the
machines in November.
It's not surprising that the widespread problems with electronic
voting
machines have sparked such outrage and mistrust among voters.
Last November,
comedian Bill Maher stood in a Las Vegas casino and looked out
over
thousands of slot machines. "They never make a mistake," he
remarked to me.
"Can't we get a voting machine that can't be fixed?"
Indeed, there is a remarkably simple solution: equip every
touch-screen
machine to provide paper receipts that can be verified by voters
and
recounted in the event of malfunction or tampering. "The paper
is the
insurance against the cheating machine," says Rubin, the
computer expert.
In Florida, an astonishing new law actually makes it illegal to
count paper
ballots by hand after they've already been tallied by machine.
But
twenty-seven states now require a paper trail, and others are
considering
similar requirements. In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson has
instituted
what many consider an even better solution: Voters use paper
ballots, which
are then scanned and counted electronically. "We became one of
the
laughingstock states in 2004 because the machines were
defective, slow and
unreliable," says Richardson. "I said to myself, 'I'm not going
to go
through this again.' The paper-ballot system, as untechnical as
it seems, is
the most verifiable way we can assure Americans that their vote
is
counting."
Paper ballots will not completely eliminate the threat of
tampering, of
course -- after all, election fraud and miscounts have occurred
throughout
our history. As long as there has been a paper trail, however,
our elections
have been conducted with some measure of public scrutiny. But
electronic
voting machines are a hacker's dream. And today, for-profit
companies are
being given unprecedented and frightening power not only to
provide these
machines but to store and count our votes in secret, without any
real
oversight.
You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for
the integrity
of our electoral system: The right to vote is simply too
important -- and
too hard won -- to be surrendered without a fight. It is time
for Americans
to reclaim our democracy from private interests.
............
Post your thoughts about the threats to fair voting, in the
National Affairs
blog <http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/?p=539>. Plus,
read Robert
F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"
<http://www.rollingstone.com/election04> -- his report on
Republican methods
for keeping more than 350,000 Ohio voters from casting ballots
or having
their votes counted.
For additional reporting on the threat posed by electronic
voting machines,
visit The Brad Blog:
http://bradblog.com/
............
NHNE Electronic Voting News & Information:
http://tinyurl.com/pf5ol
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Published by David Sunfellow
NewHeavenNewEarth (NHNE)
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