Liberal Repercussion

if they change the GA flag, I swear I'll burn one in front of a TV camera

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The hacks in the machine

The electronic voting being used in today's Super Tuesday Democratic primaries offers unprecedented opportunities for electoral fraud, write Albert Scardino and John Scardino

Tuesday March 2, 2004

Stealing an election used to take some doing. Sometimes the dead had to vote. At other times it took the intervention of the supreme court, as in Florida three years ago. Maybe not a theft in that case, but certainly a spirited getaway.

With new voting equipment in use today in California, Georgia and Maryland for the Super Tuesday primaries, it now may be possible to hijack the results with nothing more than a phone call into a computer modem.

Electronic theft may not be necessary. Last time around, election officials in at least two swing states launched a coordinated campaign to inhibit many residents of inner city areas from voting. Tens of thousands were wrongly denied a say in the Gore-Bush race in Missouri and Florida. They were disproportionately Democrats.

If intimidation, bureaucratic roadblocks and arbitrary enforcement based on antiquated records don't work this time, there may be an electronic backup.

The new hardware has been rushed into service as a preventative for the kind of chaos that prevailed in Miami, Palm Beach and other areas of Florida after the Gore-Bush election. Tens of thousands of polling places now have colour screens in place of paper ballots or old mechanical voting machines. Yet, in spite of passwords and press releases insisting on the integrity of vendors and designers, the election process has become more vulnerable to systemic fraud than at any time in US history.

State boundaries and competing political bosses often stood as firewalls against wholesale, national election fraud. The new standardised systems with poor security arrangements allow theft to be automated and instantaneous from coast to coast.

More worryingly, with public opinion so evenly divided, a president can be elected on the basis of 537 votes in one state. The new systems appear so easy to crack that a hacker armed with a telephone and the right numbers can dial into numerous access points, change a few votes for each precinct or hundreds of votes in several - leaving no trail.

There is nothing fanciful about the possibility of things going wrong. In one election last year in Indiana, the new electronic equipment recorded more than 100,000 votes in an election with only 19,000 registered voters.

Another example comes from Georgia, one of the Super Tuesday primary states. In 2002, voters there used new electronic systems to throw out a popular incumbent governor and a serving US senator, both Democrats, in favour of little-known Republican opponents. Though polls right up to the election indicated that both Democrats would be re-elected comfortably, the tally on election night showed massive swings against them.

Oddly, the swings occurred in only a part of the state, indistinguishable from areas that conformed very closely to the pre-election polls. Based on the number of votes counted, commentators reported turnout of more than 70% of the voters in some areas. These same districts mustered no more than 45% in the presidential election two years earlier.

The explanation, according to the winners, was that rural voters came out in force to voice outrage at the governor's alteration of the state flag to remove the Confederate battle emblem, the familiar crossed stars on a red background. Later analysis indicated that no more voters than normal came to the polls that day.

No one has found any proof that the results were tampered with, though a number of investigators have looked. On the other hand, no one has been able to audit the results, because the voting machines provide no paper receipts. A hanging chad on a paper ballot may be difficult to interpret, as election officials learned in Florida three years ago, but at least there was something to look at.

The flag has a place in today's voting, too. The new Georgia governor managed to convince the legislature to change the flag once more, reverting to an older design with the words "In God we trust" emblazoned across the centre.

To settle things flag-wise once and for all, the choice of banners has been put to the voters. When Georgia voters show up at the polls today to choose presidential candidates, they will also have a chance to pick a flag - on electronic voting machines.

The polls show the Democratic governor's design is heavily favoured to win, but voter interest is low, so turnout may not be very good - unless the same counter mysteriously reappears after the polls close, as happened two years ago.

The new voting systems have an incestuous parenthood. The Republican candidate in 2000 became president with help from local cronies who purged Democrats from the rolls. As president, he cut taxes on the wealthy while proposing to spend $3.7bn to help states to modernise their voting systems.

The biggest beneficiary so far has been Diebold Electronic Voting Systems, part of a company that makes bank vaults and automatic teller machines and has now become a leading supplier to the newly created voting systems market.

Since entering the business in 2002, Diebold has won contracts to supply more than 50,000 voting machines, for California, Georgia, Maryland and Ohio. Independent software experts concerned about the security of the systems found that Diebold had posted the source code for the software on the company's web site.

In short order, they found ways to manipulate the code to produce fraudulent results and then hacked their way into a list of phone numbers for the modems being installed on Diebold servers. For more information see blackboxvoting.org.

Diebold employees turned whistleblowers last year to reveal that the company had produced fixes for some flaws, then altered the software without consulting election officials. Whether the fixes worked or not, the fact that a vendor could alter a voting machine's operating system without the approval of the authorities has itself caused alarm.

Government officials responsible for the integrity of voting systems in their states and counties then demanded a formal investigation of Diebold's vulnerabilities. In an interview last week on Britain's Channel 4, the investigators said that the systems could be easily hacked, totals altered and results overturned in a matter of minutes.

Diebold's chief executive and other company officers have contributed more than $600,000 to the Bush re-election campaign and pledged to fellow Republicans that he would do everything in his power to ensure Bush's re-election (a statement he now regrets, according to a spokesman).

Diebold is now lobbying state officials to require each county to use its machines, to be paid for, at least in part, with the money appropriated by congress to modernise the system. By November, millions of voters will go to the polls to cast ballots on Diebold machines that can be easily tampered with to produce a desired result.

Things used to be so much more straightforward than this. In an election in the 1980s, the incumbent mayor of Jersey City, an old industrial centre in northern New Jersey, feared that he had lost the support of his most elderly constituents. Many of them lived in city-owned apartment towers. On election morning workers removed the control panels of the lifts "for routine maintenance".

His opponent rounded up weight lifters from nearby gyms to carry voters down the stairs to vote and then haul them back up. The challenger won.

The electronic voting story may be nothing more than a case of engineering incompetence blended with corporate greed living alongside political expediency. On the other hand, it may be more sinister. "Those who cast the votes decide nothing," said Josef Stalin. "Those who count the votes decide everything."

posted by Rei Toei @ 5:48 p.m.