July 19, 2004
Kerry Building Legal Network for Vote Fights

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Mindful of the election problems in Florida four years ago, aides to Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, say his campaign is putting together a far more intricate set of legal safeguards than any presidential candidate before him to monitor the election.

Aides to Mr. Kerry say the campaign is taking the unusual step of setting up a nationwide legal network under its own umbrella, rather than relying, as in the past, on lawyers associated with state Democratic parties. The aides said they were recruiting people based on their skills as litigators and election lawyers, rather than rewarding political connections or big donors.

Lawyers for the campaign are gathering intelligence and preparing litigation over the ballot machines being used and the rules concerning how voters will be registered or their votes disqualified. In some cases, the lawyers are compiling dossiers on the people involved and their track records on enforcing voting rights. The disputed 2000 presidential election remains a fresh wound for Democrats, and Mr. Kerry has been referring to it on the stump while assuring his audiences that he will not let this year's election be a repeat of the 2000 vote.

"A million African-Americans disenfranchised in the last election," he said at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Philadelphia on Thursday. "Well, we're not just going to sit there and wait for it to happen. On Election Day in your cities, my campaign will provide teams of election observers and lawyers to monitor elections, and we will enforce the law."

The Kerry campaign's legal efforts are hardly occurring in a vacuum.

The Bush-Cheney campaign says it will have party lawyers in every state, covering 30,000 precincts. An affiliated group, the Republican National Lawyers Association, held a two-day training session in Milwaukee over the weekend on "how to promote ballot access to all qualified voters," according to the group's Web site.

Lawyers for nonpartisan advocacy groups conducting voter registration drives are also working behind the scenes and in court to ensure that their new registrants make it onto the rolls and that their ballots are counted.

But it is the campaign of Mr. Kerry that appears to be doing the most to apply lessons from the Florida recount and that is adopting the more fiercely partisan posture in the early going.

Its plans include setting up SWAT teams of specially trained lawyers, spokesmen and political experts to swoop into any state where a recount could be needed.

"The U.S. has had a policy of being able to fight two regional conflicts and still defend the homeland," said Marc E. Elias, the Kerry campaign's general counsel. "We want to be able to fight five statewide recounts and still have resources available to the campaign."

The lessons of Florida include fairly mundane ones. Democratic lawyers said, for example, that they had such a hard time obtaining office space in Tallahassee, presumably because landlords in the state capital feared antagonizing Gov. Jeb Bush, a Republican and brother of President Bush.

This time, Kerry aides say, they are recruiting not only specialists in election law who work in small law firms or alone, but also litigators at large firms in every state who have the resources and office space to support a long-term, large-scale and pro bono recount operation.

"We don't want a situation where we wake up the next day and are scrambling to think of what our legal team looks like," Mr. Elias said.

The Kerry campaign has already enlisted lead lawyers in all 50 states, and those lawyers are recruiting lawyers at the county and the precinct level.

"It's our intention to have lawyers in one fashion or another covering all of Iowa's 99 counties," said Brent Appel, the Kerry lawyer in Des Moines.

Kerry aides say the campaign has set up a national steering committee with task forces tackling different issues: one on ballot machines, another on voter education, and a third on absentee, early, and military voting, to name a few..

At the Democratic convention next week in Boston, they say, any lawyers interested in volunteering will be offered training. And dozens of the lawyers already recruited by the Kerry organization will hold two days of intensive meetings to finalize strategy, tactics and assignments.

Democrats say they learned from the Florida vote, and from the Supreme Court rulings that arose from it, that the most important legal battles are those fought before Election Day, over how election laws are to be carried out, who is allowed to register and who will be allowed to vote.

Robert Bauer, a partner of Mr. Elias's who is overseeing the Kerry legal effort, took a historical view of what he called "warfare over the electoral franchise." The first phase, he said, concerned who was entitled to vote and included the all-white primary, literacy tests and poll taxes that were eliminated in the mid-20th century. The second phase was fought largely over the dilution of the vote along racial lines and used the Voting Rights Act, he said.

"Now, we're into a third phase, that was exemplified by Bush-Gore, of franchise restrictions that are accomplished through manipulations of the elections administration process or of the law," Mr. Bauer said. "It's about people who somehow can't register, or can't vote, or their vote isn't counted, and it's done not frontally, but through legal manipulations."

Those can include the seemingly picayune. In Minnesota, a lawyer for the Kerry campaign is protesting a ruling by the secretary of state — Mary Kiffmeyer, a Republican — that every registrant must provide identification that matches "with certainty" a state database containing registered voters' names, birthdates and driver's license numbers or partial Social Security numbers. "It doesn't take into account a transposition of a number by a data-entry person," said Jim Rubenstein, the Kerry lawyer in Minneapolis. In an interview, Ms. Kiffmeyer said local officials would have the discretion to overlook an obvious typographical error.

Republicans are not trumpeting their efforts nearly as much, though Benjamin Ginsberg, the national counsel for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said he expected lawyers to cover 30,000 precincts on Election Day.

He noted that the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, had been rebuffed by his Democratic counterpart when he proposed recently that the two parties agree on a list of pivotal precincts and send bipartisan pairs of lawyers to monitor them. "Obviously the goal in this is to have every valid vote counted," Mr. Ginsberg said, "and to not allow the sort of rhetorical overkill, on either intimidation or fraud, to be used in a tainted fashion to interfere with the get-out-the-vote operation."

Mr. Bauer of the Kerry campaign said: "There's not much interest in depending on Republican agents to police the polls."

Apart from the two campaigns, a host of advocacy and civil-rights groups, which often act in parallel with Democrats when it comes to expanding ballot access, are stepping up their own election-law efforts this year.

America's Families United, a racial-justice advocacy group that is registering thousands of people, has set up a "voter protection project" to ensure that its new registrants make it onto the rolls, by comparing each new voter list to its own list. Penda D. Hair, the project director, said her goal was to recruit 6,000 lawyers in 20 states who could challenge registrars when they reject applications improperly.

In South Dakota, Native American officials are suing for clarification of new election rules. In 2002, they say, a dramatic increase in voting by tribal members — who often lack driver's licenses or other accepted forms of picture identification — made the difference in the Senate race that Tim Johnson won by fewer than 600 votes. The state has since revised its identification rules, and in the special Congressional election there last month, Native Americans reported widespread discrepancies in the application of the rules, said Jacqueline Johnson, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians.

In some places, Ms. Johnson said, signs went up at polling places warning, "No I.D., no vote," even though the law allows voters to sign an affidavit if they do not have valid identification. Elsewhere, she said, people living as far as 60 miles from polling places were sent home to get identification, and partisan poll watchers sometimes insisted that voters instead fill out provisional ballots. Ms. Johnson said such ballots were more likely to be disqualified on challenges.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, meanwhile, has made a Freedom of Information Act request to review the Justice Department's communications to local and state election authorities during this election cycle. "We're being proactive, trying to head off any problems at the pass," said Nancy Zirkin, the conference's deputy director.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html...DAE0894DC404482

August 17, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Saving the Vote
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Everyone knows it, but not many politicians or mainstream journalists are willing to talk about it, for fear of sounding conspiracy-minded: there is a substantial chance that the result of the 2004 presidential election will be suspect.

When I say that the result will be suspect, I don't mean that the election will, in fact, have been stolen. (We may never know.) I mean that there will be sufficient uncertainty about the honesty of the vote count that much of the world and many Americans will have serious doubts.

How might the election result be suspect? Well, to take only one of several possibilities, suppose that Florida - where recent polls give John Kerry the lead - once again swings the election to George Bush.

Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have to take the result on faith.

Yet the behavior of Gov. Jeb Bush's officials with regard to other election-related matters offers no justification for such faith. First there was the affair of the felon list. Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. But in 2000 many innocent people, a great number of them black, couldn't vote because they were erroneously put on a list of felons; these wrongful exclusions may have put Governor Bush's brother in the White House.

This year, Florida again drew up a felon list, and tried to keep it secret. When a judge forced the list's release, it turned out that it once again wrongly disenfranchised many people - again, largely African-American - while including almost no Hispanics.

Yesterday, my colleague Bob Herbert reported on another highly suspicious Florida initiative: state police officers have gone into the homes of elderly African-American voters - including participants in get-out-the-vote operations - and interrogated them as part of what the state says is a fraud investigation. But the state has provided little information about the investigation, and, as Mr. Herbert says, this looks remarkably like an attempt to intimidate voters.

Given this pattern, there will be skepticism if Florida's paperless voting machines give President Bush an upset, uncheckable victory.

Congress should have acted long ago to place the coming election above suspicion by requiring a paper trail for votes. But legislation was bottled up in committee, and it may be too late to change the hardware. Yet it is crucial that this election be credible. What can be done?

There is still time for officials to provide enhanced security, assuring the public that nobody can tamper with voting machines before or during the election; to hire independent security consultants to perform random tests before and during Election Day; and to provide paper ballots to every voter who requests one.

Voters, too, can do their bit. Recently the Florida Republican Party sent out a brochure urging supporters to use absentee ballots to make sure their votes are counted. The party claims that was a mistake - but it was, in fact, good advice. Voters should use paper ballots where they are available, and if this means voting absentee, so be it. (Election officials will be furious about the increased workload, but they have brought this on themselves.)

Finally, some voting activists have urged a last-minute push for independent exit polling, parallel to but independent of polling by media groups (whose combined operation suffered a meltdown during the upset Republican electoral triumph in 2002). This sounds like a very good idea.

Intensive exit polling would do triple duty. It would serve as a deterrent to anyone contemplating election fraud. If all went well, it would help validate the results and silence skeptics. And it would give an early warning if there was election tampering - perhaps early enough to seek redress.

It's horrifying to think that the credibility of our democracy - a democracy bought through the courage and sacrifice of many brave men and women - is now in danger. It's so horrifying that many prefer not to think about it. But closing our eyes won't make the threat go away. On the contrary, denial will only increase the chances of a disastrously suspect election.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&s=dugger
How They Could Steal the Election This Time

by RONNIE DUGGER

[from the August 16, 2004 issue]

On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.

The result could be the failure of an American presidential election and its collapse into suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the kitchen. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary, has written, "Automated voting machines will be easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses." Senator John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March, "I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted." Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP convention that "a million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election," Kerry says his campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes" [see Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes," May 17].

The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire.

About a third of the votes, 36 million, will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless, direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote directly on a touch-screen. Unlike receipted transactions at the neighborhood ATM, however, you get no paper record of your vote. Since, as a government expert says, "the ballot is embedded in the voting equipment," there is no voter-marked paper ballot to be counted or recounted. Voting on the DRE, you never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one can tell what a computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election official "can't watch the bits inside," says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International and a world authority on computer-based risks.

The four major election corporations count votes with voting-system source codes. These are kept strictly secret by contract with the local jurisdictions and states using the machines. That secrecy makes it next to impossible for a candidate to examine the source code used to tabulate his or her own contest. In computer jargon a "trapdoor" is an opening in the code through which the program can be corrupted. David Stutsman, an Indiana lawyer whose suits in the 1980s exposed a trapdoor that was being used by the nation's largest election company at that time, puts it well: "The secrecy of the ballot has been turned into the secrecy of the vote count."

According to Dr. David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford, all elections conducted on DREs "are open to question." Challenging those who belittle the danger of fraud, Dill says that with trillions of dollars at stake in the battle for control of Congress and the presidency, potential attackers who might seek to fix elections include "hackers, candidates, zealots, foreign governments and criminal organizations," and "local officials can't stop it."

Last fall during a public talk on "The Voting Machine War" for advanced computer-science students at Stanford, Dill asked, "Why am I always being asked to prove these systems aren't secure? The burden of proof ought to be on the vendor. You ask about the hardware. 'Secret.' The software? 'Secret.' What's the cryptography? 'Can't tell you because that'll compromise the secrecy of the machines.'... Federal testing procedures? 'Secret'! Results of the tests? 'Secret'! Basically we are required to have blind faith."

The integrity of the vote-counting inside DREs depends on audit logs and reports they print out, but as Neumann says, these are "not real audit trails" because they are themselves riggable. The DREs randomly store three to seven complete sets of alleged duplicates of each voter's ballot, and sets of these images can be printed out after the election and manually counted. The companies claim that satisfies the requirement in the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that "a manual audit capacity" must be available. But as informed computer scientists unanimously agree, if the first set of ballot images is corrupted, they all are. I asked Robert Boram, the chief engineer who invented a DRE sold by the RF Shoup voting-systems company, if he could rig his DRE's three sets of ballot images. "Give me a month," he replied.

The United States therefore faces the likelihood that about three out of ten of the votes in the national election this November will be unverifiable, unauditable and unrecountable. The private election companies and local and state election officials, when required to carry out recounts of elections conducted inside the DREs, will order the computers to spit out second printouts of the vote totals and the computers' wholly electronic, fakable "audit trail." The companies and most of the election officials will then tell the voters that the second printouts are "recounts" that prove the vote-counting was "100 percent accurate," even though a second printout is not a recount.

HAVA was supposed to solve election problems revealed in 2000; instead, it has made the situation worse. Under the act the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), appointed by President Bush, is supposed to set standards for the vote-counting process, but four months before the election the new agency had only seven full-time staff members. On June 17 the EAC sent $861 million to twenty-five states, mainly to buy computerized machines for which no new technical standards have been set. Its just-appointed fifteen-member technical standards committee does not include more than one leading critic of computerized vote-counting.

Rather than completely testing the vote-counting codes, there is some secretive testing of systems by three private companies that are chosen by the pro-voting-business National Association of State Election Directors. The companies consult obsolete pro-company and completely voluntary standards promulgated by the Federal Election Commission and get paid by the very companies whose equipment is being tested. The three private companies, speciously called Independent Testing Authorities, together constitute a Potemkin village to falsely assure the states and the voters of the security of the systems. Often their work is misrepresented as "federal testing." The states then test and "certify" the systems, and the local jurisdictions put on dog-and-pony-show "logic and accuracy tests," which are not capable of discovering hidden codes that would change vote totals.

"The system is much more out of control than anyone here may be willing to admit," Dr. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University and for many years an examiner of voting machines for Texas and Pennsylvania, told a House panel on June 24. "There's virtually no control over how software enters a voting machine." Shamos told another House panel on July 20, "There are no adequate standards for voting machines, nor any effective testing protocols."

Hackable computer codes control vote-counting in all three kinds of computerized systems that will be used again in the 2004 elections: the ballotless DREs, on which some 36 million will vote; optical-scan systems that electronically tally paper ballots marked by the voters, on which 40 million people will vote; and punch-card ballots, also tabulated by computerized card-readers, which gained notoriety in 2000 and are still used by 22 million voters. (Another 16 million still vote on the old lever machines, about a million on hand-counted paper ballots.)

Florida 2000 was universally misunderstood and mischaracterized in the press as a crisis of hanging chads on the punch-card ballots. The serious issue, then as now, was embodied in the explicit though all but unreported position that James Baker, George W. Bush's field commander in Florida, staked out to stop the recounting of votes. The computerized vote-counting systems, Baker declared, are "precision machinery" that both count and recount votes more accurately than people do. Now, with Senator Kerry demanding recountability, an ominously intensifying partisan split has developed in Washington over whether to have a voter-verified paper trail and, when necessary, to conduct recounts with it.

Torment in Washington

Though no broad citizens' movement has formed against computerized vote-counting, a nationwide backlash against unverifiable paperless voting has. The paper ballots used in the op-scan and punch-card systems already provide a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). The principal proposed security safeguard for the DRE system was invented, but not patented, ten years ago by computer scientist Rebecca Mercuri, now a research fellow at Harvard. In her solution, after voters record their choices on the touch-screen, they confirm them on a paper ballot that appears under glass and then push a button to cast the vote, causing the machine to deposit the paper ballot in a box that will hold it for recounting if that is ordered. The printer for the paper ballots for each voting machine should cost about $50; the total add-on could be $300-$600. Many jurisdictions also have the alternative of expanding or acquiring the relatively inexpensive optical-scan systems or other systems already in place that create paper trails.

In the US Senate seven Democrats and the one Independent are co-sponsoring a bill by Senators Bob Graham and Hillary Clinton to require paper trails on DREs by November, with a loophole for jurisdictions whose officials deem it to be technologically impossible. Clinton told the press that without a voter-verified paper trail GOP-leaning corporations might program voting machines to help Republicans steal elections [see sidebar, page 16]. In an interview in his hideaway office in the Capitol, Graham told me that he regards his and Clinton's bill as so obviously needed that it's "a no-brainer." The absence of a paper trail on the DREs could endanger "the legitimacy" of November's election, Graham said.

New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt introduced a House bill more than a year ago requiring a paper trail on DREs. It has 149 co-sponsors, including a few prominent Republicans. Holt says, "The verification has to be something that the voter herself or himself has to do"; without that, "we will never have a truly secure election." Holt's bill has opened up a partisan divide in the House. The chairman of the committee to which his bill is assigned, Ohio Republican Bob Ney, informed Holt that he is against the bill and would not allow a hearing on it. A few days later Graham and Holt wrote their fellow members of Congress that "without an independent, voter-verified paper trail, we will be able only to guess whether votes are accurately counted." Last month Ney relented and scheduled two hearings. Holt plans to offer his bill as an amendment to the Treasury appropriation after Congress returns from its August recess. Graham is still mulling his strategy.

The principal stated objection to a DRE paper trail comes from some spokespersons for the disabled, who characterize it as a step back from the touch-screen's improved accessibility and privacy. Many election officials, whose work paper ballots make both auditable and much more extensive, object variously that the attachment will add costs, that the printers might fail and that paper ballots can be stolen or counterfeited and sometimes produce somewhat different totals.

Leading citizen organizations have been split. Initially the League of Women Voters, concerned to minimize invalidly cast ballots, opposed the paper trail, but there was a revolt in the chapters and a petition for the paper trail was signed by 800 members. At the league's June convention, after a fight led by Barbara Simons, past president of the Association of Computer Machinery, the league switched sides, endorsing voting systems that are "recountable." Common Cause, placing the highest value on insuring that every vote is counted and can be recounted if necessary, has been among the leaders of the fight for the paper trail.

Around the States

Not surprisingly, the starkest resistance to the voter-verified paper trail comes from Florida, where more than half the citizens will have to vote on touch-screen systems in November. The President's brother, Governor Jeb Bush, and Jeb's Secretary of State, Glenda Hood, express unqualified confidence in the trustworthiness of the DRE systems and militantly oppose providing a paper-ballot trail for them. Hood has denied that the electronic voting machines can be tampered with in the software, saying: "The touch-screen machines are not computers. You'd have to go machine by machine, all over the state." A spokeswoman for her says flatly that "a manual recount is unnecessary."

This past spring a powerful state senator proposed to make it illegal to recount votes in the DRE systems, but she backed down when called on it by activists. Then Ed Kast, director of Hood's division of elections, who has since resigned, sought to achieve the same purpose by diktat, issuing a formal ruling that, despite the extant state law requiring recounts under certain circumstances, supervisors of elections do not need to recount DRE ballots. The ACLU and other groups have sued to invalidate that ruling; a spokesperson for the state Republican Party excoriates the suit as a left-wingers' "ploy to undermine voters' confidence."

Representative Robert Wexler, a Democrat from the southern tier of the three big counties on the Atlantic, which for election scandals is to Florida what Cook County is to Illinois, sued state and county election officials in state and federal court to require the VVPAT on DREs. He argues that allowing some voters to have manual recounts but not others violates the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore compelling equal treatment of voters (although the majority specified it was only for that election). To date his suits, opposed at every step by the Bush Administration in Tallahassee, have gotten nowhere. If he loses, half the voters in Florida, those voting on DREs, will be denied the manual recounts that the other half can have.

The Bush forces in Florida geared up for another purge of released felons from the voter rolls. Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections for Leon County, admits with shame that the state's felon purge in 2000 resulted in more than 50,000 legal voters being disenfranchised. The state elections division identified 47,000 more suspected felons, a list disproportionately heavy with blacks, and asked that local election supervisors purge them. The Bush people refused to make the list public, but were ordered to do so by a judge. Only then was it discovered that the list excluded felons who are Hispanic. In Florida Hispanics tend to vote Republican. This dandy error was "absolutely unintentional," the Bush people said--while abandoning the then indefensible list. Miami Herald columnist Jim Defede wrote that Hood--an "amazing incompetent or the leader of a frightening conspiracy"--must resign.

"What are we going to do if there's a close race?" Wexler asked in the Orlando Sentinel. "The voting records of these machines will have disappeared in cyberspace." He told me angrily: "Apparently their motives are to suppress the vote in Florida in a number of different ways. They are refusing a paper trail on a computerized voting machine. They are again preparing on the felons--they've got a new and improved process. I don't trust 'em to do the right thing." This summer, Representative Alcee Hastings, whose district includes Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, exclaimed, "Any way we cut it, these people are going to try to steal this election."

The Miami-Dade Reform Coalition asked Jeb Bush to audit the touch-screen machines this summer. Bush's spokesperson rebuffed that as "an accusation du jour." Undeterred, Democratic US Senator Bill Nelson of Florida demanded, "Why not do an audit when so much is at stake?... The national election for President could ride on the results coming out of Florida." Senator Nelson even sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft asking that the federal government audit the machines.

This past spring in California, Diebold systems malfunctioned in two counties, disenfranchising thousands of voters. Secretary of State Kevin Shelley discovered that the voting systems in seventeen counties in the state had not been certified, as required by law. After two days of tumultuous hearings in Sacramento, during which high-level election officials called the company's behavior "despicable" and accused its officials of lying, Shelley prohibited the use of Diebold's systems in four counties, the first time this has happened in the United States. Shelley, who has said to the Los Angeles Times that he doesn't want to be "the Katherine Harris of the West Coast," also made the certification of voting systems in ten more counties dependent on their adoption of twenty-three security improvements that he specified. One of these requires those counties to let citizens vote on paper if they want to, but Shelley flinched at requiring a DRE paper trail this year. Four counties and advocates of the disabled sued Shelley to block his actions, but a federal judge ruled he had the authority and had used it reasonably.

Two secretaries of state, Republicans Dean Heller in Nevada and Matt Blunt in Missouri, have required that DREs in their states have a voter-verified paper ballot for the November election. Sequoia is producing the Mercuri VVPAT on demand for Nevada, and several small election companies, including Avante and AccuPoll, have built Mercuri attachments, won their certification and are ready to sell them to local jurisdictions now. Among the thirty-one other states with DRE voting systems in some of their jurisdictions, as of early summer legislatures in five had rejected requiring the paper trail, another nine were considering such a requirement and seventeen had no such proposal before them.

In swing-state Ohio, under procedures approved by Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, thirty-one counties decided they would not use paperless DREs in November, and three said they would. Blackwell then ruled that because of unsolved security problems, none of them will. In Maryland, which imposed Diebold DREs statewide in 2002, the Board of Elections ruled that paper ballots cast in the March primary by citizens who did not want to vote on the DREs would not be counted. That's now in the courts. The Campaign for Verifiable Voting presented 13,000 signatures for a paper trail and called for the resignation of the state elections chief, Linda Lamone, who, sitting tight, said, "I think everything is going to be just fine." In Texas, Representative Ciro Rodriguez, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was renominated by 150 votes until 419 "found votes" made challenger Henry Cuellar the winner. Rodriguez is contesting the outcome, but since the voting in Bexar County (San Antonio) was conducted on DREs, the votes there can't be recounted. "There's no paper trail to verify what was put in," Cuellar said.

A paper trail will not assure that elections won't be stolen in the DREs. "The only thing the VVPAT will do is give us the ability to prove that it happened," says Roxanne Jekot of Cumming, Georgia, a self-taught computer specialist who has become one of the most effective activists against paperless computerized voting. "There is nothing to deter that single outsourced information-technology worker [from manipulating the machine]. Nobody can prove that he did it."

Many states require recounts if an outcome in a computer-counted race is within a margin of less than 1 percent or a half or quarter percent, but that invites crooked programmers, if any such be at work, to jimmy their rigged outcomes to fall outside the recount-triggering spreads.

Furthermore, a paper trail isn't an audit unless the ballots are recounted. Even before the advent of touch-screen systems, obtaining actual recounts of elections was becoming more difficult. Election officials, election companies and state laws have often combined to block recounts or discourage narrowly losing candidates from getting them. Incredibly, in 2002 the legislature in Nebraska, the home state of Election Systems & Software, outlawed recounts of the paper ballots in the ES&S optical-scan computerized ballot-counting systems that tally 85 percent or so of the votes in that state. Colorado requires that for elections conducted on DRE machines, recounts must be conducted on the very same machines.

In Alabama two years ago, during a controversy over an election for governor conducted mostly on op-scan machines, Attorney General Bill Pryor, backing up the sheriff in one questioned county, ruled officially that under state law anyone recounting the ballots would be subject to arrest. This year President Bush, circumventing Senate hearings, elevated Pryor to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in a recess appointment.

'It's Really a Matter of Trust'

Confident, friendly, but officious, Jesse Durazo, the registrar of voters of Santa Clara County in the heart of the Silicon Valley, is typical of hundreds of local election officials who berate "the academics." This past spring, despite dire warnings from Professors Neumann of SRI and Dill of Stanford, Durazo led his county into buying 5,500 of the Sequoia AVC Edge DREs at $3,000 each ($20 million, figuring in everything). The anteroom of his county election headquarters is festooned with cheery signs such as one saying Voting Just Got Easier. He is delighted that DREs will facilitate voting by those who speak a foreign language (including Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese).

Durazo said that the AVC had first been approved by the federal government (which is not correct) and then certified by the California secretary of state. He said that providing a voter-verified ballot would open the way to "unlimited error," while computer error, in contrast, can be "quantified." As for Trojan horses smuggling in corrupt instructions, he said in a confident tone, "I don't have those fears." Stealing votes in the computers is next to impossible, he insisted, because local ballots are set up at the last minute, there are a large number of races and ballot initiatives in any one election, and the order of the candidates' positions on the ballots is rotated in different precincts.

The three sets of all the votes, kept in the computer, provide the recount, he said. Are those not just copies of each other, automatically made? Durazo exclaimed in high dudgeon: "It's a redundant perfection!... It starts with the premise that the information in the system is correct."

Alfred Gonzales, Durazo's Filipino outreach specialist for voters who speak Tagalog, demonstrated the AVC, a sign on the top of which said Try It Out Today. No More Punchcards! I voted on it and asked Gonzales how I knew for sure that my vote would be counted. "Because it will be registered in the machine, saved in the hard drive, and put on a cartridge," he said. "At the end of the day it will be in the printout of the total." How did he know the machine would do that? "Because it has been federally certified!" he said. "There is fool-proof security." Well, one more thing, I asked. There's no ballot--what if you need a recount? "It's really a matter of trusting the machine," Gonzales said. Patting the AVC gently, he intoned with pride, "It's really a matter of trust."

"These companies are basically saying 'trust us,'" Rebecca Mercuri told the New York Times. "Why should anybody trust them? That's not the way democracy is supposed to work." Douglas Kellner, a leader on the New York City Board of Elections, exclaimed at a meeting of computer specialists in Berkeley this past spring, "I think the word 'trust' ought to be banned from election administration!" Dr. Avi Rubin, computer science professor and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, recently testified before the federal Election Assistance Commission, "The vendors, and many election officials, such as those in Maryland and Georgia, continue to insist that the machines are perfectly secure. I cannot fathom the basis for their claims. I do not know of a single computer security expert who would testify that these machines are secure."

Mercuri wrote in her dissertation on vote-counting in 2001 that "security flaws (such as Trojan horse attacks)...are possible in all of the computer-based voting systems" and that providing thorough examinations of source code and other circuits for DREs that vary from municipality to municipality "is a Herculean task--one that is likely not to be affordable, even if it were accomplishable."

Not all the scientists agree. Michael Shamos of Carnegie-Mellon, who once warned that computerized vote-counting is highly vulnerable to fraud, now takes the position that "the issue is not whether voting systems are absolutely secure, but whether they present barriers sufficiently formidable to give us confidence in the integrity of our elections."

Voting Machines Stolen in Georgia

In 2000 five out of six Georgians cast a paper ballot that could be recounted on ES&S systems. In January 2001, in a speech to the Democratic-controlled legislature, Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox, a Democrat who is expected to run for governor in 2006, declared that considering all the recent problems down in Florida, Georgia should adopt one "uniform electronic voting system by November 2004." Upon Cox's fervent recommendation of the just-born Diebold Election Systems, in May 2002 Georgia agreed to pay Diebold $54 million for 19,000 DRE voting systems. The counties and cities of Georgia had chosen their own voting machines for the last time, and, less obviously, Georgians had lost their ability to recount their votes in contested elections.

At once Diebold set to manufacturing 282 of its AccuVote TS voting systems a day. Some of the earliest ones arriving in Georgia, sent out for use in the training of election workers, were left in a hotel conference room overnight, stolen and never recovered. Late that June the secret vote-counting codes inside nine to fourteen more of the Diebold machines were stolen. Diebold made an uncounted number of apparently illegal changes in the election-conducting code between June and November. The memory cards on which the votes on each of the computers were recorded on election day all over Georgia had no encryption. According to Rob Behler, who served as Diebold's production deployment manager in Georgia during the first half of that summer, those cards could be used to change the results manually, precinct by precinct.

Incumbent US Senator Max Cleland and incumbent Governor Roy Barnes, both Democrats, were odds-on favorites to win re-election. A week before the voting an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll showed Cleland ahead by five points, 49-44, but on election day he lost to his Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss, by seven points, 53-46, a twelve-point swing. The loss of Governor Barnes to Sonny Perdue was even more remarkable: a one-week switch of fourteen percentage points. These were suspicious anomalies, and subsequently in a Peach State Poll one in eight Georgia voters were "not very confident" or "not at all confident" that the DREs had produced accurate results; another 32 percent were only "somewhat confident."

In his front parlor at home in Georgia, Rob Behler told me that just before or just as he took over the Atlanta warehouse for Diebold, some of the voting machines had been sent out to "do demos," and in one southern county "somebody broke in and stole...[nine or] fourteen of the machines and, I think, one of the servers." He says the vote-counting programs in the stolen computers could have been completely reconstructed by reverse engineering and employed to jimmy the election.

"Quality-checking" the AccuVote machines as they arrived from Diebold at a warehouse in Atlanta, Behler and his crew found problems, he says, with "every single one" of them and about a fifth of them were shoved aside as unusable. When Diebold's programmers wanted "patches," that is, changes, inserted into the voting-system software, Behler says, they sent them to him via the company's open, insecure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site in cyberspace. On his own unsecured laptop (resting on his desk as he spoke), Behler made twenty-two or twenty-three of the cards that were used to change the programs in the machines.

The night of the November 2002 election, sixty-seven of the memory cards used in Fulton County (Atlanta) disappeared. Running his laptop with a dual battery, Behler says, in six or seven hours he could have changed the totals on those sixty-seven cards. "There's no technical problem. There was absolutely zero protection on the card itself. You throw the card in, you just drill down into its files."

Brit Williams, a computer consultant at Kennesaw State University who runs Georgia's testing of voting systems, confirmed to me that the memory cards were not encrypted and all had the same password (1111), but each one, he contended, was "unique to its machine." He snapped, "We had 22,000 voting stations. How would you like to be in charge of 22,000 passwords?" Williams said the sixty-seven missing memory cards in Atlanta had been left in the machines by forgetful workers and were recovered.

The Georgia election of 2002 illustrates how serious risks of technical malfunctions and malicious tampering can occur without anyone outside the voting business finding out about them. No doubt in part because of the hasty start-up, Diebold's "security," though approved by the independent testing authorities and the state, was in fact farcical. Both of the losing Democrats had backed installation of the DRE systems statewide, so they could hardly call for recounts that their own state party had made literally impossible.

The Kids Prick Open a Scandal

Some kids who are "really interested in computers" were playing around last year, spidering through the links on various websites, when they discovered that Diebold had an unsecured FTP site (the same one Behler had used). One of the boys noted the fact on his website. Some other material on that site--not the stuff about Diebold--attracted a lot of hits, and that automatically led Google, the cyberspace search engine, to position it among the early-listed sites for many searches. One day Bev Harris, a literary publicist in Washington who was doing research for a book on vote-counting in computers, fed Google the right search words and the FTP site itself popped up. Knowing little about computers, she turned to David Allen, who was publishing her book, and he recognized the openly posted source codes and much other data concerning Diebold voting machines.

A small group of activists in Georgia worked with Harris. One of them, Roxanne Jekot, who runs a software consulting firm, analyzed "almost every line" of the Diebold source code and found many ways to change vote totals there and also in the Microsoft operating code. "The software is totally junk," she says. "They sold vaporware." Determined to get peer review of what she was finding, Jekot approached David Dill, the Stanford computer science professor.

"Both Roxanne and Bev were very courageous and determined to lift the veil of secrecy on the code," Dill says. "I think most academics would be much more cautious, especially about publishing the fact that they looked at the code. I certainly was, and I wasn't about to get other people in trouble by asking them to help me. A number of us would be inclined to talk to lawyers before doing anything too bold. So it made a huge difference that Bev posted the code in New Zealand for everyone to download. That reduced but didn't eliminate the legal risks of the Johns Hopkins/Rice University people looking at the code. If Bev and whoever else was involved in releasing this code had not been so brave, people [with strong professional reputations] might not have been able to speak out so freely."

After some agreements on a division of roles, Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins and three other scientists produced a devastating twenty-three-page exposure of the Diebold software. That was followed by two more damaging technical studies in Ohio. Then a "Red Team" exercise to break the Diebold code was staged at RABA Technologies' headquarters in Maryland. Four of the eight computer scientists on the team had worked at the National Security Agency, and the team director had been the senior technical director for the NSA. The team concluded, "A voter can be deceived into thinking he is voting for one candidate when, in fact, the software is recording the vote for another candidate." A security vulnerability "allows a remote attacker to get complete control of the machine." And one can "automatically upload malicious software" that will "modify or delete elections." Some kids sniffing around in cyberspace had led, step by step, to the dawning national realization that computerized vote-counting puts democracy in grave danger.

What You Can Do

Public interest groups are mobilizing to head off another Florida. Petitions calling for a paper trail for DREs have attracted something approaching half a million signatures. Lou Dobbs's quick poll on CNN on "paper receipts of electronic votes" was running 5,735 to 85 for them on July 20. Greg Palast and Martin Luther King III have more than 80,000 signatures on their petition against paperless touch-screens and the purging of voter rolls. Global Exchange, the San Francisco-based organization, is inviting twenty-eight nonpartisan foreign observers to monitor the US election. Eleven members of Congress asked Kofi Annan to send UN monitors. Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is organizing attorneys for litigation against paperless electronic voting.

In mid-June the California secretary of state approved the nation's first set of standards for a verified paper trail for touch-screen machines. A recent "Voting, Vote Capture and Vote Counting" symposium at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has produced an "Annotated Best Practices," available at www.ljean.com/files/ABPractices.pdf. On June 29 the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Brennan Center for Justice, with the endorsement of Common Cause, the NAACP, People for the American Way and most of the leading scientific critics of paperless touch-screen voting, sent the nation's local election officials a "call for new security measures for electronic voting machines," including local retention of independent security experts; the full report is available at www.civilrights.org/issues/voting/lccr_brennan_report.pdf.

Douglas Kellner, the New York City election expert, believes the best practical remedy for the dangers of computerized vote-counting is voting on optical-scan systems, posting the election results in the precincts and keeping the ballots with the machines in which they were counted. In all computerized vote-counting situations the precinct results should be publicly distributed and posted in the precincts before they are transmitted to the center for final counting, Kellner says. Once they are sent from the precinct the audit trail is lost.

Citizens can stay current on election developments via several websites: electionline.org, a reliable and up-to-date source; VerifiedVoting.org, Dill's group; notablesoftware.com, Mercuri's site; blackboxvoting.org, Bev Harris's site; countthevote.org, the site of the Georgia group led by Jekot; and these will key into many others. For a steady flow of news stories on this subject (and a few others) from around the country, get on the e-mail list of resist@best.com. Official information concerning each state is available online at each state's website for its secretary of state.

People should go down to their local election departments and ask their supervisor of elections how they are going to know that their votes are counted--and refuse to take "Trust us," or "Trust the machines," for an answer. They can be poll watchers. Many organizations are fostering poll watching, including People for the American Way's Election Protection 2004 project. Common Cause "has made election monitoring a major project," a spokesperson says. VerifiedVoting.org is concentrating on having people watch election technology, including pre-election testing as well as the procedures on election day. Bev Harris is organizing people to do such work (see her website).

Rebecca Mercuri says that if you believe an election has been corrupted through voting equipment, you should collect affidavits from voters; get the results from every voting machine for all precincts; get the names and titles of everyone involved; inventory the equipment, including the software, and try to have it impounded; demand a recount; and go to the press. Noting that all counties that have rushed to purchase DRE voting systems also have paper-ballot systems in place to handle absentee voters, motor-voters and emergency ballots for when the system breaks down, she suggests mothballing the DREs and using paper ballots. "Counties are saying there's nothing they can do but use the DREs in November, and that is simply untrue," Mercuri declares.

Much of this would be unnecessary if Congress enacted either the Graham-Clinton or the Holt bill, which would empower voters to verify their own votes and create a paper trail.

The computerized voting companies have precipitated a crisis for the integrity of democracy. Three months to go.

ELECTIONS

Voting machine testing shrouded

A process for testing and certifying voting technology in the United States is virtually nonexistent, critics said.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - (AP) -- The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy and refuse to discuss flaws in the ATM-like machines to be used by nearly one in three voters in November.

Despite concerns over whether the touch-screen machines can be trusted, the testing companies won't say publicly whether they have encountered shoddy workmanship.

They say they are committed to secrecy in their contracts with the voting machines' makers -- even though tax money ultimately buys or leases the machines.

''I find it grotesque that an organization charged with such a heavy responsibility feels no obligation to explain to anyone what it is doing,'' Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and electronic voting expert, told lawmakers in Washington in June.

The system for ''testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken but is virtually nonexistent,'' Shamos added.

Although up to 50 million Americans are expected to vote on touch-screen machines on Nov. 2, federal regulators have virtually no oversight over testing of the technology. The certification process -- partly because the voting machine companies pay for it -- is described as obsolete by those charged with overseeing it.

The testing firms -- CIBER and Wyle Laboratories in Huntsville and SysTest Labs in Denver -- are also inadequately equipped, some critics contend.

Federal regulations specify that every voting system used must be validated by a tester. Yet it has taken more than a year to gain approval for some election software and hardware, leading some states either to do their own testing or order uncertified equipment.

That wouldn't be such an issue if not for troubles with touch screens, which were introduced broadly to modernize voting technology after the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida.

Failures involving touch screens during voting this year in Georgia, Maryland and California and other states prompted questions about the machines' susceptibility to tampering and software bugs.

Also in question is their viability, given the lack of paper records, if recounts are needed in what's shaping up to be a tightly contested presidential race. Paper records of each vote were considered a vital component of the electronic machines used in last week's referendum in Venezuela on whether to recall President Hugo Chávez.

Critics of reliance on touch-screen voting want both paper records and public scrutiny of their software. The machines' makers are resisting.

''Four years after the last presidential election, very little has been done to assure the public of the accuracy and integrity of our voting systems,'' Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., told members of a House subcommittee in June

The downloading of the president '04
Will fears about the new voting machines keep voters away from the polls? And what's going on in Florida, anyway?

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By Farhad Manjoo

Aug. 24, 2004 | Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a corporate lawyer and a former president of the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, vividly remembers the moment she became an election reform activist. It was on Sept. 10, 2002, when she saw yet another election in South Florida go unfathomably awry -- this time a primary election, the first vote in which her county, Miami-Dade, and several neighboring counties would use electronic voting machines at the polls.

"It was jarring," she recalls. The poll workers didn't know how to run the new touch-screen machines. The voters didn't know how to vote on the machines. Some of the systems didn't work at all; they displayed incorrect selections, froze up, acted generally odd. "What moved me to action was seeing all these people -- elderly black folks standing in line for hours without being able to vote, fanning themselves in the hot sun, waiting for the machines to start working so they could get their chance," Rodriguez-Taseff says. "And then, seeing the people coming out of the polls with their eyes dazed over, shocked and amazed by what had happened. They couldn't understand why when they pressed a button next to one candidate, the machine brought up another candidate's name."

Accounts of the perils of electronic voting systems are nothing new. In the last couple of years, it seems we've all heard stories like Rodriguez-Taseff's -- tales of machines breaking down during elections, of systems displaying erroneous selections, of machines behaving badly. When computer security experts have examined some of the voting machines now widely in use, they've discovered enormous security problems. In January, for instance, a team at RABA Technologies, a computer consulting firm in Maryland, managed to devise a half-dozen ways of compromising the votes in touch-screen machines manufactured by Diebold, which produces the systems to be used in Maryland and Georgia this year. (A PDF file of their report can be found here.) And who hasn't heard that voting machine firms may have close relationships with certain politicians? Diebold's CEO is famous online for declaring, in his role as a major Bush-Cheney fundraiser, that he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

According to the political consulting firm Election Data Services, on Election Day this year about 29 percent of the registered voters in the nation -- more than 45 million people -- will find electronic touch-screen systems at their polling places. To computer scientists, the only way to secure these machines is to have them print out "verifiable" paper ballots -- a paper ballot that a voter accepts or rejects as his accurate vote, and which is then counted in the case of a contested election. Such a system will only be available this year for the one-half of 1 percent of voters in Nevada. The rest of us will cast our electronic votes with a kind of leap of faith. We'll have no way of knowing what the machine has actually recorded, and we'll be forced to trust that the system (the officials, the voting company, the procedures, everyone and everything involved in the race) has done everything fairly. We have no choice, really, but to trust the system.

Still, two years after witnessing that Florida debacle, Rodriguez-Taseff, who founded and now heads the Miami-Dade Reform Coalition, a nonpartisan citizen's group dedicated to fixing elections in a county where elections seem eternally unfixable, remains deeply worried about the electronic systems that will be used at her polls this year. But she says that it's too late, too costly and probably not even technically feasible to configure voting machines to print the kind of verifiable ballots that computer scientists have called for, at least for this election. That kind of system, untested and unproven in any real race, "lives in outer space," Rodriguez-Taseff says bluntly.

What worries Rodriguez-Taseff are the far more pragmatic questions of voting procedures and voting practices we'll have to deal with in electronic polling places this year. She fears that polls won't open on time, and that voters won't know how to use the machines, and that officials won't know how to help voters when the machines (inevitably) screw up. She's also concerned that in the event of irregularities, elections laws in Florida won't allow a thorough examination of the machines to see what's gone wrong. The machines in her state are capable of printing out paper "ballot images" of each vote after the election; these ballot images aren't quite the same thing as the voter-verified paper trail that computer scientists have been calling for, but they would constitute some kind of paper record of every voter's choices, and Rodriguez-Taseff believes they could prove useful if there are questions about an election's accuracy. Florida's election rules, however, specifically prohibit manually recounting these ballot images, a situation that Rodriguez-Taseff says will cast even more doubt on election results.

She is also concerned that voters who've heard about the problems with electronic voting machines will disenfranchise themselves. In a recent poll of Florida voters conducted by Quinnipiac University, more than half of the people surveyed reported being less than fully confident that their votes would be counted at all during the upcoming election. The numbers were higher when broken out for minorities and Democrats in the state. About 16 percent of those surveyed said they planned to vote by absentee ballot, and half of them said they were choosing the absentee route because they didn't trust the voting machines.

Rodriguez-Taseff blames political parties -- specifically Democrats trying to court minority voters in Florida -- for this skepticism. She says the parties aren't doing enough to educate voters about what they'll see at the polls this year. Instead of being honest with voters about both the advantages and disadvantages of electronic voting, politicians are trying to paper over the problems, or to urge a quick-fix, not especially good alternative -- absentee voting.

But other voting experts charge that it's not the Democrats' or the Republicans' fault that people don't trust the election system -- it is, instead, the fault of activists who've been constantly criticizing the voting machines for the past two years. "The conversation the way they've been framing it is all going to make people believe that they shouldn't vote," says Ted Selker, a professor at MIT who co-directs the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which produced a landmark study examining how voting technology performed in the 2000 election. He says that electronic voting critics have forced the electorate to become much more cynical and jaded about elections and especially about the integrity of elections officials.

And in an election this tight, is such skepticism something that political parties -- especially Democrats -- want or need? Most touch-screen machines in South Florida were introduced, after all, by Democratic officials who were horrified at the rate of disenfranchisement of minorities in the 2000 presidential vote; the machines were supposed to make voters come back to the polls, not keep them away. Clearly, though, either the machines, or the controversy surrounding the machines, is making people scared.

What if all the activism only succeeds in keeping people away from the polls on Election Day?

Just a few weeks after Florida's 2002 primary, when Salon first reported on the flawed machines and on some computer experts' concerns about the security and accuracy of electronic voting systems, just about everyone we spoke to in the election community told us not to worry. What happened in Florida's primary was caused by ill-prepared poll workers, not buggy machines, elections officials and voting companies said, and they maintained (and still maintain) that no votes were lost. It was said that computer scientists who fretted about electronic voting machines that aren't backed up by a "paper trail" were naive, and they didn't understand the rigorous security procedures that occur in real elections; people who suggested that we shouldn't trust our democracy to private firms were scoffed at, labeled conspiracy theorists.

Over the course of a couple of years, though, calls by elections officials and voting companies for us to remain unworried became almost comically blind to the problems at hand. There have been enough voting machine failures, scandals and exposés in that time to make any concerned citizen weep. These days, nobody can seriously call the critics of such systems naive conspiracy theorists. Thanks to their efforts, we now know that at voting firms such as Diebold, employees don't seem to take security very seriously, as internal documents from the firm seem to suggest; that executives at some companies have suspiciously close relationships with elected officials; and that despite assurances from elections officials, when you vote on an electronic machine, you might never know what the system has done with your choice.

No longer are the activists considered kooks and paranoids, and their fears, backed up by numerous studies pointing out flaws in some electronic voting machines, have thoroughly permeated the mainstream media. Magazines as diverse as the Nation, Vanity Fair and Hustler have devoted considerable space to the issue. In January, the New York Times inaugurated a special editorial page section aimed at "Making Votes Count," and Paul Krugman routinely uses his column to warn of the dangers of paperless electronic voting. When Rodriguez-Taseff's Miami-Dade Reform Coalition recently discovered that the county had lost all of its electronic records from the 2002 election, the news didn't break online, in a techie blog or underground discussion site, as it might have a year or two ago. Instead, the story landed on the front page of the Times.

The coverage has certainly helped convince the public, as well as elections officials, of the dangers of electronic systems. Officials in California, for instance, have mandated that electronic systems include verifiable paper ballots by 2006, and Congress is mulling over legislation to require such machines nationally. David Dill, the Stanford computer scientist who's done much to line up technologists against paperless electronic voting systems, says that he's exceedingly pleased with what critics of electronic voting machines have accomplished so far. When, in early 2003, Dill began asking computer scientists to sign a petition calling for verifiable voting systems -- that is, systems that produce some kind of human-readable physical evidence of a person's vote -- he didn't think he'd be able to convince entire states to change their rules.

But in the face of so much anti-e-voting rhetoric, are voters becoming unreasonably scared or suspicious of elections? They might be. While it's undeniable that Dill and other critics of electronic voting systems have sparked much-needed discussion and action to fix some of the glaring problems with electronic machines, experts like Selker worry the hype is unnecessarily scaring voters. Selker points out that in 2000, most of the votes that were lost because of equipment malfunction were caused by faulty ballot design (remember the "butterfly ballot"?), not faulty machines, and that by far the largest number of votes (several million) lost could be blamed on bad voter registration procedures. These problems should be fixed before we spend money on paper trails for touch-screen machines, Selker says.

While he understands people's trepidation about voting on a system that doesn't have a paper trail, Selker insists that rigorous testing can detect malicious code in paperless voting systems. He recommends, for instance, that elections officials conduct "parallel testing" on voting machines -- on Election Day, they would randomly visit precincts and pull certain machines out of service for the day, then subject those machines to a battery of tests. If those randomly selected machines are found to record and tabulate votes accurately, you can be reasonably sure that the other machines are doing the same thing. (Officials in California are expected to conduct parallel testing on Election Day, as will some officials in electronic voting counties scattered all over the nation. In Maryland, where the choice to go to Diebold machines has sparked several security reviews and a lawsuit calling on a court to prevent the state from using the system, officials are considering using the parallel testing, said Linda Lamone, the administrator of Maryland's Board of Elections.) With such measures in place, Selker says, people can be confident that the electronic machines are working properly. "It'd be terrible if the reason we didn't have a great election is because Americans acted like voters in a Third World country" and didn't trust what happened at the polling place, he says.

David Dill, for his part, insists that it was never his intention to cause people to stay away from the polls, and he says he always tries to let people know that the problems with voting machines are no excuse not to vote. "People have to vote," he says. "I'm not sure how to get that message across. I wouldn't be going to all this trouble to make sure we have a trustworthy election system if I didn't respect the importance of voting." He also emphasized that "we're not talking about a proven conspiracy to steal the election with electronic voting. I'm sure that there'll be some people saying such things, but what I've been saying all along is we should pick the best technology we have available and use that."

There is something of an inconsistency to what Dill says, however. On the one hand, he's insisting that elections can't be trusted unless they're conducted on equipment that produces some kind of verifiable paper trail. At the same time, he's telling voters that they should probably go ahead and vote on machines that don't produce such a trail, machines that he says can't be trusted. Now, most people will probably disregard this inconsistency and, even if they agree with Dill that the machines are flawed, they'll still go ahead and vote. As Dill says, this year's election is far too important to miss out on. But there are probably a fair number of people who are on the fence about voting to begin with -- young people, say, or certain minorities, or members of other groups that tend to vote in low numbers, possibly because they don't think voting will make any real difference to their lives. Dill's suggestion that the voting system is not trustworthy just adds another reason for them to doubt the importance of voting -- and for how many people will it be the deciding factor, the final straw keeping them home on Election Day?

Some Democrats are, understandably, nervous about this idea. Dill says that he's heard from party officials who tell him privately that they support him, but that they couldn't support the cause publicly for fear that it will turn voters away. In Florida, the party is giving voters mixed signals about what they should do. It won't say that the machines are buggy, or that people shouldn't trust them. Yet it has also supported a call for a paper trail. When asked about the party's position, Allie Merzer, a spokeswoman for the Florida Democratic Party, said, "We advocate for any system that increases voter confidence. All voters should have the right to have their vote counted." Merzer said that "in some instances" people had "valid" concerns about electronic voting machines. People who are concerned should vote using other methods, she suggested -- absentee ballots or early voting. In light of people's concerns, the party is "ramping up" its effort to sign people up for absentee ballots, Merzer said.

"Stupid Democrats -- with Democrats as dumb as this who needs Republicans?" counters Lida Rodriguez-Taseff. "They're running around afraid of their own shadows, not talking about the problems with the voting machines, thinking they can lie and manipulate the African-American community into voting for them."

Instead of being mealy-mouthed about the situation, Rodriguez-Taseff would like the Democrats to directly acknowledge and make clear to voters the problems associated with electronic machines. Only when it does this will the party be able to fix the problems, she says. And she thinks that a direct approach will bring more voters to the polls: "They should reach deep into the history of this situation," she says. "They really should be saying, 'Look, the lynch mob didn't scare you away from voting. Poll taxes didn't scare you away. Literacy tests didn't scare you away. Are you going to let a little voting machine scare you away?' Voting is a sign of defiance and courage. Voting at a voting machine even when the voting machine doesn't work is a sign of courage. But instead, they're choosing to lie to people. 'No, the lynch mob is not outside.' 'Oh yeah, your vote will be counted -- just vote for us.' People aren't stupid. And that's why people aren't going to go to the polls, because they're being lied to."

Rodriguez-Taseff also took issue with the Democrats' suggestion that people should vote using absentee ballots instead of going to the polls. Absentee ballots are not known to be any safer than electronic voting systems. Yes, there's a paper ballot -- but it can easily be thrown away, lost, misfiled, damaged, never counted, or be subjected to any number of other harms, whether intentional or accidental. Of course, there are security precautions to prevent these things; but if you're the sort of person who is wary about the security precautions meant to prevent electronic vote fraud, why wouldn't you be similarly wary of the precautions meant to prevent absentee-ballot vote fraud?

Rodriguez-Taseff says that she doesn't intend to vote absentee. With all that can go wrong with such a ballot, she'd prefer to take her chances with the computer. Ted Selker of MIT says the same thing. Indeed, Selker recounted a time he witnessed an incident of absentee ballot tampering in his own voting precinct in Massachusetts. After he cast his vote on one Election Day, he noticed a woman (probably an elections official or poll worker) sitting to the side, looking over a stack of ballots. He asked her what she was doing. "I'm checking the absentee ballots," the woman said, explaining that she was making sure that they were in good enough condition to be filed into the ballot reader. Selker asked her if she'd found any problems. "So she tells me, 'One of them couldn't be read, so I looked at it and I found a mark that wasn't right and I erased it,'" Selker says. "So you see, she changed somebody's ballot without anyone else's permission, on her own. And she admitted it to me. That's what I think about absentee ballots."

David Dill's home precinct in California uses a paper-based optical scan voting system, not an electronic touch-screen. If it did use a touch-screen, would he vote absentee? Dill is aware of the problems with absentee ballots, and choosing between absentee voting and paperless touch-screen voting would be especially difficult, he says. In the end, though, Dill says that he would probably take his chances with the absentee ballot. Rebecca Mercuri, the computer scientist who first developed the idea of a verified paper ballot and is quite skeptical of any machines that lack such a system, says that she, too, would vote absentee instead of on a touch-screen.

One of the few political groups that seems to have no deep division or concern about how people should vote in the upcoming election is the Republican Party. At both national and local levels, the GOP is consistent about what people should do -- they should go to the polls and vote, and they should trust their touch-screens. It is true that in July, the Florida Republicans sent some voters a flier urging them to register for absentee ballots. "The liberal Democrats have already begun their attacks and the new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount," said the flier, which featured a picture of President Bush. "Make sure your vote counts. Order your absentee ballot today." But the party immediately repudiated that message. Everything else that Republican officials -- including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Glenda Hood, the Republican secretary of state -- have said indicates a deep trust in the elections systems as they are.

"That flier most definitely caused confusion," said Joseph Agostini, a spokesman for the Republican Party of Florida. He said that the person responsible for that confusion has "learned the hard way" what the Florida Republicans actually think about electronic voting. "It's something we regret that went out, and we've taken steps to make sure that this misunderstanding doesn't occur again," Agostini said. "Let me say without any uncertainty that we the Republican Party have complete confidence in the Florida election system and its accuracy. Whether it's opti-scan or touch-screen by Diebold, we have no doubts that the election will run smoothly."

If you're concerned with the security of electronic voting systems but you decide to vote on such a machine anyway, you can perhaps rest a bit easier this year, as the controversy surrounding the machines has already led to many extra security safeguards protecting the systems. In large part due to the activists' complaints over the lack of a paper trail, some of the most ill-regarded machines and manufacturers have been subjected to punishing scrutiny. Diebold's machines, for instance, have been thoroughly inspected by several computer researchers, and while many of the researchers found significant problems with the machines, it is at least comforting to know that elections officials and the company made some improvements to the systems. In Maryland, for example, the state and Diebold have implemented many of the safeguards proposed by RABA, a computer firm that found significant vulnerabilities in the Diebold system earlier this year. Linda Lamone, Maryland's election administrator, says that while she has not enjoyed being the subject of intense criticism over her decision to use Diebold's machines, "I like the opportunity to make things better."

Facing similar pressures from critics of electronic voting systems, Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller decided last December to make his state the first in the nation to use paper-equipped touch-screen systems. The machines he chose are manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems, and for the most part they work exactly how proponents of such systems have said all touch-screen systems should work: When a voter steps up to the system and casts a ballot on the touch-screen machine, a printer attached to the machine produces a ballot for the voter to review. (The ballot is printed under a glass screen in order to prevent the voter from walking off with it.) After the voter reviews this paper ballot, he or she can either accept or reject it on the touch-screen; either way, the ballot scrolls away into a locked compartment, and it's then considered the voter's official ballot, trumping whatever electronic ballot the touch-screen machine has stored. In the event that a recount is needed, the paper ballot tape would be counted by hand, and that count would become the ultimate election result, said Alfie Charles, a spokesman for Sequoia.

David Dill and Rebecca Mercuri say they're hopeful that the Nevada test will go well, but both said they thought there'd probably be some mishaps in the state, as there always are in such things. "I do not want the future of the paper-trail movement to be judged on how the machines do in Nevada," Dill said, though he conceded that this would probably happen. If the election in Nevada goes badly, people on the other side of the paper-trail debate will surely point to the race as proof that paper-trail systems can't work.

And, who knows, maybe they'd be right. Indeed, Mercuri said that she's been thinking for some time that even electronic machines equipped with a paper trail "are probably not the best way to vote," because "the touch-screen puts something between the voter and the actual construction of their ballots." For most able-bodied voters, both Mercuri and Dill said, fill-in-the-bubble optical-scan paper ballots are probably the best way to vote.

Many groups and both political parties plan to monitor polling places this year, and given the scrutiny they'll face, you can be sure that any irregularity, no matter how small, will be taken very seriously by officials. Verified Voting, David Dill's group, is calling for technically inclined people to volunteer to monitor precincts across the nation. Verified Voting is also creating a Web-based national error-reporting system, a central clearinghouse for people to report everything that goes wrong on Election Day; this will allow the group to spot when similar problems occur in different locations, say, or to keep track of a specific sort of glitch, giving activists a fuller picture of what happens on Election Day.

In Maryland, Linda Schade, the activist who has sued the state to prevent the Diebold machines from being used in November, says that in the event her suit is unsuccessful, she and her fellow Diebold critics will closely scrutinize what happens on Nov. 2. "I want to have a handful of people at every precinct dedicated to helping people, making sure they know what's going on, that all races are on the ballots, that voters go in with the information they need, and that there are people on hand when there are problems," she says.

Schade says she hopes everything goes well. But what if it doesn't? What if, for example, there's an unexpected result -- what if Maryland, which looks sure to choose Kerry, goes for Bush? Will anyone trust the machines?

In the end, that's the only real test of a voting system. Do people believe what it says, even when what it says seems unbelievable? "If we wake up the next day and Maryland has gone for Bush ...." Schade says, and her voice trails off. There's nothing more to say. The truth is, nobody really knows what will happen then.

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About the writer
Farhad Manjoo is a staff writer for Salon Technology & Business.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/08/...ines/index.html

August 23, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Chill in Florida
By BOB HERBERT

The state police investigation into get-out-the-vote activities by blacks in Orlando, Fla., fits perfectly with the political aims of Gov. Jeb Bush and the Republican Party.

The Republicans were stung in the 2000 presidential election when Al Gore became the first Democrat since 1948 to carry Orange County, of which Orlando is the hub. He could not have carried the county without the strong support of black voters, many of whom cast absentee ballots.

The G.O.P. was stung again in 2003 when Buddy Dyer, a Democrat, was elected mayor of Orlando. He won a special election to succeed Glenda Hood, a three-term Republican who was appointed Florida secretary of state by Governor Bush. Mr. Dyer was re-elected last March. As with Mr. Gore, the black vote was an important factor.

These two election reverses have upset Republicans in Orange County and statewide. Moreover, the anxiety over Democratic gains in Orange County is entwined with the very real fear among party stalwarts that Florida might go for John Kerry in this year's presidential election.

It is in this context that two of the ugliest developments of the current campaign season should be viewed.

"A Democrat can't win a statewide election in Florida without a high voter turnout - both at the polls and with absentee ballots - of African-Americans," said a man who is close to the Republican establishment in Florida but asked not to be identified. "It's no secret that the name of the game for Republicans is to restrain that turnout as much as possible. Black votes are Democratic votes, and there are a lot of them in Florida."

The two ugly developments - both focused on race - were the heavy-handed investigation by Florida state troopers of black get-out-the-vote efforts in Orlando, and the state's blatant attempt to purge blacks from voter rolls through the use of a flawed list of supposed felons that contained the names of thousands of African-Americans and, conveniently, very few Hispanics.

Florida is one of only a handful of states that bar convicted felons from voting, unless they successfully petition to have their voting rights restored. The state's "felon purge" list had to be abandoned by Glenda Hood, the secretary of state (and, yes, former mayor of Orlando), after it became known that the flawed list would target blacks but not Hispanics, who are more likely in Florida to vote Republican. The list also contained the names of thousands of people, most of them black, who should not have been on the list at all.

Ms. Hood, handpicked by Governor Bush to succeed the notorious Katherine Harris as secretary of state, was forced to admit that the felons list was a mess. She said the problems were unintentional. What clearly was intentional was the desire of Ms. Hood and Governor Bush to keep the list secret. It was disclosed only as a result of lawsuits filed under Florida's admirable sunshine law.

Meanwhile, the sending of state troopers into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando was said by officials to be a response to allegations of voter fraud in last March's mayoral election. But the investigation went forward despite findings in the spring that appeared to show that the allegations were unfounded.

Why go forward anyway? Well, consider that the prolonged investigation dovetails exquisitely with that crucial but unspoken mission of the G.O.P. in Florida: to keep black voter turnout as low as possible. The interrogation of elderly black men and women in their homes has already frightened many voters and intimidated elderly get-out-the-vote volunteers.

The use of state troopers to zero in on voter turnout efforts is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, in Florida. But the head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Guy Tunnell, who was also handpicked by Governor Bush, has been unfazed by the mounting criticism of this use of the state police. His spokesmen have said a "person of interest" in the investigation is Ezzie Thomas, a 73-year-old black man who just happens to have done very well in turning out the African-American vote.

From the G.O.P. perspective, it doesn't really matter whether anyone is arrested in the Orlando investigation, or even if a crime was committed. The idea, in Orange County and elsewhere, is to send a chill through the democratic process, suppressing opposing votes by whatever means are available.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/opinion/...Ed%2fColumnists

Hoodwinked
Why is Florida's voting system so corrupt?
By Ann Louise Bardach
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2004, at 12:45 PM PT

At least there won't be chad this time
One indicator of the dire state of electoral affairs in Florida is the fact that Theresa LePore, the election supervisor who designed the infamous butterfly ballot, will once again be on the job. It was Ms. LePore's ballot that awarded the votes of thousands of elderly Jews in Palm Beach County to Pat Buchanan, arguably costing Al Gore the election. Given the multitude of other failures in the state's voting system, that's the good news.

In the wake of the most scandalous election in U.S. history, which led to an unprecedented 36-day recount, most Americans believed that state and federal authorities would take steps to ensure that the country would never again go through such an ordeal. But in truth very few changes have been made, and those that have been implemented have raised new concerns. Yet nearly all of Flordia's current troubles share a common denominator—they were decisions made or endorsed by Florida's secretary of state and chief elections officer, Glenda Hood, who was handpicked by Gov. Jeb Bush in November 2002.

Gov. Bush's own task force on the 2000 election recommended that the Legislature change county election supervisors from elected to nonpartisan positions. But the Legislature did not act on this recommendation, nor on the suggestion of election reform groups that the secretary of state also be selected by a nonpartisan commission, to ensure the necessary firewall between election officials and politicians.

There are excellent reasons for this recommendation. Following the contentious 2000 recount, e-mails on former Sec. of State Katherine Harris' computer revealed that she had been in contact with Jeb Bush during the recount, contrary to both their claims. Miami Herald reporter Meg Laughlin discovered that e-mail messages sent to Jeb Bush from Harris had been deleted after the recount. Harris then had the operating system of her computer changed, a procedure that erased all its data. "What was odd about what she did," said Mark Seibel, an editor at the Herald, "was that they installed an old operating system—not a new one—which makes you wonder why they did it."

According to Gallup polls taken yearly since 2000, roughly 50 percent of Americans believe that the election of George W. Bush was either "won on a technicality" or "stolen." Only 34 percent are "very confident" that the vote will be counted accurately in November.

But rather than allay those doubts by selecting an election supervisor of unimpeachable integrity, Gov. Bush seems to have found an equal to Katherine Harris in Glenda Hood, the former Republican mayor of Orlando. True, Hood is not juggling Harris' other job—state chairman for George W. Bush's campaign—but she has done little to assure Floridians that all the votes will be counted this time around.

For one, Hood and Jeb Bush have strongly endorsed the state's Republican-controlled legislature's new rule that outlaws manual recounts. This means that if any of the new optical-scan or touch-screen machines fail—as they did in the 2002 elections; and the recent March primaries; and just last week, when a backup system failed in a test run in Miami-Dade—there will be no recourse for counting votes. A coalition of election-reform groups has challenged this rule, and Rep. Robert Wexler of Palm Beach sued in federal court after a state appeals court dismissed the matter, ruling that while the right to vote is guaranteed, a perfect voting system is not.

Unlike the recent elections in Venezuela, where the new touch-screen voting machine provided every voter with a receipt, Floridians will have to take the word of Hood and Bush that their vote was counted.

To the embarrassment of Hood and Jeb Bush, even the state's Republican Party has voiced its doubts about the electronic voting system. A flier disseminated last month by the party, featuring a picture of a smiling President Bush striking a thumbs-up sign, urged Republicans living in Miami-Dade County to vote by absentee ballot even if they will be home on Election Day. "Make sure your vote counts," read the flier. "Order your absentee ballot today.'' Now many Democrats also believe that the only safe vote is an absentee ballot vote.

But it is in the "low-tech area" of absentee ballots, as Miami Herald columnist Jim DeFede puts it, "that things get really funky." Most critically, Hood and Gov. Bush have championed a new state law that abolishes Florida's longtime requirement that absentee ballots be witnessed. While some other states, like California, do not require witnesses, no state has Florida's history of institutional vote fraud.

Indeed, election fraud in Florida long precedes the 2000 debacle. In some counties it extends all the way back to the early days of Florida's statehood, in 1845. Florida's political culture derives from several different regions—the north, near Georgia, has more in common with the southern part of the United States; the south with Latin America—so election fraud tends to differ in the two regions. In the northern part of the state, for example, sheriffs have been known to let certain boxes of ballots—thought to be unfavorable to a particular politician—fall out of their squad cars and tumble into the Gulf of Mexico. In the south, notably Miami-Dade, a remarkable number of dead people have been known to rise up and make it to the polls. In 1998, Miami's mayoral election of Xavier Suarez was overthrown for a host of irregularities, including the fact that a man named Manuel Yip, who had died four years earlier, had voted for Suarez. (In fact, it was the fourth time he had voted since his death in 1994.)

But most of the fraud that has dogged Florida centers on absentee ballots. In the mayoral election mentioned above, approximately 5,000 absentee ballots were found to be fraudulent. Some folks were unaware they had voted, some did not live in Miami, and (naturally, being Florida) some were dead. In addition, many of the ballots had the same witness. One Miami vegetable peddler had witnessed more than 70 absentee ballots. And some of the city's poorest had been paid $10 to vote for Suarez. Without the state's witness requirement, officials would never have been able to prove that the absentee ballots were bogus. Buying ballots is another current problem. In 1998, an election volunteer was caught selling ballots to undercover agents. And just last week, the Cuban exile columnist Max Lesnik reported that absentee ballots were being sold on Miami's Calle Ocho for $25 apiece.

So, by doing away with the witness requirement, Hood, Gov. Bush, and the Florida Legislature have removed the only existing brake on absentee-voter fraud. It's now open season in the Sunshine State.

There is also the matter of Florida's large elderly population, which can be susceptible to manipulation. For example: For years, until he disappeared in 1982 after a drug-smuggling indictment, a Bay of Pigs veteran named Rafael Villaverde bused hundreds of Cuban exile ancianos in Miami-Dade from old-age homes to the polls so they could deliver the vote for the Republican Party.

Then there is the issue of the felon list. Florida is one of only seven states that does not automatically restore a felon's voting rights after his or her release from prison (another of the ignored recommendations made by the commission Jeb Bush created). More than 52 percent of Florida's felon population happens to be African-American, a demographic that voted Democratic in 2000 in unprecedented numbers. No matter whether one's crime has been marijuana possession, check bouncing, or DUIs, anyone who has been convicted of a felony must endure an arduous obstacle course in order to have their voting rights restored. Most will have to face the state's clemency board chaired by Gov. Bush and two other Republican officials. There is no appeal process. One veteran official with Florida's Corrections Department, who asked for anonymity, noted that, "We have the president's brother deciding whether people get to vote or not vote, which strikes me as a conflict of interest."

How critical is the felon issue? Consider that in Florida in 2003, more than 54,000 felons were released or completed their parole; and the ACLU alleges that more than 600,000 former felons living in Florida had been improperly deprived of their right to vote by Katherine Harris' policies in the 2000 election. (She and Gov. Bush instituted "purge lists" to ensure that no former felon voted without state approval.)

About the only thing that could restore confidence in Florida electoral procedures would be Hood's immediate resignation; her successor should then be chosen by a bipartisan commission. And as Gov. Bush cannot possibly be an impartial observer in his brother's quest for another term, he should recuse himself from every aspect involving the vote count in Florida. He also needs to flex his power with his famously compliant Legislature to repeal the new laws eliminating manual recounts and witnessed absentee ballots. In addition, all felons who have repaid their debt to society, following completion of their sentences, should have their voting rights restored.

If these changes are not made, Florida cannot conduct a credible election come November.

Ann Louise Bardach covers Florida politics for Slate. She is the author of Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana and the editor of Cuba: A Traveler's Literary Companion.
Photograph of Judge Robert Rosenberg by Mayer Robert/Sygma/Corbis.

http://www.slate.com/id/2105524/

The Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole

by Bev Harris
Thu, 08/26/2004

Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator -- 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.

Public officials: If you are in a county that uses GEMS 1.18.18, GEMS 1.18.19, or GEMS 1.18.23, your secretary or state may not have told you about this. You're the one who'll be blamed if your election is tampered with. [...]

Whether you vote absentee, on touch-screens, or on paper ballot (fill in the bubble) optical scan machines, all votes are ultimately brought to the "mother ship," the central tabulator at the county which adds them all up and creates the results report.

These systems are used in over 30 states and each counts up to two million votes at once. [...]

The central tabulator is far more vulnerable than the touch screen terminals. Think about it: If you were going to tamper with an election, would you rather tamper with 4,500 individual voting machines, or with just one machine, the central tabulator which receives votes from all the machines? Of course, the central tabulator is the most desirable target.

Findings: The GEMS central tabulator program is incorrectly designed and highly vulnerable to fraud. Election results can be changed in a matter of seconds. Part of the program we examined appears to be designed with election tampering in mind. [...]

Much of this information, originally published on July 8, 2003, has since been corroborated by formal studies (RABA) and by Diebold's own internal memos written by its programmers.

Not a single location has yet implemented the security measures needed to mitigate the risk. [...]

In Nov. 2003, Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris, and director Jim March, filed a Qui Tam lawsuit in California citing fraudulent claims by Diebold, seeking restitution for the taxpayer. Diebold claimed its voting system was secure. It is, in fact, highly vulnerable to and appears to be designed for fraud.

The California Attorney General was made aware of this problem nearly a year ago. Harris and Black Box Voting Associate Director Andy Stephenson visited the Washington Attorney General's office in Feb. 2004 to inform them of the problem. Yet, nothing has been done to inform election officials who are using the system, nor have appropriate security safeguards been implemented. In fact, Gov. Arnold Swarzenegger recently froze the funds, allocated by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, which would have paid for increased scrutiny of the voting system in California.

On April 21, 2004, Harris appeared before the California Voting Systems Panel, and presented the smoking gun document showing that Diebold had not corrected the GEMS flaws, even though it had updated and upgraded the GEMS program.

On Aug. 8, 2004, Harris demonstrated to Howard Dean how easy it is to change votes in GEMS, on CNBC TV.

On Aug. 11, 2004, Jim March formally requested that the California Voting Systems Panel watch the demonstration of the double set of books in GEMS. They were already convened, and the time for Harris was already allotted. Though the demonstration takes only 3 minutes, the panel refused to allow it and would not look. They did, however, meet privately with Diebold afterwords, without informing the public or issuing any report of what transpired.

On Aug. 18, 2004, Harris and Stephenson, together with computer security expert Dr. Hugh Thompson, and former King County Elections Supervisor Julie Anne Kempf, met with members of the California Voting Systems Panel and the California Secretary of State's office to demonstrate the double set of books. The officials declined to allow a camera crew from 60 Minutes to film or attend.

The Secretary of State's office halted the meeting, called in the general counsel for their office, and a defense attorney from the California Attorney General's office. They refused to allow Black Box Voting to videotape its own demonstration. They prohibited any audiotape and specified that no notes of the meeting could be requested in public records requests.

The undersecretary of state, Mark Kyle, left the meeting early, and one voting panel member, John Mott Smith, appeared to sleep through the presentation.

On Aug. 23, 2004, CBC TV came to California and filmed the demonstration.

On Aug 30 and 31, Harris and Stephenson will be in New York City to demonstrate the double set of books for any public official and any TV crews who wish to see it.

On Sept. 1, another event is planned in New York City, and on Sept. 21, Harris and Stephenson intend to demonstrate the problem for members and congress and the press in Washington D.C. [...]


Everyone, please copy&paste this article everywhere else you visit on the Internet !
Every citizen must have the opportunity to review this latest information.

"Voter terrorism"
For decades, Republicans have mounted highly organized operations to discourage minorities from voting. Experts say there's no reason to believe this year's presidential campaign will be any different.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Farhad Manjoo

Sept. 21, 2004 | Philadelphia's 2003 mayoral election did not set especially high standards for civic discourse in the city where American democracy was born. Talking to Philadelphians about the bitter contest between John Street, the African-American incumbent Democrat, and Sam Katz, the white Republican challenger, is like discussing an election in some upstart Latin American democracy. During the course of the race, Street's office was bugged by the FBI, a Katz field office was "firebombed" by an unlit Molotov cocktail, and on Election Day, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, 84 voting-related incidents were called in to police, including "assaults, disturbances, threats, harassment, vandalism" and one bona fide "polling-place brawl."

Amid the general ugliness of the race, though, there's one incident that Democrats in the city remember with a distinct sense of unease. The story, which was first reported by The American Prospect in February, and has since been broadcast by activist groups like MoveOn.org, goes like this: In an attempt to intimidate African-Americans and deter them from showing up at the polls, the Katz campaign, or one of its associates, put together a team of men dressed in official-looking attire -- dark suits, lapel pins bearing insignia of federal or local law-enforcement agencies -- and sent them into areas of the city with large black populations. According to Sherry Swirsky, a local antitrust attorney who is active in Democratic politics and who worked as an election monitor that day, the men carried clipboards and drove around in unmarked black vans.

"Some of them were just driving around neighborhoods, looking menacing," Swirsky recalls. "But others were going up to voters and giving them misinformation about the kind of I.D. they needed in order to vote. The truth is, you don't need any I.D. to vote. But they were telling them they needed a major credit card, a passport or driver's license. They were telling them it was risky to vote if they had any outstanding child support bills. Imagine the menacing presence of a bunch of big white guys in black cars who look like they're law-enforcement people telling you all these things."

Swirsky has monitored several elections in Philadelphia and elsewhere and headed the Democrats' presidential recount effort in New Mexico in 2000. But what happened in Philadelphia, she says, is the most sophisticated election intimidation campaign she's ever seen. It was not a sick prank by one or two racists but instead a systematic effort that required planning and not-insignificant outlays of money (the uniforms, the vehicles and the men, some of whom were reportedly recruited from out of state). "There was such a level of coordination there that if its objectives were not improper, I would say I admired it for the professionalism," she says.

Swirsky met dozens of voters who were intimidated by strange men in uniforms; in a survey of black voters taken after the election, 7 percent reported being accosted by voter-intimidation efforts. "I talked to a number of them and tried to assuage their concerns," she says. "I told them they should go out and vote: 'Those people were wrong. You don't need that kind of identification. No, you're not going to get arrested if you owe child support and you go out to vote.'" But despite her efforts -- and even though, in the end, Street won the race -- Swirsky is certain that many black voters stayed away from the polls that day.

The voter-intimidation campaign that Republicans mounted in Philadelphia was not an anomaly. Instead, it marked a routine occurrence in American elections, a national scandal that rarely makes the front page. The sad fact is that voter-intimidation efforts aimed at minorities have been carried out in just about every major election over the past 20 years. The campaigns are almost always mounted by Republicans who aim to reduce the turnout of overwhelmingly Democratic minority voters at the polls. Now, in what's shaping up to be a razor-thin presidential election, Democrats across the country are pointing to what occurred in Philadelphia as an example of what they have to fear from Republicans this election year.

To Americans today, the idea that a major political party actively plans to disenfranchise minority voters may seem anachronistic; we'd like to believe that such tactics would no longer be tolerated in our nation. But over the last two decades, various arms of the Republican Party, or groups working for Republican candidates -- at the national, state and local levels -- have carried out well-documented projects designed to intimidate blacks and other minorities.

Under the guise of "ballot security" measures, supposedly designed to preserve an election's "integrity" and reduce "voter fraud," Republicans have organized off-duty cops to patrol heavily minority precincts, put up threatening signs, and mailed out sternly worded "bulletins" warning of the consequences of voter fraud. They've also systematically challenged the residency of thousands of minority voters in several elections, and they've rigged voter rolls to exclude minorities eligible to vote, which occurred in Florida in 2000. These were not ad hoc efforts. As in Philadelphia's mayor's race, they were often planned and executed for the specific purpose of reducing black turnout in order to boost Republican political fortunes.

The Republican Party denies any plans to suppress the minority vote this year; in fact, President Bush has recently attempted to court black voters. Swirsky and other Democrats who fear that the GOP may attempt to suppress the black vote can produce no proof that Republicans are up to no good. But many independent observers are suspicious. "As we look at the last 12 months or so, we are extremely concerned about incidents indicating that Republican officials may be planning to challenge minority voters," says Ralph Neas, president of the nonpartisan People for the American Way Foundation.

Neas is referring not just to the Philadelphia mayor's race but also to a widely publicized absentee ballot-fraud investigation conducted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Orlando this summer. In that investigation, elderly African-American voters were visited at their homes by police officers curious about their voting behavior. While Florida officials deny any attempt to intimidate voters, critics say the investigation is emblematic of the kind of under-the-radar, state-sponsored intimidation program that Republican officials have conducted in the past. On Friday, the Justice Department disclosed that it has initiated a civil rights investigation into what occurred in Orlando.

Currently the NAACP, People for the American Way Foundation, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and other voting-rights groups are putting together what they call a historic effort to forestall voter-intimidation tactics this year. In the days before the vote and on Election Day itself, these groups will send an armada of lawyers to polling places across 17 states to watch for and react to any legal challenges that come up -- an attempt to derail the most outrageous intimidation campaigns.

Many black voters themselves are intensely aware of the prospect of suppression tactics -- and they're ready for them, says Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP. "This is part of the folklore of black America, especially since 2000," he says. "Many people have tales to tell about this happening to people they know."

Still, despite the counter-intimidation efforts and increased awareness, elections experts still predict that suppression programs will likely succeed in turning away many voters at the polls this year. How many? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Nobody knows. But Bond notes that it took less than 600 votes in Florida to swing the election to Bush last time, and he believes that more than 600 African-American Gore voters were disenfranchised there. If this year's "election is as close as everyone believes it will be," Bond says, "and if they frighten just 600 voters away from the polls," minority voter-intimidation tactics may very well determine the next president of the United States.

In July, John Pappageorge, a Republican state representative in Troy, Mich., attended a local party meeting to discuss with colleagues the Republicans' chances of winning the state for Bush in November. In the course of the discussion, according to an account published in the Detroit Free Press, Pappageorge declared, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election." Detroit, of course, has a huge minority population; about 83 percent of its residents are African-American. Pappageorge's statement was roundly condemned and he quickly apologized for it, insisting that he wasn't suggesting anything racist or illegal in calling for a suppression of the Detroit vote. As a matter of politic strategy, Pappageorge was probably right.

A concise political axiom underlies the Republican rationale for mounting voter-suppression campaigns aimed at blacks: African-Americans don't vote for Republicans. In the 2000 election, Bush received about 9 percent of the black vote and nobody believes he has a chance of improving on that this year. His father received about the same percentage of the African-American vote, as did Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

It's true that despite those consistently low numbers, Republican presidential candidates sometimes make a play for African-American voters, as Bush recently did in his much-heralded speech to the Urban League. But these efforts are obviously disingenuous, Democrats contend, because the last thing a Republican candidate would want is more people from an overwhelmingly Democratic demographic coming to the polls. The likelier reason that Republicans occasionally attempt to woo black voters is as a way of signaling to whites that they're compassionate.

Indeed, strategists say, both the Republicans' and Democrats' efforts to win black voters rarely have anything to do with specific policies that might be of importance to African-Americans. Since Democratic presidents and governors usually can't win without huge African-American turnouts, and since Republicans can't win with such turnouts, each party's approach to African-American voters is at best a numbers game. Democrats are forever working on methods to increase the minority turnout, while Republicans try to keep as many minorities at home as possible on Election Day. That is not a scurrilous charge against the GOP, though it sounds like one; it's the way politics is practiced in America.

At least it's the way politics has been practiced since the early 1980s, when Republicans first began implementing their most brazen voter-intimidation campaigns. In the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial election, the RNC and its affiliates devised a program that they claimed was aimed at reducing voter fraud. The party hired police officers to patrol minority neighborhoods in Passaic County and put up signs warning that the election was being monitored "by the Ballot Security Task Force." The plan was obviously meant to intimidate voters rather than secure the polls. When Democrats filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Republicans over the tactics, the national GOP and the New Jersey Republicans were forced to sign a consent decree promising to refrain from the sorts of suppression activities they employed in the 1981 race. (The election, incidentally, was won by the Republican candidate, Thomas Kean, who later went on to chair the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks.)

But the pull of voter intimidation was too strong for the Republicans, the math of suppression irresistible. In 1986 the party hired an outside company to conduct another ballot-security initiative, this one aimed at challenging the voting eligibility of 31,000 voters in Louisiana, the vast majority of whom were black. According to a 2002 study of voter-intimidation practices that Swirsky wrote for the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, when Democrats again sued over the ballot-security initiative, they unearthed a Republican planning document that stated that the Louisiana program "could keep the African-American vote down considerably."

In 1987, because of that evidence, the RNC was once again forced to enter into an agreement with Democrats, this one requiring the federal courts to preapprove all of the Republicans' ballot-security programs. But as Swirsky reports in her study, even this order "did not end Republican efforts to depress minority voter turnout."

In the 1990 Senate contest between Jesse Helms and Harvey Gannt in North Carolina, the state Republican Party mailed out "voter registration bulletins" to 150,000 homes in minority precincts, warning that voters would need to bring a raft of personal information to the polls on Election Day, and adding, falsely, that a voter "must have lived in [a] precinct for at least the previous 30 days" to be eligible to vote there. The mailings also warned of penalties for providing inaccurate information to elections officials. The Justice Department later brought a legal challenge against the state party over the mailings and Republicans agreed, once again, to curtail their efforts to suppress minority-voter turnout.

You can guess what the Republicans did after that -- more of the same. In August, the People for the American Way Foundation and the NAACP released a report detailing the past two decades' sorry history of voter-intimidation efforts. The report reads like a chronicle of the Jim Crow South, except the dates are in the 1980s and 1990s, and the locations are not limited to points below the Mason-Dixon line.

In 1988 in Hidalgo County, Texas, the Republican Party ran ads targeted at Latino voters. They warned of prison sentences for non-U.S. citizens who go to the polls, adding that officials "will be watching." In South Dakota in 2002, the state attorney general devised an anti-voting-fraud plan that involved sending law-enforcement officials to question 2,000 newly registered Native American voters. There was no similar probe, the report notes, "to investigate new registrants in counties without significant Native American populations, despite the fact that those counties contained most of the new registrations in the state."

In Dillon County, S.C., in 1998, Son Kinon, a Republican state official, mailed out 3,000 brochures to black voters warning, "You have always been my friend, so don't chance GOING TO JAIL on Election Day! ... SLED [South Carolina Law Enforcement Division] agents, FBI agents, people from the Justice Department and undercover agents will be in Dillon County working this election. People who you think are your friends, and even your neighbors, could be the very ones that turn you in. THIS ELECTION IS NOT WORTH GOING TO JAIL!!!!!!"

To many African-Americans, the most notorious effort to disenfranchise blacks occurred in Florida in 2000. During the election, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Republican state officials "failed to fulfill their responsibilities." In the aftermath of the debacle, numerous media reports surfaced of organized efforts to keep blacks away from the polls -- tales of police roadblocks erected in black neighborhoods, of election officials asking voters for unnecessary identification, of people being forcibly turned away from the polls by police. A few of these stories were discredited. Yet when the commission investigated the election, it corroborated many of them.

Floridians told the commission that they saw police cars illegally patrolling areas near polling places. They testified that in minority neighborhoods, polling places were closed early or were moved without any notice. The commission declared that election problems in Florida resulted "in an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement, with a significantly disproportionate impact on African American voters."

Much of the disenfranchisement was caused by antiquated voting machines used in minority neighborhoods; while just 11 percent of Florida's voters are African-American, more than half of the spoiled ballots -- more than 90,000 of the votes tossed out -- were cast by blacks. But another major source of disenfranchisement was the state's erroneous purging from voter rolls of thousands of suspected felons, the vast majority of whom were African-Americans. The purging occurred, the commission concluded, as a result of the "overzealous" efforts of Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris to combat voter fraud. "African American voters were placed on purge lists more often and more erroneously than Hispanic or white voters," the commission also noted. Could it be, many Democrats wonder, that Hispanic voters were not purged because, at least in Florida, they tend to vote Republican?

Year after year, race after race, Republicans have launched efforts to deter minorities from the polls. Yet they have suffered few legal or political costs stemming from the shameful practices. Why? Part of the reason, voting-rights activists say, is it's very difficult to prove the connections between specific vote-suppression tactics and the candidates who've apparently launched them. The candidates and campaigns who plan these efforts often hire third-party consultants to take care of the dirty work, so plausible deniability can always be maintained. Moreover, when Republicans are caught trying to