The Real Scandal Is the Voting Machines Themselves
The ongoing electoral insanity has confirmed something that I and a small
number of people who have occasionally thought about these things have known
for a while: Over the past three-and-a-half decades we in the United States
have sold out our election process–which, unless I’m very much mistaken, is
the foundation of our democracy (such as it is)–to a small but lucrative
cadre of for-profit businesses and their wildly defective products. Which
they manufactured, in some cases, many years ago, but which are still used to
tally votes today. The real scandal of this election is that most of the
problems in the voting and vote-counting systems have been well-known for
years, and no one has done a damn thing about them.More than 11 years ago, I
wrote a detailed article titled "Vote of No Confidence" for the Silicon
Valley weekly, Metro. In the article, I discussed how "The next president of
the United States may not be chosen by the voters. Instead, he may be the
choice of whoever controls or manipulates the computer systems that tally the
votes." The now famous "hanging chad" was but one small aspect of this story.
(Until last month, I was one of the few citizens of the United States who had
actually heard, much less uttered, the words "hanging chad.")
A deeper problem lay in the security and integrity of the software used to
run the vote count. The software for most of the machines, I learned, was
incomprehensible–what computer scientists described as "spaghetti code" and
"a bucket of worms," prone to error and vulnerable to deliberate manipulation
in a way that would be, for all purposes, undetectable. An ethically
challenged software engineer could write a little program to make the count
come out however he wanted it to, and no one would ever know. Even if a
fraudulent program were detectable, someone would have to look at it first to
detect it. And that was impossible, because the private companies that owned
the software considered the code a protected trade secret.
In fact, there are today two companies that dominate the industry. Election
Systems & Software, whose machines count about 60 percent of the votes
nationwide, and Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment of Jamestown, NY. In 1993,
Sequoia Pacific won a $60 million contract from New York City to take the
city into the electronic voting age–only to have the contract ditched this
year.
No one is saying that those companies, or any of their much smaller would-be
competitors, don’t try their best–and certainly not that they’re dishonest.
The flaws are inherent to computerized voting systems. I found, 11 years ago,
that there was no particular reason to trust the outcome of any election in
the United States anymore. At least not those counted by computer, which is
most of them.
Since 1989 there has been no reason to update that opinion. Despite having
authored that retroactively prescient article, filled with startling facts
about the iffy nature of American elections, I have not, over the past
decade, spent an undue amount of time waiting by the mailbox for my Pulitzer
Prize. Why not? Because I was hardly the first person to make note of these
facts. No less a source than The New York Times ran a series about the
vulnerability of elections in 1985, by reporter David Burnham, who also wrote
the book The Rise of the Computer State.
As early as 1974, the U.S. General Accounting Office commissioned a study
that found significant accuracy and security problems in the methods used to
count votes by computer. In 1986, the California Attorney General’s office
released a report criticizing computerized vote-counting systems for "lacking
a reliable audit trail and having a program structure that is very difficult
even for computer professionals to understand." In 1988, the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (then called the National Bureau of
Standards) released a study by computer scientist Roy. G. Saltman that
concluded, in the typically understated language of government documents,
that "it has been clearly shown that audit trails that document election
results, as well as general practices to assure accuracy, integrity and
security, can be considerably improved."
Somewhat more bluntly, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
followed up on Saltman’s report in their fall 1988 newsletter, declaring:
"America’s fundamental democratic institution is ripe for abuse... It is
ridiculous for our country to run such a haphazard, easily violated election
system. If we are to retain confidence in our election results, we must
institute adequate security procedures in computerized vote tallying, and
return election control to the citizenry."
Also in 1988 (something of a watershed year for computer-voting exposes), the
journalist Ronnie Dugger, founder of The Texas Observer, authored a
staggeringly long and meticulously researched essay for The New Yorker (when
The New Yorker was still publishing staggeringly long and meticulously
researched essays) in which he singled out the "Vote-o-Matic" system in
particular–still a popular computer voting system, and the very one used in
those disputed Florida counties–as possibly "disenfranchising hundreds of
thousands of voters."
Dugger explained how computer systems that tabulate elections are shot
through with error and wide open to what, more recently, James Baker might
call "mischief." I talked to Dugger back in 1989, when I was writing my own
article. Freed from the genteel strictures of New Yorker house style, he told
me, "The whole damn thing is mind-boggling. They could steal the presidency."
•
Computerized vote-counting is a terrible system. This is only news to those
who haven’t been paying attention. Every problem that’s arisen in the 2000
election has been on the public record for more than a decade. Yet here we
are. Why?
My first thought was that less-wealthy counties can’t afford the latest
technology. They’re stuck with outdated systems like the Vote-o-Matic, for
reasons of pure economics. But David Lublin doesn’t think so. He teaches in
the American University School of Public Affairs Dept. of Government, and is
now on his second grant from the National Science Foundation to collect
election data from around the country.
"I wouldn’t say the wealthier places always have better or well-conducted
elections," he says. "Often that is the case, but there are surprising
exceptions. It depends on the willingness of the local county authority to
spend the money, or the state to require them to do it."
Nor, for that matter, is increasingly sophisticated computer technology the
answer. In fact, it may only make the problems even worse. For example, the
next generation of voting computers what are what’s known as DREs ("Direct
Recording Electronic"), kind of voting ATMs that allow voters to cast
ballot-free votes on a video monitor by pressing buttons, or even on a touch
screen.
"DREs are even worse," says Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist at Bryn
Mawr who’s studied computerized elections for more than 10 years and recently
finished her doctoral dissertation on that exact topic at the University of
Pennsylvania. DREs leave no "audit trail" (paper trail) whatsoever, she
points out. Votes are recorded directly onto a memory cartridge. There is
absolutely nothing to ensure that the vote that registers on the screen is
the vote that gets recorded on the cartridge, or that the vote that is
recorded on the cartridge is the vote that prints out on paper.
"Unless the voter sees that paper trail, how do they know?" she says. "I
could teach a 12-year-old to write a program that shows one thing on the
screen and another thing on the printout."
While some newer election computing companies say they’ve figured out how to
create a foolproof electronic audit trail, Mercuri dismisses such claims as
"preposterous." There’s no way to make sure that software is 100 percent
pure. "If we could do that in computer science, we’d have the virus problem
solved," she says.
Since computers were first used to count votes in the early 1960s, there have
been dozens of instances of computer error in elections. And that’s counting
only the known errors. There have been no verified frauds, but that may be
only because computer fraud is nearly impossible to verify. Former Florida
Gov. Kenneth "Buddy" MacKay suggested last week to Carl Bernstein (in an
article on the website Voter.com) that computer fraud may have been behind
his highly suspicious 1988 Senate loss to Connie Mack. MacKay lost by 33,000
votes out of four million. In a development that foreshadowed what happened
this year, the tv networks had "called" a MacKay victory only to later tell
their viewers "never mind."
Funny thing was, in four large counties–Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and
Hillsborough–200,000 fewer voters registered votes in the Senate race than in
the presidential race. That’s a 20 percent drop-off. In other counties, and
in earlier elections, the drop-off was around 1 percent. Computer error or
tampering remains the most likely explanation for the alarming discrepancy,
though none was ever proved. MacKay tried to get a look at the source code
for the vote-counting software but was rebuffed by the election equipment
companies who declared it proprietary.
"What could have happened in 1988," MacKay told Bernstein last week, "was
that the machines could have been programmed so that in my big precincts
every tenth vote got counted wrong."
Another "Sore Loserman," perhaps? Maybe–but MacKay was echoing what Peter
Neumann, principal scientist at SRI International’s Menlo Park, CA, computer
lab (and author of the 1995 book Computer-Related Risks), said back then.
Writing about the MacKay-Mack election in Risks Digest, Neumann noted,
"Remembering that these computer systems reportedly permit operators to turn
off the audit trails and to change arbitrary memory locations on the fly, it
seems natural to wonder whether anything fishy went on."
Here are a few other amusing anecdotes from the annals of wacky election
computing:
In Middlesex County, NJ, this year, a DRE vote-counting computer went on the
fritz. It recorded votes for both the Republican and Democratic candidates in
the county freeholder’s race, but simply wiped out all votes for their
respective runningmates.
In the 1985 Dallas, TX, mayor’s race, Starke Taylor defeated Max Goldblatt in
an election so controversial that it led the Texas legislature to investigate
the flaws in the state’s computerized vote-tabulation process. Allegedly,
according to the Dallas Morning News, a computer had been shut off and given
"new instructions" after it showed Goldblatt leading by 400 votes.
During the Democratic presidential primary of 1980, in Orange County, CA, a
"programmer’s error" gave about 15,000 votes cast for Jimmy Carter and Ted
Kennedy to Jerry Brown–and, of all people, Lyndon LaRouche.
There are many more such tales. Computers in Oklahoma skipped 10 percent of
the ballots in a 1986 election. A power surge in San Francisco switched votes
from one candidate to another. A Moline, IL, city alderman actually took
office in 1985 only to step down three months later when someone figured out
that a machine had misread hundreds of ballots due to a bad "timing belt."
You get the picture. The Dallas case prompted the Texas Secretary of State to
direct that, in future elections, a "manual recount" could be ordered to
"ensure the accuracy of the count." The actual ballots, the computer punch
cards themselves, are the only existing "audit trail," to document how people
actually voted.
•
I don’t want to appear "partisan," but with all of these well-documented
facts, it seemed to me that the Republican idea that machine counts are
better than human counts is patently absurd. So I called up Bob Swartz,
founder of Pennsylvania-based Cardamation, one of the nation’s largest makers
and sellers of computer punch cards and card-reading machines. (Not many
companies are in that field anymore.) Swartz has been in the punch-card
business for 40 years, though he doesn’t do election business anymore. I
thought that made him a good person to ask.
Turns out, in his line of work, looking at computer cards with your own eyes
is standard procedure. "We didn’t call it a ‘hand count.’ We just called it
‘looking at the cards,’" he says. "We read the cards through the machine
twice, and if there are differences we look at the cards. If our goal is to
get 100 percent accuracy, there’s no question that’s the way to achieve it."
Swartz fully expects card-reading machines to make mistakes. It’s when they
do not make mistakes that he gets suspicious. "If you recount 400,000 votes
and there’s no difference," he says, "someone fudged the figures."
No election system can ever be fraudproof or error-free. That doesn’t mean we
shouldn’t try to improve on the dismal systems we’re using today. It just
seems that casting votes on paper ballots, then counting and recounting them
by hand, is the surest way to figure out who really won an election. Assuming
mostly honest personnel, and barring breathtaking acts of ineptitude, human
vote-counters will not, generally speaking, discard ballots by the thousands
on a mere whim. Nor will they, unless they are severely reading-deficient or
insane, record votes cast for one candidate as votes cast for another
candidate.
Further, it is much more conspicuous for a dishonest election official to
issue new instructions to a group of human beings midway through a counting
session than it is for a dishonest computer programmer to type a few new
lines of code into a machine. Perhaps most importantly, there is nothing
"proprietary" about a person picking up pieces of paper and going "one for
this guy, one for that guy." If Americans, or at least the television
networks Americans like to watch, weren’t so damned impatient, conducting
elections completely on paper ballots would be the most sensible solution.
Noncomputerized elections take a lot longer to produce results, there’s no
denying that. But we don’t hold elections all that often in this country. We
wait four years to vote for president. We can’t wait another week or two to
find out who won?
If the never-ending election of 2000 (and I have to admit, it is taking a
long time) teaches us anything, it’s that we can indeed wait it out for a
while without untoward consequences.
If America returned to the paper ballot system, fraud and error in elections
definitely would not end. They would, however, be much easier to detect and
correct. Elections would be run by people, not corporations. There are enough
vested interests trying to influence every election. Why do we need the
extraneous interest of profit-making companies?
vol 13 no 50
http://www.nypress.com/content.cfm?conte
