| -Caveat Lector-
Wired News: How E-Voting Threatens Democracy
02:00 AM Mar. 29, 2004 PT
By Kim Zetter
In January 2003, voting activist Bev Harris was holed up in the basement of her three-story house in Renton, Washington, searching the Internet for an electronic voting machine manual, when she made a startling discovery. Clicking on a link for a file transfer protocol site belonging to voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems, Harris found about 40,000 unprotected computer files. They included source code for Diebold's AccuVote touch-screen voting machine, program files for its Global Election Management System tabulation software, a Texas voter-registration list with voters' names and addresses, and what appeared to be live vote data from 57 precincts in a 2002 California primary election. "There was a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been there," Harris said. The California file was time-stamped 3:31 p.m. on Election Day, indicating that Diebold might have obtained the data during voting. But polling precincts aren't supposed to release votes until after polls close at 8 p.m. So Harris began to wonder if it were possible for the company to extract votes during an election and change them without anyone knowing. A look at the Diebold tabulation program provided a possible answer. Harris discovered that she could enter the vote database using Microsoft Access -- a standard program often bundled with Microsoft Office -- and change votes without leaving a trace. Diebold hadn't password-protected the file or secured the audit log, so anyone with access to the tabulation program during an election -- Diebold employees, election staff or even hackers if the county server were connected to a phone line -- could change votes and alter the log to erase the evidence. "It was getting scarier and scarier," Harris said. "I was thinking we have an immense problem here that's much bigger than me." Over the past year, doubts about the accuracy and integrity of e-voting equipment have been growing, thanks to Harris' discovery. Some election officials have called Harris, a 53-year-old mother of five and a self-employed publicist, a wacko, a conspiracy nut and even a threat to democracy for her role in raising the controversy. But day by day, other election officials, secretaries of state, legislators and voters have come to agree with her that something is seriously wrong with electronic voting systems and the companies that make them. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, which allocated $3.9 billion in matching federal funds to help states upgrade to new e-voting systems. Touted as the answer to the hanging chads in Florida that marred the 2000 presidential election, e-voting machines have been lauded by their makers as faster, more accurate and easier to use than punch-card and lever machines. But election glitches involving the systems paint a different picture, depicting machines that sometimes fail to boot up, fail to record votes or even record them for the wrong candidates. Computer scientists say the machines are also easy to hack. In addition to glitches, there are concerns about the people behind the machines. A few voting company employees have been implicated in bribery or kickback schemes involving election officials. And there are concerns about the partisan loyalties of voting executives -- Diebold's chief executive, for example, is a top fund-raiser for President Bush. Despite all this, many election officials who have purchased the machines for their counties deny the systems' vulnerability to miscounts or rigging and vehemently defend the integrity of the voting companies. E-voting machines aren't new. They've been around since the 1960s and '70s, when optical-scan and punch-key machines (where a voter chooses candidates with a keyboard) were introduced. Paperless touch-screen machines, also known as Direct Recording Electronic machines, appeared in the '90s. However, they cost about $3,000 each, and few counties opted to buy them until funds became available through HAVA. According to political consulting firm Election Data Services, about 50 million people in the United States will vote this November using paperless touch-screen voting machines, while 55 million will use optical-scan machines that require voters to use a pen to mark a paper ballot, which an electronic machine then scans. Both systems have experienced problems in elections. But when optical-scan machines misread ballots or miscalculate votes, election officials can re-scan the ballots or recount them by hand. Touch-screen votes, however, exist only in digital form, so officials can't know if a machine records votes inaccurately. Nor can they correct the problem after the fact if somehow they do discover that a machine has recorded votes inaccurately. The controversy around e-voting began in September 2002 when Harris read an online article under the provocative headline, "Elections in America: Assume Crooks Are in Control." Written by environmental activist Lynn Landes, the article was based partly on a 1992 book on election rigging called Votescam: The Stealing of America. Landes said she realized that the right to vote was useless as long as she had no way of verifying that her vote was recorded accurately. "When we're using lever machines, touch-screen voting machines or the Internet, we are not voting, the machine is voting," Landes said. "We're inputting our choice and hoping the machine is (recording it) correctly." She was concerned that voting machines were closed to public scrutiny, and the people who made them were not subject to background checks. "Felons and foreigners can, and do, own computer voting machine companies," Landes wrote, suggesting that the Russian mafia could be behind U.S. elections and no one would know. As it turned out, two of the top three companies did have foreign ties. Diebold Election Systems began as a Canadian firm called Global Election Systems before being purchased by Ohio-based Diebold Inc. in January 2002. And Sequoia Voting Systems is owned by two foreign firms -- 85 percent by De La Rue, a British company, and 15 percent by the Jefferson Smurfit Group of Ireland. As for criminal activity, a Sequoia regional manager was indicted in Louisiana in 2001 for conspiring to commit money laundering and bribery, although he was never convicted. Philip Foster was accused of facilitating a 10-year kickback scheme between his brother-in-law and an election official involving millions of dollars in overcharges for voting equipment. But while the election official went to jail, Foster, who still works for Sequoia, received immunity for his testimony and is in the process of trying to get the charges expunged from his record. Sequoia spokesman Alfie Charles said the voting equipment in question wasn't Sequoia equipment, and that "Sequoia has never been under any investigation regarding the situation in Louisiana and absolutely no allegations of improper conduct have been directed at the company." Tom Eschberger, a vice president for the largest voting firm, Election Systems & Software, or ES&S, was also involved in a bribery and kickback scheme, this one in Arkansas. Former Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen was convicted for his role in the crime, but Eschberger, like Foster, received immunity. ES&S won't comment on the matter other than to say that Eschberger "wasn't prosecuted." "I was casting a net out and challenging other people to look at this issue," said Landes, the environmental activist. "If I could find this much disturbing information in a short length of time, what could other people find?" Harris was not the least bit interested in voting when she read Landes' article. She was a book publicist who promoted titles like They Told Me I Couldn't, a belly dancer's account of sword dancing through Colombia, and Belly Laughs, a collection of tales from belly dancers around the world. But she was interested in investigations. She once had tracked the moves of an accountant who embezzled $80,000 from her PR business, and she had conducted background research on Bush's Rangers -- an elite group of fund-raisers for the president -- for the fun of it. "I thought, I know how to do this. I'll just go find this stuff out. I literally viewed it as a 20-minute (project)," she said. Story continued on Page 2 »
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om |
