E-voting follies

This story from Wired News is a damning summary of the maniacal, singleminded bureaucratic push for unverifiable "e-voting". Excerpts:

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....

(Diebold's response to this discovery, as is well known, was to use legal mechanisms like the DMCA to try to forbid dissemination of this information. Meanwhile they showed absolutely zero interest in correcting the "accidental" security flaws. Meanwhile, the chairman of the company confidently promised that he would "deliver Ohio" to his political buddies.)

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....

...So one day on a whim, after completing her publicity calls, Harris typed the words "stock ownership" and the name Election Systems & Software into a search engine and pulled up a slew of articles. Reading the oldest ones first because that's where companies "give information that they haven't yet thought to hide," she uncovered some startling facts.

Up until 1995, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel had been chairman of ES&S (then called American Information Systems) before quitting the company in March of that year two weeks before launching his Senate bid. ES&S, based in Omaha, Nebraska, manufactured the only voting machines used in the state in his election the following year. According to Neil Erickson, Nebraska's deputy secretary of state for elections, the machines counted 85 percent of votes in Hagel's race; the remaining votes were counted by hand.

Hagel, a first-time candidate who had lived out of the state for 20 years, came from behind to win two major upsets in that election: first in the primary race against a fellow Republican, then in the general race against Democrat Ben Nelson, the state's popular former governor. Nelson began the race with a 65 percent to 18 percent lead in the polls, but Hagel won with 56 percent of the vote, becoming the state's first Republican senator since 1972....

It's long been a cliche for political cynics to say that one person's vote doesn't count. With the help of insecure and unverifiable voting machines controlled by political partisans, that may become the literal truth except for the one person who controls the voting software.

More from www.blackboxvoting.com, including a link to a startling article from the New York Times: Florida as the next Florida

Excerpts:

As Floridians went to the polls last Tuesday, Glenda Hood, Katherine Harris's successor as secretary of state, assured the nation that Florida's voting system would not break down this year the way it did in 2000. Florida now has "the very best" technology available, she declared on CNN. "And I do feel that it's a great disservice to create the feeling that there's a problem when there is not." Hours later, results in Bay County showed that with more than 60 percent of precincts reporting, Richard Gephardt, who long before had pulled out of the presidential race, was beating John Kerry by two to one. "I'm devastated," the county's top election official said, promising a recount of his county's 19,000 votes.

Florida's official line is that its machines are so carefully tested, nothing can go wrong. But things already have gone wrong. In a January election in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, the victory margin was 12 votes, but the machines recorded more than 130 blank ballots. It is simply not believable that 130 people showed up to cast a nonvote, in an election with only one race on the ballot. The runner-up wanted a recount, but since the machines do not produce a paper record, there was nothing to recount. [emphasis added.]

In 2002, in the primary race for governor between Janet Reno and Bill McBride, electronic voting problems were so widespread they cast doubt on the outcome. Many Miami-Dade County votes were not counted on election night because machines were shut down improperly. One precinct with over 1,000 eligible voters recorded no votes, despite a 33 percent turnout statewide. Election workers spent days hunting for lost votes, while Floridians waited, in an uncomfortable replay of 2000, to see whether Mr. McBride's victory margin, which had dwindled to less than 10,000, would hold up....

The 2004 election may make the 2000 Florida fiasco look like a toddler's tantrum if this is any indication. On the other hand, perhaps the vote-riggers will get their act together well enough to hide their tracks. Unless those pesky voters kick up enough of a political storm to force the election officials to provide verifiable, permanent, and re-countable hard copy ballots.