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The Ulster County Town of Olive Says No to
Voting
Equipment that Does Not Allow Voters
To
Inspect their Ballots
—an investigation by Irv
Yarg
On March 2th, the town board in Olive, New York resolved
to reject "electronic voting equipment that does not
allow voters to inspect their ballots, fails to provide
a means by which a meaningful recount may be conducted,
or uses software that is not open to public scrutiny."
The Olive resolution for "private and secure voting"
came eight days after the New York State Assembly had
passed A8847, a bill to mandate the use of electronic
voting in all elections, and handed it on to the State
Senate for approval.
Bert
Leifeld, who read the Olive resolution aloud at this
month's town board meeting, confided that the issue
has been an item of concern at meetings of the Town
Supervisor's Association and that opposition to the
cyber-vote is fairly uniform amongst Association members.
The
Olive resolution notes that the Help America Vote Act
(HAVA) passed by Congress in October 2003 "has created
the opposite effect" than intended and "is having the
unintended consequence of states rushing to purchase
computer-voting systems that suffer serious flaws."
The HAVA bill was proposed in the wake of the shocking
confusions surrounding the 2000 national election which
left many disillusioned voters muttering comments from
"This was a stolen election" to "Why vote when we have
the Supreme Court to do it for us?" HAVA leveraged the
highly publicized "hanging chad" fiasco of the punch
card voting system to institute a computerized system
which many critics have pointed out has been instrumental
in more miscounted and uncounted results not only in
Florida but across the nation in recent years.
Introduced on August 4, 2003 by Watertown's six-term
Republican-Conservative Senator James W. Wright, the
A8847 bill enjoyed bipartisan co-sponsorship by 28 state
officials, including Kingston's Kevin Cahill, and passed
the Assembly last month without a "nay" vote. Its provisions
include the adoption of an official model voting machine:
"The state board of elections, upon concurrence of at
least three members of such board, shall adopt a single
voting machine...to be the sole, exclusive voting machine
used at all general, special and primary elections (in
New York State)...after July first, two thousand five."
Choices
of computer voting machines are limited to a handful
of companies which dominate the market, some of them
foreign-owned and some with specific political affiliations
and even ties to organized crime. In December, for instance,
Bev Harris, author of a recent book on the e-vote issue
called Black Box Voting, alleged that
at least five managers of a Diebold Corporation subsidiary
(a major e-vote machine vendor suspected of irregularities
in the 2000 Florida results) were felons with backgrounds
in stock fraud, computer record falsification and cocaine
trafficking. Other allegations circle Sequoia, ES&S
(Election Systems & Software ) and other e-vote firms.
Oversight of these private sector regions seems to be
a neglected area of the structural leap to cybervote.
"Alarmingly,
under U.S. federal law, no background checks are required
on these companies or their employees," notes electro-vote
researcher Lynn Landes at the EcoTalk.org. website,
which maintains a public watch on the issue. "Felons
and foreigners can, and do, own computer voting machine
companies." [My emphasis.]
Many critics charge that the system put in place to
uphold the integrity of democratic elections has succeeded
only in making vote fraud easier and less detectable.
A number of studies have revealed cyber-voting systems
to be open to manipulation from both inside and outside
the system. Touch-screen system voting can also eliminate
or control the evidence for a recount, making detection
of error or fraud difficult to impossible. "Trojan Horse"
programs are able to change totals and cover their tracks
while hackers with simple tools have demonstrated an
ability to alter results on e-machines in the time it
takes to close the curtain and cast a vote.
The
numerous drawbacks, like internal modems which allow
machines to be communicated with while in operation
and other serious flaws detected in studies by the computer
scientist Aviel Rubin, Technical Director of Information
Security Institute at John Hopkins University; the non-partisan
Voting Integrity Project of Arlington, Virginia and
other investigators, are not unknown to lawmakers. Reform
bills sponsored by individuals like Rep. Hannah Pingree
(D-Maine) and Rep. Rush Holt's (D-NJ) H.R. 2239- Voter
Confidence Act of 2003 (co-sponsored by presidential
candidate Dennis Kucinich) address some of these problems
and New York's A8847 acknowledges the need for a "paper
trail" but other experts have pointed out the ease with
which such safeguards can be circumvented by software
design... (i.e., Simply program DRE (Direct Recording
Electronic) systems to respond accurately to a printout
request while registering the actual count otherwise.
Diebold, for instance, has been accused of employing
uncertified software to ponderous effect as recently
as last year's California recall poll.)
In
an age wherein we have witnessed a sudden, last minute
flood of votes for one candidate coming in while a batch
of his/hers opponent's ballots disappear into another
column (or entirely) have electronically swung more
than a few elections, New York's A8847 bill calls for
manual audit of voter verifiable audit records of only
2% of the vote... "provided such records were not also
impaired by the electronic operational failure of the
voting machine." Okay, and we'll pick the two percent
to test...doesn't seem like a remedy for the Florida
vote...
A8847 also leaves question marks hanging over the ownership
of such machines. While HAVA proposes $3.8 billion aid
to states for purchase of the tabulators and New York
plans on spending $360 million, there may not be enough
to go around. Priced from $3 thousand to $8 thousand
apiece, the bill points out that the state board of
elections shall not be required to provide all voting
machines a county might need nor prevent counties from
purchasing their own (approved) machines. However, enough
machines WILL be required in proportion to voter registration
records of November 1, 2002.
Communities
which may not be able to purchase machines may be authorized
to "rent or borrow a limited number of one such type
of equipment for use in a primary, special, general
or village election." Apparently, private enterprise
can horn in here: "Any person or corporation owning
or being interested in any voting or ballot counting
machine may apply to have the state board of elections
examine such machine. Such applicant shall pay to the
board before the examination a fee equal to the cost
of such examination, or forty thousand dollars, whichever
is less." Free enterprise, indeed.
Such
private ownership raises another flurry of potential
problems and one of the keys to the harshly critical
response to the private vendors is that their software
is protected intellectual property and cannot be publicly
examined. The Australians solved this particular problem
in 2001 by using 'open source' software.
"We'd
been watching what had happened in America (in 2000),
and we were wary of using proprietary software that
no one was allowed to see," said Aussie election commissioner
Philip Green to Wired Newson November 3, 2003, "We were
very keen for the whole process to be transparent so
that everyone-- particularly the political parties and
the candidates, but also the world at large-- could
be satisfied that the software was actually doing what
it was meant to be doing."
Evidence
of fixed elections in the past is not hard to come by
but, in the present and the future, all bets are off.
Diebold, who stands to profit as handsomely through
the HAVA windfall- as will major pharmaceutical concerns
in the recently enacted African AIDS drug relief program
wherein critics have claimed that companies have recourse
to unload their ineffectual remedies- is well aware
of the flaws in their software. This was verified when
a hacker broke into their internal discussions archive
last August and spilled the beans, revealing their inner
secrets on the worldwide web. Despite this, Diebold
has 33,000 machines being used in U.S. elections and
are about to pump that up enormously.
This is not to target one company and certainly not
to say that only the devotees of one particular political
party are crooked enough to cheat in such high stakes
contests. The sad historical record testifies otherwise.
However, in today's scenario, the vested interests of
e-vote corporations do tend to dominate one side of
the aisle. Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, for instance,
is a top fund-raiser for President George W. Bush's
campaigns and a visitor to his private ranch, who, according
to a widely quoted story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer,
was humbled to apologize in August for publicly voicing
his commitment to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to
the GOP. Such statements from a manufacturer of vote
tallying devices scarcely reflects an impartial commitment
to democratic principles. In fact, it blatantly echoes
the sage observation of Josef Stalin, as quoted in the
late Collier brothers' 1992 ground-breaking book on
election fraud, Votescam, that it is not voters who
hold power in a democracy; it is those who COUNT the
votes.
-Irv Yarg
Professor
Rubin's detailed study is available at www.avirubin.com/vote.pdf
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