Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/printer_110804A.shtml>


    Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster
    By William Rivers Pitt
    t r u t h o u t | Report

     Monday 08 November 2004

     Everyone remembers Florida's 2000 election debacle, and all of the new
terms it introduced to our political lexicon: Hanging chads, dimpled chads,
pregnant chads, overvotes, undervotes, Sore Losermans, Jews for Buchanan
and so forth. It took several weeks, battalions of lawyers and a
questionable decision from the U.S. Supreme Court to show the nation and
the world how messy democracy can be. By any standard, what happened in
Florida during the 2000 Presidential election was a disaster.

     What happened during the Presidential election of 2004, in Florida, in
Ohio, and in a number of other states as well, was worse.

     Some of the problems with this past Tuesday's election will sound all
too familiar. Despite having four years to look into and deal with the
problems that cropped up in Florida in 2000, the 'spoiled vote' chad issue
reared its ugly head again. Investigative journalist Greg Palast, the man
almost singularly responsible for exposing the more egregious examples of
illegitimate deletions of voters from the rolls, described the continued
problems in an article published just before the election, and again in an
article published just after the election.

     Four years later, and none of the Florida problems were fixed. In
fact, by all appearances, they spread from Florida to Ohio, New Mexico,
Michigan and elsewhere. Worse, these problems only scratch the surface of
what appears to have happened in Tuesday's election. The fix that was put
in place to solve these problems - the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002
after the Florida debacle - appears to have gone a long way towards making
things worse by orders of magnitude, for it was the Help America Vote Act
which introduced paperless electronic touch-screen voting machines to
millions of voters across the country.

     At first blush, it seems like a good idea. Forget the chads, the punch
cards, the archaic booths like pianos standing on end with the handles and
the curtains. This is the 21st century, so let's do it with computers. A
simple screen presents straightforward choices, and you touch the spot on
the screen to vote for your candidate. Your vote is recorded by the
machine, and then sent via modem to a central computer which tallies the
votes. Simple, right?

     Not quite.


A Diebold voting machine.
     Is there any evidence that these machines went haywire on Tuesday?
Nationally, there were more than 1,100 reports of electronic voting machine
malfunctions. A few examples:
	* 	 In Broward County, Florida, election workers were shocked to
discover that their shiny new machines were counting backwards. "Tallies
should go up as more votes are counted," according to this report. "That's
simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone down. Officials found
the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct.
After that, the system starts counting backward."

	* 	 In Franklin County, Ohio, electronic voting machines gave Bush
3,893 extra votes in one precinct alone. "Franklin County's unofficial
results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260
votes in Precinct 1B," according to this report. "Records show only 638
voters cast ballots in that precinct. Matthew Damschroder, director of the
Franklin County Board of Elections, said Bush received 365 votes there. The
other 13 voters who cast ballots either voted for other candidates or did
not vote for president."

	* 	 In Craven County, North Carolina, a software error on the
electronic voting machines awarded Bush 11,283 extra votes. "The Elections
Systems and Software equipment," according to this report, "had downloaded
voting information from nine of the county's 26 precincts and as the
absentee ballots were added, the precinct totals were added a second time.
An override, like those occurring when one attempts to save a computer file
that already exists, is supposed to prevent double counting, but did not
function correctly."

	* 	 In Carteret County, North Carolina, "More than 4,500 votes may
be lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer
that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Local
officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting
system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the
limit was actually 3,005 votes. Officials said 3,005 early votes were
stored, but 4,530 were lost."

	* 	 In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold, the
electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 voters.
"At about 7 p.m. Tuesday," according to this report, "it was noticed that
the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all
listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having
300 registered voters. That means the total number of voters for the county
would be 22,200, although there are actually more than 79,000 registered
voters."

	* 	 In Sarpy County, Nebraska, the electronic touch screen machines
got generous. "As many as 10,000 extra votes," according to this report,
"have been tallied and candidates are still waiting for corrected totals.
Johnny Boykin lost his bid to be on the Papillion City Council. The
difference between victory and defeat in the race was 127 votes. Boykin
says, 'When I went in to work the next day and saw that 3,342 people had
shown up to vote in our ward, I thought something's not right.' He's right.
There are not even 3,000 people registered to vote in his ward. For some
reason, some votes were counted twice."

    Stories like this have been popping up in many of the states that put
these touch-screen voting machines to use. Beyond these reports are the
folks who attempted to vote for one candidate and saw the machine give
their vote to the other candidate. Sometimes, the flawed machines were
taken off-line, and sometimes they were not. As for the reports above, the
mistakes described were caught and corrected. How many mistakes made by
these machines were not caught, were not corrected, and have now become
part of the record?

     The flaws within these machines are well documented. Professors and
researchers from Johns Hopkins performed a detailed analysis of these
electronic voting machines in May of 2004. In their results, the Johns
Hopkins researchers stated, "This voting system is far below even the most
minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We identify
several problems including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use
of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software
development processes. We show that voters, without any insider privileges,
can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within
the voting terminal software."

     "Furthermore," they continued, "we show that even the most serious of
our outsider attacks could have been discovered and executed without access
to the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about
insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage.
That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite
considerable, showing that not only can an insider, such as a poll worker,
modify the votes, but that insiders can also violate voter privacy and
match votes with the voters who cast them. We conclude that this voting
system is unsuitable for use in a general election."

     Many of these machines do not provide the voter with a paper ballot
that verifies their vote. So if an error - or purposefully inserted
malicious code - in the untested machine causes their vote to go for the
other guy, they have no way to verify that it happened. The lack of a paper
ballot also means the end of recounts as we have known them; now, on these
new machines, a recount amounts to pushing a button on the machine and
getting a number in return, but without those paper ballots to do a
comparison, there is no way to verify the validity of that count.

     Worst of all is the fact that all the votes collected by these
machines are sent via modem to a central tabulating computer which counts
the votes on Windows software. This means, essentially, that any gomer with
access to the central tabulation machine who knows how to work an Excel
spreadsheet can go into this central computer and make wholesale changes to
election totals without anyone being the wiser.

     Bev Harris, who has been working tirelessly since the passage of the
Help America Vote Act to inform people of the dangers present in this new
process, got a chance to demonstrate how easy it is to steal an election on
that central tabulation computer while a guest on the CNBC program 'Topic A
With Tina Brown.' Ms. Brown was off that night, and the guest host was none
other than Governor Howard Dean. Thanks to Governor Dean and Ms. Harris,
anyone watching CNBC that night got to see just how easy it is to steal an
election because of these new machines and the flawed processes they use.

     "In a voting system," Harris said on the show, "you have all the
different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes,
as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single
county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all
the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't
to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the
4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once? What
surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you
and I use. It's just a regular computer."

     Harris then proceeded to open a laptop computer that had on it the
software used to tabulate the votes by one of the aforementioned central
processors. Journalist Thom Hartman describes what happened next: "So
Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS tabulation software, go back to the
normal Windows PC desktop, click on the 'My Computer' icon, choose 'Local
Disk C:,' open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder 'LocalDB'
which, Harris noted, 'stands for local database, that's where they keep the
votes.' Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled
Central Tabulator Votes,' which caused the PC to open the vote count in a
database program like Excel. 'Let's just flip those,' Harris said, as Dean
cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. Harris sat up a
bit straighter, smiled, and said, 'We just edited an election, and it took
us 90 seconds.'"

     Any system that makes it this easy to steal or corrupt an election has
no business being anywhere near the voters on election day.

     The counter-argument to this states that people with nefarious intent,
people with a partisan stake in the outcome of an election, would have to
have access to the central tabulation computers in order to do harm to the
process. Keep the partisans away from the process, and everything will work
out fine. Surely no partisan political types were near these machines on
Tuesday night when the votes were counted, right?

     One of the main manufacturers of these electronic touch-screen voting
machines is Diebold, Inc. More than 35 counties in Ohio alone used the
Diebold machines on Tuesday, and millions of voters across the country did
the same. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Diebold gave
$100,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2000, along with
additional contributions between 2001 and 2002 which totaled $95,000. Of
the four companies competing for the contracts to manufacture these voting
machines, only Diebold contributed large sums to any political party. The
CEO of Diebold is a man named Walden O'Dell. O'Dell was very much on board
with the Bush campaign, having said publicly in 2003 that he is "committed
to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

     So much for keeping the partisans at arm's length.

     Is there any evidence that vote totals were deliberately tampered with
by people who had a stake in the outcome? Nothing specific has been
documented to date. Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate for the U.S.
House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District, claims to have
evidence that the Florida election was hacked, and says further that he
knows who hacked it and how it was done. Such evidence is not yet
forthcoming.

     There are, however, some disturbing and compelling trends that
indicate things are not as they should be. This chart displays a breakdown
of counties in Florida. It lists the voters in each county by party
affiliation, and compares expected vote totals to the reported results. It
also separates the results into two sections, one for 'touch-screen'
counties and the other for optical scan counties.

     Over and over in these counties, the results, based upon party
registration, did not come close to matching expectations. It can be
argued, and has been argued, that such results indicate nothing more or
less than a President getting cross-over voters, as well as late-breaking
undecided voters, to come over to his side. These are Southern Democrats,
and the numbers from previous elections show that many have often voted
Republican. Yet the news wires have been inundated for well over a year
with stories about how stridently united Democratic voters were behind the
idea of removing Bush from office. It is worth wondering why that unity did
not permeate these Democratic voting districts. If that unity was there, it
is worth asking why the election results in these counties do not reflect
this.

     Most disturbing of all is the reality that these questionable Diebold
voting machines are not isolated to Florida. This list documents, as of
March 2003, all of the counties in all of the 37 states where Diebold
machines were used to count votes. The document is 28 pages long. That is a
lot of counties, and a lot of votes, left in the hands of machines that
have a questionable track record, that send their vote totals to central
computers which make it far too easy to change election results, that were
manufactured by a company with a personal, financial, and publicly stated
stake in George W. Bush holding on to the White House.


This map indicates where different voting devices were used nationally. The
areas where electronic voting machines were used is marked in blue.
     A poster named 'TruthIsAll' on the DemocraticUnderground.com forums
laid out the questionable results of Tuesday's election in succinct
fashion: "To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe:
That the exit polls were wrong; that Zogby's 5pm election day calls for
Kerry winning Ohio and Florida were wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000
final poll); that Harris' last-minute polling for Kerry was wrong (he was
exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that incumbent rule #1 - undecideds
break for the challenger - was wrong; That the 50% rule - an incumbent
doesn't do better than his final polling - was wrong; That the approval
rating rule - an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely
lose the election - was wrong; that it was just a coincidence that the exit
polls were correct where there was a paper trail and incorrect (+5% for
Bush) where there was no paper trail; that the surge in new young voters
had no positive effect for Kerry; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an
opponent who lost the support of scores of Republican newspapers who were
for Bush in 2000; that voting machines made by Republicans with no paper
trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands
of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were not
tampered with in this election."

     In short, we have old-style vote spoilage in minority communities. We
have electronic voting machines losing votes and adding votes all across
the country. We have electronic voting machines whose efficiency and safety
have not been tested. We have electronic voting machines that offer no
paper trail to ensure a fair outcome. We have central tabulators for these
machines running on Windows software, compiling results that can be
demonstrably tampered with. We have the makers of these machines publicly
professing their preference for George W. Bush. We have voter trends that
stray from the expected results. We have these machines counting millions
of votes all across the country.

     Perhaps this can all be dismissed. Perhaps rants like the one posted
by 'TruthIsAll' are nothing more than sour grapes from the side that lost.
Perhaps all of the glitches, wrecked votes, unprecedented voting trends and
partisan voting-machine connections can be explained away. If so, this
reporter would very much like to see those explanations. At a bare minimum,
the fact that these questions exist at all represents a grievous
undermining of the basic confidence in the process required to make this
democracy work. Democracy should not ever require leaps of faith, and we
have put the fate of our nation into the hands of machines that require
such a leap. It is unacceptable across the board, and calls into serious
question not only the election we just had, but any future election
involving these machines.

     Representatives John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler and Robert Wexler, all
members of the House Judiciary Committee, posted a letter on November 5th
to David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States. In the letter,
they asked for an investigation into the efficacy of these electronic
voting machines. The letter reads as follows:
 November 5, 2004

 The Honorable David M. Walker
Comptroller General of the United States
U.S. General Accountability Office
441 G Street, NW
Washington, DC 20548

 Dear Mr. Walker:

 We write with an urgent request that the Government Accountability Office
immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines
and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials
responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future
to improve our election systems and administration.

 In particular, we are extremely troubled by the following reports, which
we would also request that you review and evaluate for us:

 In Columbus, Ohio, an electronic voting system gave President Bush nearly
4,000 extra votes. ("Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes," Associated
Press, November 5)

 An electronic tally of a South Florida gambling ballot initiative failed
to record thousands of votes. "South Florida OKs Slot Machines Proposal,"
(Id.)

 In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because
officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots could hold
more data that it did. "Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes," (Id.)

 In San Francisco, a glitch occurred with voting machines software that
resulted in some votes being left uncounted. (Id.)

 In Florida, there was a substantial drop off in Democratic votes in
proportion to voter registration in counties utilizing optical scan
machines that was apparently not present in counties using other mechanisms.

 The House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff has received numerous
reports from Youngstown, Ohio that voters who attempted to cast a vote for
John Kerry on electronic voting machines saw that their votes were instead
recorded as votes for George W. Bush. In South Florida, Congressman
Wexler's staff received numerous reports from voters in Palm Beach, Broward
and Dade Counties that they attempted to select John Kerry but George Bush
appeared on the screen. CNN has reported that a dozen voters in six states,
particularly Democrats in Florida, reported similar problems. This was
among over one thousand such problems reported. ("Touchscreen Voting
Problems Reported," Associated Press, November 5)

 Excessively long lines were a frequent problem throughout the nation in
Democratic precincts, particularly in Florida and Ohio. In one Ohio voting
precinct serving students from Kenyon College, some voters were required to
wait more than eight hours to vote. ("All Eyes on Ohio," Dan Lothian, CNN,
November 3)

 We are literally receiving additional reports every minute and will
transmit additional information as it comes available. The essence of
democracy is the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting
methods and the fairness of voting procedures. In 2000, that confidence
suffered terribly, and we fear that such a blow to our democracy may have
occurred in 2004.

 Thank you for your prompt attention to this inquiry.

 Sincerely,

 John Conyers, Jr., Jerrold Nadler, Robert Wexler

 Ranking Member, Ranking Member, Member of Congress
House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution

 cc: Hon. F. James Sensenbrenner, Chairman

    "The essence of democracy," wrote the Congressmen, "is the confidence
of the electorate in the accuracy of voting methods and the fairness of
voting procedures. In 2000, that confidence suffered terribly, and we fear
that such a blow to our democracy may have occurred in 2004." Those fears
appear to be valid.

     John Kerry and John Edwards promised on Tuesday night that every vote
would count, and that every vote would be counted. By Wednesday morning,
Kerry had conceded the race to Bush, eliciting outraged howls from
activists who were watching the reports of voting irregularities come
piling in. Kerry had said that 10,000 lawyers were ready to fight any
wrongdoing in this election. One hopes that he still has those lawyers on
retainer.

     According to black-letter election law, Bush does not officially get a
second term until the electors from the Electoral College go to Washington
D.C on December 12th. Perhaps Kerry's 10,000 lawyers, along with a real
investigation per the request of Conyers, Nadler and Wexler, could give
those electors something to think about in the interim.

     In the meantime, soon-to-be-unemployed DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe
sent out an email on Saturday night titled 'Help determine the Democratic
Party's next steps.' In the email, McAuliffe states, "If you were involved
in these grassroots activities, we want to hear from you about your
experience. What did you do? Did you feel the action you took was
effective? Was it a good experience for you? How would you make it better?
Tell us your thoughts." He provided a feedback form where such thoughts can
be sent.


  


-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'