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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Computerized vote-counting machines are sweeping the country. But they can be hacked -- and right now there's no way to be sure they haven't been.
Feb 20, 2003 | During the past five months, Bev Harris has e-mailed to news organizations a series of reports that detail alarming problems in the high-tech voting machinery currently sweeping its way through American democracy. But almost no one is paying attention.
Harris is a literary publicist and writer whose investigations into the secret world of voting equipment firms have led some to call her the Erin Brockovich of elections. Harris has discovered, for example, that Diebold, the company that supplied touch-screen voting machines to Georgia during the 2002 election, made its system's sensitive software files available on a public Internet site. She has reported on the certification process for machines coming onto the market -- revealing that the software code running the equipment is seldom thoroughly reviewed and can often be changed with mysteriously installed "patches" just prior to an election. And in perhaps her most eyebrow-raising coup, she found that Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, used to run the company that built most of the machines that count votes in his state -- and that he still owns a stake in the firm.
Harris hasn't been alone in making such discoveries. A small group of writers, technologists and activists is working hard to convince elections officials all over the country that their rush to upgrade aging punch-card machines with seemingly more reliable touch-screen systems is dangerous. But so far neither the general public nor elections officials appear too worried.
It's not hard to see why: If you look at some of the conspiracy theory rhetoric on the Web spawned by the work of Harris and others, it becomes all too easy to dismiss the whole campaign as sour grapes. There is no smoking-gun evidence to support the conclusion that Hagel's landslide Senate victory in 2002 benefited from voter fraud. The same is true for several unexpected Republican victories in Georgia last year -- during which the entire state used touch-screen machines for the first time.
But Harris herself is no conspiracy nut. Her facts check out. Nor is she an ideologue. Her stories on voting machines are based not on her politics but on serious, in-depth investigative reporting. Since October, she's spoken to dozens of people in the voting world, from elections officials to "systems certifiers" to engineers whom she calls whistle-blowers. She's detailed some of her findings on her Web site, but she says they aren't the whole story -- which she'll tell in a book, "Black Box Voting," to be published in May.
The facts Harris and others lay out ought to give many election officials pause. Touch-screen voting machines aren't especially reliable; there are documented cases in which they have frozen, broken down and tabulated incorrectly during actual, binding elections. They're also not immune to hacks. Though voting companies will confidently tell you about their myriad security policies, the fact is that these machines run software, and software can be tampered with: An election result could be changed without anyone being the wiser. And perhaps worst of all, the machines and the companies that make them are shrouded in secrecy. What really happens in a touch-screen machine when you select your candidate? In most cases, everything probably goes as it should -- but there is no way to know for sure.
Indeed, the conspiracy theories, regardless of their validity, nevertheless highlight the main problem with electronic machines. Because they leave no paper trail -- the vote count is registered only electronically in the machine -- the results that the new machines deliver are open to dispute by people who have cause to be suspicious. For instance, Charlie Matulka, Hagel's Democratic opponent in Nebraska last year, believes that he might have won the race -- though the official count put him at about 15 percent of the vote.
Bev Harris doesn't believe that anything went wrong in Nebraska, but that's not the point. She wonders how you can prove that everything went well when what goes on inside a voting machine isn't accessible by the public.
The same problems are in play with respect to the Georgia elections. "I don't think that there was anything wrong, but I can't show that there wasn't," says David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University. Dill is trying to get Santa Clara County, the home of California's Silicon Valley, to reject electronic machines that don't produce a paper trail. "And it always frustrates me when I read a conspiracy theory and I can't find some way to dismiss it -- it bothers me that I can't show people that they're full of it."
