All the President's votes?
A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the
time it's over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged,
unscrutinised control of a few large - and pro-Republican - corporations.
Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive.
By Andrew Gumbel
The Independent 14 October 2003
Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia
last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy
Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between
nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate
race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up
for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican
challenger, Saxby Chambliss.
Those figures were more or less what political experts would
have expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats
to statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of
Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost
the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent
to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from
the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent
to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points. Red-faced opinion
pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do and launched
internal investigations. Political analysts credited the upset
- part of a pattern of Republican successes around the country
- to a huge campaigning push by President Bush in the final days
of the race. They also said that Roy Barnes had lost because of
a surge of "angry white men" punishing him for eradicating
all but a vestige of the old confederate symbol from the state
flag.
But something about these explanations did not make sense, and
they have made even less sense over time. When the Georgia secretary
of state's office published its demographic breakdown of the election
earlier this year, it turned out there was no surge of angry white
men; in fact, the only subgroup showing even a modest increase
in turnout was black women.
There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in
different parts of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly
in line with the primary election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated
north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage
points higher than he had in the primaries. And in 74 counties
in the Democrat south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22
points more for the Republicans than the party as a whole had
won less than three months earlier.
Now, weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections,
and the figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except
statistical anomalies worthy of further study. But in Georgia
there was an extra reason to be suspicious. Last November, the
state became the first in the country to conduct an election entirely
with touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing $54m (£33m)
on a new system that promised to deliver the securest, most up-to-date,
most voter-friendly election in the history of the republic. The
machines, however, turned out to be anything but reliable. With
academic studies showing the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly
programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering, and
with thousands of similar machines from different companies being
introduced at high speed across the country, computer voting may,
in fact, be US democracy's own 21st-century nightmare.
In many Georgia counties last November, the machines froze up,
causing long delays as technicians tried to reboot them. In heavily
Democratic Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta, 67 memory cards
from the voting machines went missing, delaying certification
of the results there for 10 days. In neighbouring DeKalb County,
10 memory cards were unaccounted for; they were later recovered
from terminals that had supposedly broken down and been taken
out of service.
It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards
were tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will probably
never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was
not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private
company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place,
under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult
but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for
the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software
to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper
trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing
devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters'
choices, but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts
were impossible. Had Diebold Inc, the manufacturer, been asked
to review the votes, all it could have done was programme the
computers to spit out the same data as before, flawed or not.
Astonishingly, these are the terms under which America's top
three computer voting machine manufacturers - Diebold, Sequoia
and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) - have sold their
products to election officials around the country. Far from questioning
the need for rigid trade secrecy and the absence of a paper record,
secretaries of state and their technical advisers - anxious to
banish memories of the hanging chad fiasco and other associated
disasters in the 2000 presidential recount in Florida - have,
for the most part, welcomed the touchscreen voting machines as
a technological miracle solution.
Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute
swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota,
Illinois and New Hampshire - all in races that had been flagged
as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party.
Again, this was widely attributed to the campaigning efforts of
President Bush and the demoralisation of a Democratic Party too
timid to speak out against the looming war in Iraq.
Strangely, however, the pollsters made no comparable howlers
in lower-key races whose outcome was not seriously contested.
Another anomaly, perhaps. What, then, is one to make of the fact
that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are
all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political
fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell,
Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was "committed
to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president
next year" - even as his company was bidding for the contract
on the state's new voting machinery?
Alarmed and suspicious, a group of Georgia citizens began to
look into last November's election to see whether there was any
chance the results might have been deliberately or accidentally
manipulated. Their research proved unexpectedly, and disturbingly,
fruitful.
First, they wanted to know if the software had undergone adequate
checking. Under state and federal law, all voting machinery and
component parts must be certified before use in an election. So
an Atlanta graphic designer called Denis Wright wrote to the secretary
of state's office for a copy of the certification letter. Clifford
Tatum, assistant director of legal affairs for the election division,
wrote back: "We have determined that no records exist in
the Secretary of State's office regarding a certification letter
from the lab certifying the version of software used on Election
Day." Mr Tatum said it was possible the relevant documents
were with Gary Powell, an official at the Georgia Technology Authority,
so campaigners wrote to him as well. Mr Powell responded he was
"not sure what you mean by the words 'please provide written
certification documents' ".
"If the machines were not certified, then right there the
election was illegal," Mr Wright says. The secretary of state's
office has yet to demonstrate anything to the contrary. The investigating
citizens then considered the nature of the software itself. Shortly
after the election, a Diebold technician called Rob Behler came
forward and reported that, when the machines were about to be
shipped to Georgia polling stations in the summer of 2002, they
performed so erratically that their software had to be amended
with a last-minute "patch". Instead of being transmitted
via disk - a potentially time-consuming process, especially since
its author was in Canada, not Georgia - the patch was posted,
along with the entire election software package, on an open-access
FTP, or file transfer protocol site, on the internet. That, according
to computer experts, was a violation of the most basic of security
precautions, opening all sorts of possibilities for the introduction
of rogue or malicious code. At the same time, however, it gave
campaigners a golden opportunity to circumvent Diebold's own secrecy
demands and see exactly how the system worked. Roxanne Jekot,
a computer programmer with 20 years' experience, and an occasional
teacher at Lanier Technical College northeast of Atlanta, did
a line-by-line review and found "enough to stand your hair
on end".
"There were security holes all over it," she says,
"from the most basic display of the ballot on the screen
all the way through the operating system." Although the programme
was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system,
which has numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot
found it worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98;
the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".
Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers
working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just
done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This
doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder, would
you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic
mode, cobbling together something that would work for the moment,
knowing that at some point they would have to go back to figure
out how to make it work more permanently." She found some
of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless
instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From
a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason to do that,"
she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."
Mostly, though, she was struck by the shoddiness of much of the
programming. "I really expected to have some difficulty reviewing
the source code because it would be at a higher level than I am
accustomed to," she says. "In fact, a lot of this stuff
looked like the homework my first-year students might have turned
in." Diebold had no specific comment on Ms Jekot's interpretations,
offering only a blanket caution about the complexity of election
systems "often not well understood by individuals with little
real-world experience".
But Ms Jekot was not the only one to examine the Diebold software
and find it lacking. In July, a group of researchers from the
Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore discovered what they called "stunning flaws".
These included putting the password in the source code, a basic
security no-no; manipulating the voter smart-card function so
one person could cast more than one vote; and other loopholes
that could theoretically allow voters' ballot choices to be altered
without their knowledge, either on the spot or by remote access.
Diebold issued a detailed response, saying that the Johns Hopkins
report was riddled with false assumptions, inadequate information
and "a multitude of false conclusions". Substantially
similar findings, however, were made in a follow-up study on behalf
of the state of Maryland, in which a group of computer security
experts catalogued 328 software flaws, 26 of them critical, putting
the whole system "at high risk of compromise". "If
these vulnerabilities are exploited, significant impact could
occur on the accuracy, integrity, and availability of election
results," their report says.
Ever since the Johns Hopkins study, Diebold has sought to explain
away the open FTP file as an old, incomplete version of its election
package. The claim cannot be independently verified, because of
the trade-secrecy agreement, and not everyone is buying it. "It
is documented throughout the code who changed what and when. We
have the history of this programme from 1996 to 2002," Ms
Jekot says. "I have no doubt this is the software used in
the elections." Diebold now says it has upgraded its encryption
and password features - but only on its Maryland machines.
A key security question concerned compatibility with Microsoft
Windows, and Ms Jekot says just three programmers, all of them
senior Diebold executives, were involved in this aspect of the
system. One of these, Diebold's vice-president of research and
development, Talbot Iredale, wrote an e-mail in April 2002 - later
obtained by the campaigners - making it clear that he wanted to
shield the operating system from Wylie Labs, an independent testing
agency involved in the early certification process.
The reason that emerges from the e-mail is that he wanted to
make the software compatible with WinCE 3.0, an operating system
used for handhelds and PDAs; in other words, a system that could
be manipulated from a remote location. "We do not want Wyle
[sic] reviewing and certifying the operating systems," the
e-mail reads. "Therefore can we keep to a minimum the references
to the WinCE 3.0 operating system."
In an earlier intercepted e-mail, this one from Ken Clark in
Diebold's research and development department, the company explained
upfront to another independent testing lab that the supposedly
secure software system could be accessed without a password, and
its contents easily changed using the Microsoft Access programme.
Mr Clark says he had considered putting in a password requirement
to stop dealers and customers doing "stupid things",
but that the easy access had often "got people out of a bind".
Astonishingly, the representative from the independent testing
lab did not see anything wrong with this and granted certification
to the part of the software programme she was inspecting - a pattern
of lackadaisical oversight that was replicated all the way to
the top of the political chain of command in Georgia, and in many
other parts of the country.
Diebold has not contested the authenticity of the e-mails, now
openly accessible on the internet. However, Diebold did caution
that, as the e-mails were taken from a Diebold Election systems
website in March 2003 by an illegal hack, the nature of the information
stolen could have been revised or manipulated.
There are two reasons why the United States is rushing to overhaul
its voting systems. The first is the Florida débâcle
in the Bush-Gore election; no state wants to be the centre of
that kind of attention again. And the second is the Help America
Vote Act (HAVA), signed by President Bush last October, which
promises an unprecedented $3.9bn (£2.3bn) to the states
to replace their old punchcard-and-lever machines. However, enthusiasm
for the new technology seems to be motivated as much by a bureaucratic
love of spending as by a love of democratic accountability. According
to Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard's John F Kennedy
School of Government and a specialist in voting systems, the shockingly
high error rate of punchcard machines (3-5 per cent in Florida
in 2000) has been known to people in the elections business for
years. It was only after it became public knowledge in the last
presidential election that anybody felt moved to do anything about
it.
The problem is, computer touchscreen machines and other so-called
DRE (direct recording electronic) systems are significantly less
reliable than punchcards, irrespective of their vulnerability
to interference. In a series of research papers for the Voting
Technology Project, a joint venture of the prestigious Massachussetts
and California Institutes of Technology, DREs were found to be
among the worst performing systems. No method, the MIT/CalTech
study conceded, worked more reliably than hand-counting paper
ballots - an option that US electoral officials seem to consider
hopelessly antiquated, or at least impractical in elections combining
multiple local, state and national races for offices from President
down to dogcatcher.
The clear disadvantages and dangers associated with DREs have
not deterred state and county authorities from throwing themselves
headlong into touchscreen technology. More than 40,000 machines
made by Diebold alone are already in use in 37 states, and most
are touchscreens. County after county is poised to spend hundreds
of millions of dollars more on computer voting before next spring's
presidential primaries. "They say this is the direction they
have to go in to have fair elections, but the rush to go towards
computerisation is very dubious," Dr Mercuri says. "One
has to wonder why this is going on, because the way it is set
up it takes away the checks and balances we have in a democratic
society. That's the whole point of paper trails and recounts."
Anyone who has struggled with an interactive display in a museum
knows how dodgy touchscreens can be. If they don't freeze, they
easily become misaligned, which means they can record the wrong
data. In Dallas, during early voting before last November's election,
people found that no matter how often they tried to press a Democrat
button, the Republican candidate's name would light up. After
a court hearing, Diebold agreed to take down 18 machines with
apparent misalignment problems. "And those were the ones
where you could visually spot a problem," Dr Mercuri says.
"What about what you don't see? Just because your vote shows
up on the screen for the Democrats, how do you know it is registering
inside the machine for the Democrats?"
Other problems have shown up periodically: machines that register
zero votes, or machines that indicate voters coming to the polling
station but not voting, even when a single race with just two
candidates was on the ballot. Dr Mercuri was part of a lawsuit
in Palm Beach County in which she and other plaintiffs tried to
have a suspect Sequoia machine examined, only to run up against
the brick wall of the trade-secret agreement. "It makes it
really hard to show their product has been tampered with,"
she says, "if it's a felony to inspect it."
As for the possibilities of foul play, Dr Mercuri says they are
virtually limitless. "There are literally hundreds of ways
to do this," she says. "There are hundreds of ways to
embed a rogue series of commands into the code and nobody would
ever know because the nature of programming is so complex. The
numbers would all tally perfectly." Tampering with an election
could be something as simple as a "denial-of-service"
attack, in which the machines simply stop working for an extended
period, deterring voters faced with the prospect of long lines.
Or it could be done with invasive computer codes known in the
trade by such nicknames as "Trojan horses" or "Easter
eggs". Detecting one of these, Dr Mercuri says, would be
almost impossible unless the investigator knew in advance it was
there and how to trigger it. Computer researcher Theresa Hommel,
who is alarmed by touchscreen systems, has constructed a simulated
voting machine in which the same candidate always wins, no matter
what data you put in. She calls her model the Fraud-o-matic, and
it is available online at www.wheresthepaper.org.
It is not just touchscreens which are at risk from error or malicious
intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes is vulnerable.
An optical scan of ballots in Scu
