Sum of a Glitch: Evidence shows that machines might be the real swing voters this November.

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/978/

 

Features > August 24, 2004

 

Sum of a Glitch

Evidence shows that machines might be the real swing

voters this November

 

By Bev Harris

 

In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by

Election Systems and Software (ES & S) flipped the

governor’s race. Six thousand three hundred Baldwin

County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after

the polls had closed and everyone had gone home.

Democrat Don Siegelman’s victory was handed to

Republican Bob Riley, and the recount Siegelman

requested was denied. Three months after the election,

the vendor shrugged. “Something happened. I don’t have

enough intelligence to say exactly what,” said Mark

Kelley of ES & S.

 

When I began researching this story in October 2002,

the media was reporting that electronic voting

machines are fun and speedy, but I looked in vain for

articles reporting that they are accurate. I

discovered four magic words, “voting machines and

glitch,” which, when entered into a search engine,

yielded a shocking result: A staggering pile of

miscounts was accumulating. These were reported

locally but had never been compiled in a single place,

so reporters were missing a disturbing pattern.

 

I published a compendium of 56 documented cases in

which voting machines got it wrong.

 

How do voting-machine makers respond to these reports?

With shrugs. They indicate that their miscounts are

nothing to be concerned about. One of their favorite

phrases is: “It didn’t change the result.”

 

Except, of course, when it did:

 

* In the 2002 general election, a computer

miscount overturned the House District 11 result in

Wayne County, North Carolina. Incorrect programming

caused machines to skip several thousand party-line

votes, both Republican and Democratic. Fixing the

error turned up 5,500 more votes and reversed the

election for state representative.

* This crushing defeat never happened: Voting

machines failed to tally “yes” votes on the 2002

school bond issue in Gretna, Nebraska. This error gave

the false impression that the measure had failed

miserably, but it actually passed by a 2-to-1 margin.

Responsibility for the errors was attributed to ES & S,

the Omaha company that had provided the ballots and

the machines.

* According to the Chicago Tribune, “It was like

being queen for a day—but only for 12 hours,” said

Richard Miholic, a losing Republican candidate for

alderman in 2003 who was told that he had won a Lake

County, Illinois, primary election. He was among 15

people in four races affected by an ES & S vote-counting

foul-up.

* An Orange County, California, election computer

made a 100 percent error during the April 1998 school

bond referendum. The Registrar of Voters Office

initially announced that the bond issue had lost by a

wide margin; in fact, it was supported by a majority

of the ballots cast. The error was attributed to a

programmer’s reversing the “yes” and “no” answers in

the software used to count the votes.

* A computer program that was specially enhanced

to speed the November 1993 Kane County, Illinois,

election results to a waiting public did just

that—unfortunately, it sped the wrong data. Voting

totals for a dozen Illinois races were incomplete, and

in one case they suggested that a local referendum

proposal had lost when it actually had been approved.

For some reason, software that had worked earlier

without a hitch had waited until election night to

omit eight precincts in the tally.

* A squeaker—no, a landslide—oops, we reversed the

totals—and about those absentee votes, make that

72-19, not 44-47. Software programming errors, sorry.

Oh, and reverse that election, we announced the wrong

winner. In the 2002 Clay County, Kansas, commissioner

primary, voting machines said Jerry Mayo ran a close

race but lost, garnering 48 percent of the vote, but a

hand recount revealed Mayo had won by a landslide,

receiving 76 percent of the vote.

 

The excuses given for these miscounts are just as

flawed as the election results themselves. Vendors

have learned that reporters and election workers will

believe pretty much anything, as long as it sounds

high-tech. They blame incorrect vote counts on “a bad

chip” or “a faulty memory card,” but defective chips

and bad memory cards have very different symptoms.

They don’t function at all, or they spit out

nonsensical data.

 

In the November 2002 general election in Scurry

County, Texas, poll workers got suspicious about a

landslide victory for two Republican commissioner

candidates. Told that a “bad chip” was to blame, they

had a new computer chip flown in and also counted the

votes by hand—and found that Democrats actually had

won by wide margins, overturning the election.

 

Voting machine vendors claim these things are

amazingly accurate. Bob Urosevich, who has headed

three voting machine companies under five corporate

names, said in 1990 that his company’s optical-scan

machines had an error rate of only “one-thousandth of

1 percent.”

 

At that time Urosevich was with ES & S (then called

American Information Systems). Recently, the same

Urosevich (now president of Diebold Election Systems)

gave an even more glowing endorsement of his company’s

touch-screen accuracy.

 

“Considering the magnitude of these elections, which

includes more than 870,000 registered voters within

the four Maryland counties, we are very pleased with

the results as every single vote was accurately

counted,” he said.

 

In 1992, when Chuck Hagel accepted his position as

chairman of American Information Systems, he offered a

rousing endorsement: “The AIS system is 99.99 percent

accurate,” he assured.

 

But do these claims hold up?

 

According to the Wall Street Journal, in the 2000

general election an optical-scan machine in Allamakee

County, Iowa, was fed 300 ballots and reported 4

million votes. The county auditor tried the machine

again but got the same result. Eventually, the

machine’s manufacturer, ES & S, agreed to have

replacement equipment sent. Republicans had hoped that

the tiny but heavily Republican county would tip the

scales in George W. Bush’s favor, but tipping it by

almost 4 million votes attracted national attention.

 

November, 2003: Officials from Boone County, Indiana,

wanted to know why their MicroVote machines counted

144,000 votes cast when only 5,352 existed.

 

Better than a pregnant chad—these machines can

actually give birth.

 

In the 1996 McLennan County, Texas, Republican primary

runoff, one precinct tallied about 800 votes, although

only 500 ballots had been ordered.

 

“We don’t think it’s serious enough to throw out the

election,” said county Republican Party Chairman M.A.

Taylor. Error size: 60 percent.

 

Here’s a scorching little 66 percent error rate: Eight

hundred and twenty-six votes in one Tucson,

Arizona-area precinct simply evaporated, remaining

unaccounted for a month after the 1994 general

election. No recount appears to have been done, even

though two-thirds of voters did not get their votes

counted. Election officials said the vanishing votes

were the result of a faulty computer program.

Apparently, the software programming error and the

person who caused it are still at large.

 

Some voters aren’t so sure that every single vote was

accurately counted during the 2002 general election in

Maryland.

 

According to the Washington Times, Kevin West of Upper

Marlboro, who voted at the St. Thomas Church in Croom,

said, “I pushed a Republican ticket for governor and

his name disappeared. Then the Democrat’s name got an

‘X’ put in it.”

 

No one will ever know whether the Maryland machines

counted correctly because the new Diebold touch-screen

system is unauditable.

 

Tom Eschberger became a vice president of ES & S not

long after he accepted an immunity deal for

cooperating with prosecutors in a case against

Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen, who pleaded

guilty to taking kickbacks and bribes in a scheme

related to computerized voting systems.

 

Eschberger reported that a test conducted on a

malfunctioning machine and its software in the 1998

general election in Honolulu, Hawaii, showed the

machine worked normally. He said the company did not

know that the machine wasn’t functioning properly

until the Supreme Court ordered a recount, when a

second test on the same machine detected that it

wasn’t counting properly.

 

“But again, in all fairness, there were 7,000 machines

in Venezuela and 500 machines in Dallas that did not

have problems,” he said.

 

Really?

 

Dallas, Texas A software programming error caused

Dallas County, Texas’ new, $3.8 million high-tech

ballot system to miss 41,015 votes during the November

1998 election. The system refused to count votes from

98 precincts, telling itself they had already been

counted. Operators and election officials didn’t

realize they had a problem until after they’d released

“final” totals that omitted one in eight votes.

 

In one of the nonsensical answers that we hear so

often from vendors, ES & S assured us that votes were

never lost, just uncounted.

 

The company took responsibility and was trying to find

two apparently unrelated software bugs, one that

mistakenly indicated precinct votes were in when they

weren’t, and another that forgot to include 8,400

mail-in ballots in the final tally. Democrats were

livid and suspicious, but Tom Eschberger said, “What

we had was a speed bump along the way.”

 

Caracas, Venezuela In May 2000, Venezuela’s highest

court suspended elections because of problems with the

tabulation for the national election. Venezuela sent

an air force jet to Omaha to fetch experts from ES & S

in a last-ditch effort to fix the problem. Dozens of

protesters chanted, “Gringos get out!” at ES & S

technicians. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez accused

ES & S of trying to destablize the country’s electoral

process. Chávez asked for help from the U.S.

government because, he said, the United States had

recommended ES & S.

 

Some people, when you give them the short but

horrifying version of the electronic voting issue,

insist on minimizing the problem. You tell them about

an election that lost 25 percent of its votes, and

they say, “That’s just an isolated incident.” When you

add that another election had a 100 percent error,

they call it a “glitch.” When you tell them a voting

machine was videotaped recording votes for the

opposite candidate than the one selected, they say,

“There are problems in every election.”

 

No. We are not talking about a few minor glitches.

These are real miscounts by voting machines, which

took place in real elections. Almost all of them were

caused by incorrect programming, whether by accident

or by design.

 

Is this not alarming? These voting systems have

miscounted our votes, flipping elections even when

they are not particularly close. Even more alarming:

We have no idea how many miscounts go unnoticed.

 

To correct current procedural flaws, we need to bring

in the right kinds of experts—auditors—and we need to

keep the system simple.

 

Here are some procedural safeguards we should

consider:

 

* Verify the machine tally while still at the

polling place. Run a report of the tally from the

polling place before phoning, modeming or driving

anything to the county. Post this report on the door

of the precincts and make copies available to the

press.

* Compare the polling-place tally with the

matching totals assigned by the central county office.

If there is a discrepancy, pull out the paper ballots

and do an audit.

* Provide clearly delineated accounting for the

votes that appear separately from the precinct totals,

like absentee votes and provisional votes.

Polling-place tallies should always match what is

posted at the polling place. Separate the other votes

cleanly and record them in a way that is easily

understandable for everyone.

* Hand audits must be a routine part of every

election, not just used for recounts. Hand-audit any

anomalies.

* Make “random” spot checks truly random by using

a transparent and public method for random selection.

* Allow the press, and any citizen, to audit if

they pay for it. If they discover that the election

was miscounted, reimburse them. Find ways to do these

audits inexpensively.

* Allow each party to select a handful of

precincts to hand-audit. Discretionary audits shine

light into any precincts deemed suspicious.

* Require audits for insufficient randomness

(e.g., three candidates each get 18,881 votes; voters

arrived in alphabetical order).

* Require that the audit be expanded if

discrepancies are spotted, whether or not the

discrepancy would overturn the election.

* When voting machines miscount, require that fact

be disclosed. If it is the fault of the vendor,

require such failures to be disclosed to prospective

buyers.

* Consider a 100 percent audit of the paper

ballots. It may be easier and cheaper to do a 100

percent audit than to counter the political tricks

that will arise when we introduce judgment (like what

constitutes an “anomaly”) into a robust spot-checking

procedure.

 

Taking back our vote is not something we can depend on

others to do for us. This requires the top talent we

have. Nothing less will do. This job needs you.

 

What are we fighting for? Simply this, and we must

accept nothing less: We want voting systems to produce

voter-verified paper ballots, and those ballots must

be considered the legal record when used for recounts

and audits. We must use robust fraud-deterring

auditing methods, and we must place a much higher

priority on catching and correcting software

miscounts.

 

We need a temporary interim solution, so we can be

confident that our votes are secure in the next

elections. We also need a long-term solution, a bill

passed by Congress.

 

We need to develop public policy, auditing procedures,

and tamper-proof voting machines based on input from

experts in a variety of fields, and we must not allow

our collective common sense to be overridden by profit

motives, or the desire to save face because of past

mistakes.