Will the 2004 Election be Stolen With Electronic Voting Machines? Yes.

[Guest guest]

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/09/29_harris.html

 

September 29, 2003

 

Will the 2004 Election be Stolen With Electronic Voting Machines? An

Interview with Bev Harris, Who Has Done the Groundbreaking Work on

This Issue.

 

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

 

BUZZFLASH: Electronic voting machines, including touch-screen voting,

have been touted as the salvation of a fair voting process. Your

tenacious research over the last year has shown that this idea may be

the Trojan Horse of voting machine reform, allowing elections to be

stolen more easily than in the past. What are the basic reasons that

you argue that electronic voting machines pose a threat to democracy?

 

BEV HARRIS: Four reasons:

 

1. Secrecy: What has always been a transparent process, subjected to

many eyes and belonging to all of us, has very recently become

secretive and proprietary. This happened when voting systems, which

should be considered part of the " public commons " were turned over to

private companies. These companies now assert that the process

underlying the vote must be held secret from the voters.

 

2. Ownership: When a system that belongs to the public becomes secret,

it becomes doubly important to make sure we can completely trust those

who run it. Voting machine companies are not required to tell us who

owns them. Two of the top six firms have been foreign-owned:

Election.com, owned by the Saudis until an acquisition by Accenture

recently, and Sequoia, now owned by DeLaRue (Great Britain). Three of

the top six firms have owners and/or directors who represent vested

interests:

 

-- Election Systems & Software, the largest company. Main owner is a

company owned by Senator Chuck Hagel's campaign finance director,

Michael McCarthy. Hagel has owned shares in both the voting company

itself and in the parent company run by his campaign finance director,

and Hagel was the CEO and Chairman of the voting machine company while

it built the machines that counted his votes.

 

-- Diebold, the second largest voting machine company. CEO is Wally

O'Dell, who recently visited George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch

along with an elite group of Bush supporters called the " Rangers " and

" Pioneers. " Days later, he penned a letter to Ohio Republicans

promising to help " deliver the votes " for Bush. O'Dell sponsored a

$600,000 fund raiser for Dick Cheney in July. Diebold director W.H.

Timken is also a Bush Pioneer.

 

-- VoteHere, the company striving to get its cryptography software

into all the other companies' machines (already has a contract with

Sequoia), has as its Chairman a close Cheney supporter and member of

the Defense Policy Board, Admiral Bill Owens. Former CIA director

Robert Gates, who heads the George Bush School of Business, is also a

director.

 

-- Voting companies also have a somewhat incestuous group of key

players -- Todd Urosevich and Bob Urosevich founded ES & S, but Todd now

is an executive with ES & S while Bob is president of Diebold Election

Systems. Sequoia and ES & S share software and optical scan machines.

 

3. Disabling the safeguards: Voting systems have always had people

trying to rig them, with varying degrees of success. What has changed

is scale. Whereas it used to be that one had to run around bribing

someone to shave the wheel on each lever machine, or collect up ballot

boxes and stuff them in a trunk, nowadays a programmer can,

essentially invisibly, create a back door into the vote system for

millions of votes at once. Whereas vote-rigging has always required

physical access before, modems and wireless communications devices now

open up possibilities for remote vote rigging that no one can observe.

 

-- The audit trail is being taken away: An audit is simply the act of

comparing two independent data sets that are supposed to match.

Probably the most important understory to the voting issue right now

is this: The voting industry is spending literally millions of

dollars, and going through amazing feats of contorted logic that can

best be described as marketing gymnastics, to convince us that we

should discontinue proper auditing. They want us to eliminate the

ballot which you verify, and trust the secret system instead. Even

with the optical scan machines, which retain a paper ballot, some

states have passed laws to prevent us from looking at the paper ballot

to use it for a proper audit.

 

-- Incorrect programming: One thing we've never had until we got

electronic vote-counting (which includes touch screens and optical

scan machines), is bad software programming. A lever machine can be

tampered with, but you don't have any software programming errors with

it. Incorrect software programming has now been identified in over 100

elections, often flipping the race to the wrong candidate, even when

the election was not close.

 

No one knows how many elections have actually been misprogrammed, and

as we eliminate paper ballots, no one will ever know. We do know that

errors as high as 25 percent are not uncommon, and software

programming errors have been documented as high as 100 percent, and in

one small Iowa county, a single machine miscounted by 3 million votes.

 

Incorrect software programming can take two possible forms: Accidental

or deliberate. Either one takes away our right to have our vote

counted as we cast it.

 

4. Secret certification and testing, which gives a passing grade to

flaws -- The whole reason we are supposed to accept secret software

and secret ownership is that, we're told, these systems go through

extensive and rigorous certification and testing. However, this turns

out not to be the case.

 

First of all, the certification officials refuse to say what tests

they do.

 

No one quite knows what the certifiers' credentials are or why they

keep hiring the same guy, and we're not allowed to ask that question.

 

It turns out that the states generally do not look at the secret

programs at all; they simply ask some routine questions and do a

" Logic & Accuracy test " that does not detect fraud, and has proven to

miss huge software programming errors quite often.

 

We now know that the certification process is fundamentally flawed.

The recent report by Scientific Applications International Inc. (SAIC)

on the security of the Diebold voting system identified 328 flaws, 26

of which it deemed " critical. " The examination was ONLY done because,

quite by accident, we got access to the voting program files and a

report was written that exposed problems. But what this illustrates

about certification is simply this: It doesn't work!

 

BUZZFLASH: How could a company steal votes for one party and we would

never know about it?

 

HARRIS: Given inside access, which is available to software engineers

and support techs, anything is possible. In California, according to

internal memos we have obtained written by Diebold support techs and

software engineers, in some elections no one looked at the software

code AT ALL, except for a couple of programmers out of Canada. This is

because the software that was certified and approved, and supposedly

frozen and held in escrow, was replaced with different software for

elections. All of the companies seem to do this: They allow their

techs, and sometimes even elections officials, to replace or " update "

programs, and you can't count on these " updates " being tested by

anyone. In Georgia they did this repeatedly.

 

Let me explain just how disturbing this is: The Diebold software that

has been certified includes something called " GEMS " version 1.11.14

and also GEMS version 1.17.17. However, according to company memos,

they rewrote " the guts of the program " when they made GEMS version

1.14.xx and then made even more changes, significant changes, with

GEMS version 1.15.xx. (The last two numbers vary; none of these were

certified.) These changes were made by programmers in Vancouver,

Canada and stuck on an unprotected web site, where support techs went

and retrieved them and put them on machines used in elections in

California.

 

The story gets odder. The Canadian office, where the programmers come

from, employs only a few people. Key software engineers actually come

from Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hong Kong, and often speak

imperfect English and seem blissfully unaware of U.S. election law.

Who knows what is in these programs? What is the background of these

people? You can do anything you want to an election, if you write the

commands that tell the computer what to do.

 

Getting into specifics requires some geek-speak, which is beyond the

scope of an introduction like this. Several chapters in our

soon-to-be-released book, " Black Box Voting, " discuss this in more depth.

 

BUZZFLASH: What are the names of the manufacturers of the electronic

voting machines, and which one is the biggest?

 

HARRIS: These are the key players:

 

-- Election Systems & Software (ES & S) – currently the largest

-- Diebold Election Systems – currently the fastest growing

-- Sequoia Voting Systems – Still controls a significant share of

American voting machines.

-- Hart Intercivic – Like the others, their machines are not properly

auditable.

-- VoteHere – This is a different kind of company. They have heavy

ties to the defense industry. Their current focus is to get their

encryption system into all the other manufacturers' voting systems;

their encryption concept is just another attempt to do an end run

around an open transparent system with paper ballots.

-- Avante – This is a very interesting company, because it makes touch

screens WITH a paper trail, and a secure ballot box is attached to

every machine. Their machines have been used in Sacramento County and

recently fared quite well in Connecticut.

-- AccuPoll – This is another company we should pay more attention to.

It not only has touch screens with a voter verified paper ballot, but

its software is also " Open source, " meaning anyone can examine it.

 

 

BUZZFLASH: You have charged that the owners of some of these companies

have close connections with the Republican Party. The head of Diebold,

for instance, publicly vowed to do everything possible to see that

Bush wins in Ohio in 2004. Are you concerned that the Republican Party

affiliation of some of these companies could result in voting results

skewed toward the GOP, in short, as a result of manipulating the software?

 

HARRIS: It's a conflict of interest, just as having military defense

contractors involved in our voting system is a conflict. " Conflict of

interest " provides a motive to do something impure. Allowing secret

code and combining it with conflict of interest is just playing with

electoral fire.

 

BUZZFLASH: You have been the victim of having your website

www.blackboxvoting.org shut down by Diebold. Briefly, why did they

shut down your site and how were they able to do that? You refer to

their use of " DMCA " to get your ISPN to clear your website. What is

DMCA? What is the difference between www.blackboxvoting.org and

www.blackboxvoting.com?

 

HARRIS: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) laws, in the

Internet world, are almost as controversial as the Patriot Act,

because they tread on rights, contain draconian penalties, and can be

abused in order to shut people up. What DMCA does is criminalize

copyright issues. They were pushed in by the recording industry to

prevent music piracy, but they have since been used for many other things.

 

The provision that was used against us was an abuse of the DMCA

pull-down-demand- process. Using this, a company can claim they own

copyright to something, write a letter to your Internet service

provider (ISP), demand that the offending page be removed. The ISP

must pull the page immediately or risk losing everything. These

pull-downs almost always take place without a court order.

 

Now, in our case, Diebold didn't even claim we had a copyrighted

document on our site, they complained that we had a LINK to an

unrelated site which, in turn, had LINKS to documents which they

claimed copyright to. And in our case, our ISP overstepped its bounds.

We do not know the extent to which it was pressured to do so by

Diebold or whether there were other types of political pressure. Our

ISP not only pulled the offending link, it pulled the page the link

was on, then it pulled our whole site down, then it removed access to

the files on our FTP site so that we couldn't even relocate the files

to another location. We have been told the site must remain down for

10 days, and we need to file a letter disputing their claim and bleed

lawyer's fees to litigate this. Fortunately, David Allen, who knows

about these things, had a techie-to-techie conversation with a rep at

the ISP, and they decided their attorney had been wrong and granted us

access via FTP, though the site is still not up.

 

Now let me tell you what the Diebold didn't want people to see: Memos

leaked by an insider. It was not a Diebold page, it was an independent

web site owned by someone else.

 

These memos show a pattern of allegedly breaking the law, starting

with using uncertified software; Diebold insiders allegedly admit to

doing " end runs " around the voting system, and in one of the most

shocking sets of memos, they allegedly admit that a " replacement " set

of vote totals was uploaded in Volusia County, Florida which took

16,022 votes away from Al Gore in Nov. 2000. The explanation for how a

supposedly secure system can have replacement votes put on it, and the

whereabouts of " card #3 " which contained the second vote upload, are

missing in action. (The votes were given back to Gore, but only

because a Florida clerk noticed the tally going down and sent out an

alert).

 

Now on the web sites: blackboxvoting.com is owned by David Allen, my

publisher, with Plan Nine Publishing. It contains breaking news

stories, a generous archive of articles, and commentary. I own the

domain name blackboxvoting.org, but to be fair, a webmaster named

Roxanne Jekot, of " Georgia hack challenge " fame, did all the work to

create a very effective " self-serve " activism site, where people could

go and get directly involved and post their work and set up meetings,

both public and private. It is the .org site that was shut down, and I

don't know if I'll set it up again; I don't have the programming

expertise to run it.

 

We are at " the tipping point " now. What brought us to this point,

besides all the hard work by many people, was a kind of

" drip,drip,drip " public education process, mostly using the Internet

but also using radio quite a bit, and what has finally tipped things

is the program files from the Diebold web site and the internal memos.

 

 

BUZZFLASH: Due to your work, states now seem to be reviewing

electronic voting machines, but not necessarily doing anything about

it? Is that accurate?

 

HARRIS: We're getting there. My skills are primarily in investigating,

writing, and being a mouthpiece to get things into public attention.

The set of skills for changing laws, getting injunctions, and

confronting officials in an organized, systematic way is quite

different. I have been eager to pass the torch, and I think we are at

that point, and you will see citizens groups having a big impact in

the very near future. The " Black Box Voting " book is designed to

facilitate activism, because although we'll start seeing action soon,

we have a very long fight ahead of us. It's a solid synopsis of what

we know, to equip citizens to argue this issue persuasively.

 

BUZZFLASH: Okay, you've identified a problem that goes to the heart of

how we choose our leaders in a democracy. You claim that the

" salvation " of electronic voting is rife with potential for

corruption? We are just over a year away from a national presidential

election. Can anything be done in time to ensure an accurate vote count?

 

HARRIS: It has to be. We should not do any more elections until we

have trustworthy and fully auditable voting systems. The stakes are

high and the timeline is short.

 

BUZZFLASH: You have described many of the relationships in the Black

Box Voting industry as incestuous. Can you explain how a recent State

of Maryland " investigation " into a touch-screen voting machine vendor

illustrates that? [LINK]

 

HARRIS: Yes. Check this out: The SAIC is charged with doing an

" independent " investigation of the security of Diebold software. They

then give us about 69 heavily redacted pages out of a 200-page report,

and in this, they take whole sections of the voting system off the

table for examination. Now, the SAIC has ties to the voting industry –

specifically, Admiral Bill Owens is the Vice Chairman of the SAIC and

he is the Chairman of VoteHere. SAIC has ties to the ITAA [LINK], and

the ITAA just tried to thrust a $200,000 PR campaign on the voting

industry to solve the " PR problem " caused by the Diebold revelations.

And there's more. You don't even have time for how much more there is.

 

BUZZFLASH: You have a book coming out, " Black Box Voting. " When is it

going to be released? What does it cover? (We will be offering it as a

BuzzFlash premium).

 

HARRIS: Are you ready for this? Wednesday, Oct. 1, we will start

releasing this book for free in electronic format. We know that some

of the people most likely to be disenfranchised cannot afford a book,

and we want the book to be available to everyone. We know that time is

of the essence, and we want tools to be available to activists

immediately. On Wednesday, we will release two chapters every two days

in free electronic format until the book has been thoroughly

propagated around the world. Then the paperback version will go to

print. ([LINK], watch for the announcement at the top of the homepage)

 

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

 

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About Bev HARRIS: [LINK]

 

BuzzFlash Note: We are offering Diebold's response to Harris's charges

as they appeared in a Seattle Times article [LINK]:

 

Diebold has steadfastly maintained that its elections machinery

and software are safe. The company's position was bolstered yesterday

by Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr., who released an independent

review of Diebold's touch-screen machines and said that, if properly

used, they " can contribute to one of the safest, most secure election

systems available. "

 

Harris' Web site was shut down by her Internet service provider

late Tuesday after a Diebold attorney said she was violating the

company's copyright by posting a link to a New Zealand site that

contained 15,000 pieces of Diebold e-mail.

 

Harris earlier removed Diebold e-mail from her site,

www.blackboxvoting.org, in response to an earlier legal threat by the

company. Her publisher's site, www.blackboxvoting.com, which does not

contain links to the memos, was operating yesterday. Harris said she

plans to put her Web site back on the Internet as soon as possible.

 

Harris said the e-mail supports her claims that Diebold's

high-tech voting systems are subject to abuse. She said she was

" stunned " the company acknowledged the authenticity of the potentially

damaging documents.

 

Harris said she posted the memos after they were provided to her

by a Diebold insider. She called the company's claim of copyright

infringement " a flat-out attempt to shut somebody up. ... I still have

a mouth, Diebold. Cease and desist my mouth. "

 

A call to Diebold's public-relations department yesterday was not

returned. Company spokesman Mike Jacobsen, who is on leave, was

reached at his home last night. He said the memos were stolen from

Diebold and the company wants them back.

 

Jacobsen said Harris also stole company property when she

circulated numerous company files she found on an unprotected Web

site. The files included source code for the company's touch-screen

voting machines, which have recently been bought by election officials

in Georgia, Maryland and other states.

 

Diebold insists its machines meet the security requirements of

national and state certification and has dismissed as flawed a

critical analysis by software experts from Johns Hopkins and Rice

universities. (One of the study's authors later acknowledged he was on

an advisory committee to Bellevue election-software company VoteHere

and held VoteHere stock options.)

 

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