Hacking the Mother Machine?

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Mon, 14 Mar 2005 13:53:21 -0800 (PST)

Teresa Heinz Kerry - Hacking the " Mother Machine " ?

 

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0310-32.htm

 

 

 

Teresa Heinz Kerry - Hacking the " Mother Machine " ?

 

by Thom Hartmann

 

" Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the

United States, " Teresa Heinz Kerry told a group of Seattle guests at a

March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith, according to

reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the Seattle

Post-Intelligencer. Connelly noted Heinz Kerry added that it is " very

easy to hack into the mother machines. "

 

The two brothers Mrs. Kerry is referencing are, according to voting

machine expert (and founder of www.BanVotingMachines.org) Lynn Landes,

in an article for the Online Journal, Bob Urosevich, president of

Diebold Election Systems, and Todd Urosevich, who was vice president

for customer support of Chuck Hagel's old company, now known as ES & S.

 

Presumably the " mother machines " Teresa was talking about are the

" central tabulator " computers, like the Windows-based Diebold central

tabulator PC that Howard Dean hacked into and untraceably changed an

election on - in 90 seconds - live on the " Topic A With Tina Brown "

CNBC TV show late last year.

 

As Dean noted while hacking the Diebold machine on national

television, " In 1998, only 7% of all U.S. counties used electronic

voting machines. " But, Dean noted of the 2004 race, " in the next

presidential election, roughly 1 in 3 of us will use one. "

 

Dean added:

 

" But critics have found all sorts of flaws with these machines, from

software security concerns, to the complete lack of a paper trail to

verify votes. These machines cannot be recounted.

 

" In Riverside County, California, an incumbent mysteriously pulled

ahead after the voting machine company employees stopped the tally to

tinker with the machines.

 

" In Iowa [graphic shows 'Allamakee County, Iowa'], machines in one

precinct returned 4 million votes-- when only 300 actual voters turned

out.

 

" In San Diego, election officials reportedly turned to teenagers to

reboot their malfunctioning machines.

 

" And in Florida, a computer crash erased the records from Miami-Dade's

first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines-- all data from

the 2002 gubernatorial primary is gone.

 

" There are two problems. One, there's no paper trail which means you

can't verify your vote, and it can't be recounted. The other

potentially serious problem: tampering and rigging of elections. We

asked Diebold, one of the companies that makes these machines, and

Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood to appear on this program. They

both turned us down. "

 

Democratic concern about electronic voting machines has floated around

for several years, particularly since voting rights activist Bev

Harris (of www.blackboxvoting.org) reported that she was Googling

around the internet and stumbled across an FTP backdoor on Diebold's

website that, just after the 2002 election, contained a folder titled

" Rob Georgia. " (Cleland's 2002 loss in Georgia helped hand control of

the Senate back to the Republicans, who had lost it when Jim Jeffords

of Vermont left the party to become an independent.)

 

In Georgia and Florida, where paper had been totally replaced by

touch-screen machines in many to most precincts during 2001 and 2002,

the 2002 election produced some of the nation's most startling

precursors to the alarming shift from an " exit poll win " for Kerry to

the " voting-machine win " for Bush in 2004.

 

USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, " In Georgia, an Atlanta

Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a

49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss. " Cox News

Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7)

that, " Pollsters may have goofed " because " Republican Rep. Saxby

Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin

of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a

series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in

none of them. "

 

Just as amazing was the 2002 Georgia governor's race. " Similarly, " the

Zogby polling organization reported on Nov. 7, " no polls predicted the

upset victory in Georgia of Republican Sonny Perdue over incumbent

Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes. Perdue won by a margin of 52 to 45

percent. The most recent Mason Dixon Poll had shown Barnes ahead 48 to

39 percent last month with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points. "

 

Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new

touch-screen computerized voting machines, which produced no paper

trail whatsoever. Similarly, as the San Jose Mercury News reported in

a Jan. 23, 2003 editorial titled " Gee Whiz, Voter Fraud? " " In one

Florida precinct last November, votes that were intended for the

Democratic candidate for governor ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush, because

of a misaligned touchscreen. How many votes were miscast before the

mistake was found will never be known, because there was no paper

audit. " ( " Misaligned " touchscreens also caused 18 known machines in

Dallas to register Republican votes when Democratic screen-buttons

were pushed in 2002: it's unknown how many others weren't noticed.)

 

Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that

incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war

veteran, was, as Republican TV ads suggested, too unpatriotic to

remain in the Senate, even though his Republican challenger, Saxby

Chambliss, had sat out the Vietnam war with a medical deferment.

 

Maybe, in the final two days of the race, those voters who'd pledged

themselves to Georgia's popular incumbent Governor Roy Barnes suddenly

and inexplicably decided to switch to Republican challenger Sonny Perdue.

 

Maybe George W. and Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob

Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other

long-shot Republican candidates around the country really did win

those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them

losing in the last few election cycles, but computer controlled voting

or ballot-reading machines showed them winning.

 

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a

science that it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third

World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the

United States in the past few years and just won't work here anymore.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate

exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed,

computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and

tabulating ballots.

 

As the Washington Post noted in a January 20, 2005 article by Richard

Morin and Claudia Deane ( " Report Acknowledges Inaccuracies in 2004

Exit Polls " ):

 

" But 'there were 26 states in which the estimates produced by the exit

poll data overstated the vote for John Kerry....' said Joe Lenski of

Edison Media Research and Warren Mitofsky of Mitofsky International.

 

" Throughout election night, the national exit poll showed the

Massachusetts senator leading President Bush by 51 percent to 48

percent. But when all the votes were counted, it was Bush who won by

slightly less than three percentage points. "

 

Mitofsky and Edison's work also showed that Ohio was one of the states

where the discrepancies between the official tabulation and the exit

polls were most noticeable. The Washington Post noted: " At the request

of the media sponsors, Mitofsky and Lenski are continuing to examine

exit polling in Ohio and Pennsylvania, two critical battleground

states where the poll results were off. "

 

When four attorneys in Ohio sued that state to discover details of how

voting was conducted in that state, they report they were slapped with

a massive and expensive lawsuit engineered by the State of Ohio's

Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell (also co-chair of the Ohio Bush For

President campaign) and Ohio Attorney General, Republican Jim Petro.

The Ohio lawyer/activists have launched a legal defense fund

(information available at http://freepress.org/store.php#donate) to

help them fight both for an exposé of Ohio irregularities and to

defend themselves against this attack by the Republican officials who

control the voting systems in that state.

 

Oddly, though, as statistics experts Steven Freeman and Josh

Mittledorf noted in an article for In These Times, analyzing the data

provided by exit polling companies Mitofsky and Edison, " only in

precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the

official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling

margin of error. " In those places where computers were used to count

the vote, oddly the exit polls showed Kerry winning but the voting

machines had Bush winning.

 

Mitofsky/Edison tried to explain this away with their " shy Republican "

theory, suggesting that they'd hired young pollsters and older

Republican voters were less willing to talk with them. Noted Freeman

and Mittledorf:

 

" But in fact, the data suggest that Bush voters were slightly more

likely to complete the survey: 56 percent of voters completed the

survey in the Bush strongholds, while 53 percent cooperated in Kerry

strongholds. "

 

Thus, say these two university experts: " The exit polls themselves are

a strong indicator of a corrupted election. "

 

This analysis comes just as Bev Harris' organization

www.blackboxvoting.org provided testimony to the House Judiciary

Committee, as reported on their website:

 

" In mid-February, Black Box Voting, together with computer experts and

videographers, under the supervision of appropriate officials, proved

that a real Diebold system can be hacked.

 

" This was not theoretical or a 'potential' vulnerability. Votes were

hacked on a real system in a real location using the actual setup used

on Election Day, Nov. 2, 2004.

 

" In October, Black Box Voting published an article on this Web site

about remote access into the Diebold system. After examining the

Diebold software and related internal e-mails, local security

professionals were able to demonstrate a hack into a simulated system.

 

" In February, we were allowed to try various hacking techniques into a

real election system. To our surprise, the method used in our October

simulation did not work.

 

" However, another method did work. The hack that did work was

unsophisticated enough that many high school students would be able to

achieve it. This hack altered the election by 100,000 votes, leaving

no trace at all in the central tabulator program. It did not appear in

any audit log. The hack could have been executed in the November 2004

election by just one person.

 

" This hack stunned the officials who were observing the test. It calls

into question the results of as many as 40 million votes in 30 states.

We are awaiting the response of the House Judiciary Committee to this

new development for their investigation.

 

" In another real-world example, Black Box Voting obtained the actual

files used in the Nov. 2 election in a specific county. In this

situation, the local officials did not know how to run their Diebold

system, so a Diebold tech ran the election in that county. Election

officials remembered the Diebold tech's first name, but not his last name.

 

" The Diebold tech had gone home after the election, and no one in the

county was able to access their own voting system, leading to some

consternation because they could not provide our public records request.

 

" Because local officials could not access their logs, we were given

permission to sit down and copy files. (We have since found that this

is not an isolated problem -- many local officials are painfully

unfamiliar with their own voting systems.)

 

" Local officials did not know their password, so Bev Harris asked if

they would like her to hack the password. They said 'yes' (!)

 

" Later, to our even greater surprise, Bev Harris found that the

password set by the Diebold tech on this real election file, used in

the Nov. 2004 election was ... drum roll please ... the diabolically

clever password: 'diebold.' (This took only two tries to guess.) "

 

So what to do? Here's a five-step process that Americans interested in

clean elections - regardless of party affiliation - could start

immediately, so it'll in place in time for the 2006 elections.

 

* 1. Organize and fund a national exit poll, using a non-partisan,

professional organization like Zogby, or one built from the ground up.

* 2. Have detailed systems in place - using the internet and

email, in particular - to release the results of those exit polls

within an hour of the close of the polls on election eve in November,

2006.

* 3. Plan for vote fraud, and brand the plan. In the Ukraine, the

slogan was " Time's up! " The logo was a ticking clock, and thousands of

paper stencils were distributed so the logo could be spray-painted on

sidewalks or buildings in the event evidence of vote-fraud showed up.

The color was orange, and orange scarves and hats were mass purchased

before election day.

* 4. Develop a corps of people committed to showing up and

speaking out wherever the exit polls demonstrate the clear possibility

of election fraud.

* 5. Have a relentless media strategy in place to keep the

pressure on and bring people out into the streets.

 

If you think this isn't viable, it is. It's already been done, in

Ukraine, Belarus, the former Soviet state of Georgia, and Serbia. In

three of those four elections, this very strategy succeeded in getting

" official " vote tabulations changed and elections reversed. And, irony

of ironies, it was largely funded by the United States.

 

One would think that the United States Congress would be working for

greater transparency in our elections. And, indeed, Congressman Rush

Holt and Senator Hillary Clinton have introduced bills into the House

and Senate that would call for that. But, inexplicably, Republicans in

the House and Senate have blocked them from coming to a vote.

 

At the same time, computer programmer Clinton Curtis charged, in a

sworn affidavit before a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary

Committee investigation in Ohio, that Republican Congressman Tom

Feeney of Florida participated in hiring Curtis to write

" undetectable " (when compiled) voting-machine-rigging software.

Republicans in the House have also blocked efforts to investigate this

and other charges made during hearing held in Ohio by Congressman John

Conyers.

 

In Ukraine, an entrenched political machine dedicated to single-party

rule laughed off the possibility that exit polls, colored scarves, a

catchy slogan, and spray-painted logos could force a change in a

national election. As Peter Finn reported in The Washington Post on

November 22, 2004:

 

" The [Russian-supported and " officially " winning] Yanukovych campaign

said the exit polls, which were funded by the United States and other

Western countries, and the demonstration were a calculated effort to

preempt the official result....

 

" 'These polls don't work,' said Gennady Korzh, a spokesman for

Yanukovych. 'We will win by between 3 to 5 percent. And remember, if

Americans believed exit polls, and not the actual count, John Kerry

would be president.' "

 

According to a survey released the day before the November 2, 2004

election by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of

Pennsylvania, one of the most respected and non-partisan groups to

regularly take the pulse of the American electorate, " As of Election

Eve, only 62 percent of registered voters are 'very confident' that

their votes will be accurately counted. "

 

Perhaps Teresa Heinz Kerry was one of the skeptical voters Annenberg

surveyed. And, if the fears she candidly expressed this week have any

basis, Americans - of all political persuasions - who believe in

democracy, fairness, and open elections must be prepared to act in 2006.