As the federally mandated deadline nears for state election officials to replace lever and punch-card voting machines with electronic systems, disturbing and systemic problems are emerging. E-voting has obvious downsides—no ability to check recorded votes, no ability to perform meaningful recounts and susceptibility to electronic voting fraud. Nonetheless, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandates that by January 1 states… return to article
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Reader Comments (17)Page 1 of 1 pagesI served as an election judge in Precinct 21, Ward 2 in Prince George’s
County, Maryland in the 2002 election. We use the Diebold touch screen
voting machines. Being on the inside exposed the dirty underside of voting
machine industry. There must be a paper trail and it must be in place for
the next election; 2006 is too late.
These machines are cranky. They hate to get up in the morning. Three of our
eleven machines failed to start. It turns out the memory cards can work
loose in shipping them across the county. One machine locked up entirely
while a voter was using it. We got a technician in to look at it, and he
said that the vote was counted. That would be grand, except that we had 30
voter authorization cards for the machine and it claimed only 29 voters had
used it. It looks like that voter’s vote was lost.
Security is obviously not Weldon O’Dell’s strong point, either. All of the
machines had the same four digit numerical password. Frankly, it would have
been one of the first ones I would guess. That the machines use Mr. Gates’
Windows CE software should make any tech savvy person leery of security. Mr.
Gates’ problems with security and his Windows operating systems are
established fact. That Maryland did a study and found hundreds of security
flaws in Mr. O’Dell’s product is not comforting. Even with the flaws fixed,
who is to say that some hacker will not find a new way in?
Election judges are forbidden to have bumper stickers which promote a
political candidate on their cars that they park at the polling place.
Putting up a political yard sign is frowned upon, also. Yet, Mr. O’Dell
would have us trust him while he writes partisan fund raising letters
promising that, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes
to the president next year,” This alone should be good reason not to
consider Mr. O’Dell’s voting machines. At least not without a paper trail
that is the official ballot count.
Posted by Paul Motzenbecker on Dec 12, 2003 at 5:19 PM it would actually be fairly simple to verify votes and do recounts. if the machines had a printer, like a cash register, voters could take that and drop it in a box near the machine. this would help prevent fraud.
Posted by nikita on Dec 12, 2003 at 6:49 PM Anyone concerned to preserve the integrity of the vote in the U.S. should go to http://www.verifiedvoting.org and join forces in the effort to pass HR 2239 and the similar bill just introduced in the Senate by Bob Graham to require touchscreen machines to produce a paper receipt.
Posted by Charlene Woodcock on Dec 12, 2003 at 7:07 PM THANK YOU for calling attention to this issue!! This could very well be the most important issue facing the nation at present and as usual is completely ignored by corporate media. It’s absolutely amazing that this is actually happening.
In all probability there are a handful of individuals who - this very minute - are chortling over this spectacle of nine Democratic presidential candidates bickering on television because they know it doesn’t matter a fig who gets the nomination. Who cares how well the competition is doing when you own the judges? Absolutely amazing. . .
It is entirely possible that next year, despite polling that shows most people did not vote for the President, he will be re-elected. Again.
The forces arrayed in the name of corruption are formidable [to say the least], but there others who would like to see the Republic survive that may actually help. The smart Democratic or Independent candidate would do well to court some key players ahead of the game. These include representatives from various intelligence agencies [whose corrupt elements tar the honor of everyone else] as well as defense contractors, telecommunications companies and multinational energy corporations. [For lessons here, see former President Bill Clinton’s masterful handling of relationships with the Secret Service].
In short, many of the competitors of those companies listed above could be enlisted. There are always layers within layers, and it would be naive in the extreme for the next election’s Democrat to rely solely on straight voting to win the next election. This is a shame, but it has been obvious since Florida 2000 that electioneering in this country has reached a new low in the information age. Let us hope that the agencies and corporations in question can rein in their rogue elements before the Republic suffocates from corruption and rot within. The land of the free and home of the brave deserves a much better fate, and those who don’t like democracy or voting should be shipped en masse to Cuba. Otherwise it will be “Et tu, Brutus” for the rest of us.
Posted by Ed Mellon on Dec 12, 2003 at 11:23 PM It is perfectly possible to have an electronic vote confirmed with a receipt on a magnetic strip that cannot be read by anyone else.
This could avoid the risk of vote selling and confirm that a vote was correctly recorded. It would also be possible to spot check large numbers of votes to resolve concerns about problems with specific machines.
Posted by Jim Loomis on Dec 12, 2003 at 11:36 PM This is a commentary I wrote in response to a Paul Krugman piece concerning the same topic that this excellent article covers but this writing approaches the VM issue from the tech perspective.
Hack the Vote (Paul Krugman - NY TImes) is a good piece because it shows, indirectly, why the
US approach to electronic voting machines is fatally flawed, not
because of the lack of a paper trail but because of the blind acceptance
by the states to buy overpriced, closed and proprieraty environments
that run on Windows.In Brazil and Australia, the approach to electronic vothing started from the premise that hardware and software should be open source, vetted by each county’s research institutions that would define the parameters under which the systems would be designed. After the requirements for hardware and softare were articulated by the aforementined institutions, the VM specs were put out to bid under
the proviso that all data relevant to the competitive systems would
remain open to the public. When proof of concept prototypes were
made available to the public, they were tested to see how they could
stand up under real world conditions (security/voter input). After that,
the accepted prototype for each country (with full public specs) was
put into production.Both nation’s Open Source machines run on Linux. Both systems
don’t use paper and both systems have worked as promised because
Linux is inherently more secure than Windows and Open Source,
when properly designed, is less expensive to run than comparative
Windows systems.As a footnote, Brazil’s 2nd genertion machine, which generates no
paper, is a touch screen system like Diebold’s, costs $200 vs $5500,
and can run on AC or batteries as conditions warrant.If the US had done the same approach as Brazil and Australia, the
recurring nighmare of Diebold’s marginal system running on
Windows (politics notwithstanding) would have never seen the light
of day.Finally, paper is no panacea because if the code can be hecked, then paper results can be altered to reflect the results of the hacked code. The problem here is deeper than paper, it’s with the shoddy approach this nation has taken in buying EVMs.
Keep up the good work because these bastards (Diebold etc.) should NEVER be allowed to compromise the voting process as Diebold did in Florida where 16,000 ballots for Gore mysteriously diasppeared under the auspices of Diebold and Katherine Harris.
Posted by Robert E. Moran on Dec 13, 2003 at 4:33 AM This brewing problem has been on
my mind since reading a report on Diebold and it’s nefarious CEO . I’ve only heard it discussed once on NPR by some computer engineers. I keep hoping for a relentless,wide open investigation and disclosure on part of main stream media. Fat chance, I guess.
Posted by Lorna O'Connor on Dec 13, 2003 at 5:21 PM There are two kinds of evoting : polling-place voting on proprietary hardware that does not provide any kind of protection of votes nor proof the votes were counted, and Internet voting. Recent improvements in Internet voting provide encryption of votes with open source software and cryptographic vote receipting that makes it very hard to hack votes out of the channel between voter and Electoral Officer, who holds the encryption keys. It may be harder to explain these solutions to Joe Longneck, but they are none the less far better solutions.
Forget these voting machines, they are a dead end, and forget adding a printer, this takes us back to the problems we have now with paper.
Mail me for references and supporting work.
Posted by Craig on Dec 14, 2003 at 3:33 AM In Boulder Colorado, we successfully blocked the purchase of vote RECORDING machines (DRE).
You can hearto the winning argument by listening to the 10 minute presentation at www.users.qwest.net/~alkolwicz
The full-text voter-verifiable paper ballot must be the ONLY record of vote.
Posted by Al on Dec 14, 2003 at 4:07 AM This is especially to Paul, but also to all concerned about electrionic voting and no paper trail/audit verifability…there is an excellent group of actively working folk seeking to build coalitions in this nonpartisan issue. Our web site is www.TrueVoteMD.org
We’ve been able to get tons of press in the few months of work put into this issue. Please join us and together we will get this issue on the table in the upcoming Legislative period.
Posted by Julie on Dec 14, 2003 at 5:07 AM This is an important issue that needs way more exposure, and we can’t just wait for the elections to get closer. Also, another issue I have not heard much about from even the left is the Republican National Convention that is to take place in New York City. It’s obvious why the convention is being held there, and if at all possible, it should be stopped.
Posted by David Guzman on Dec 15, 2003 at 5:32 AM Guzman, why can’t the convention happen in New York? On that same note, you would permit those to prohibit protests in certain areas,
Posted by brad on Dec 16, 2003 at 6:59 AM States are buying these fucking Diebold things all over. It seems once the money has been spent on a “better” system, there is no going back. Problem is, the fucktards who go into politics have no intellect, and don’t see the flaw in placing our freedom in ANYBODY’S PRIVATE COMPUTER.
We are the worst stewards of freedom the Earth has ever known. We should be rioting in the streets, prteventing these machines from tipping the scales to Bush in 2004.
But we won’t, and then the world will be fucked.
All I can hope for is a revolution hereñbut there won’t be one.
We’re all too satisified with cheap gas, big cars, cheap consumer items from Wal-Mart, a belly full of McDonald’s, a mind filled with celebrity gossip culture and our dicks in our hands as we masturbate to our vast pornography industry.
Our founding fathers are spinning in their graves.
Go have another Budweiser, and head off to the den to watch that new plasma TV and special-edition DVD of Charlies Angels 2: Full Throttle.
GOD DAMN AMERICA
Posted by voteman on Dec 16, 2003 at 12:22 PM Forget the Bush claims to support democracy in Iraq or anywhere else in the world. The greatest crisis of democracy is right here at home. Biddle warns us of things to come. Voter fraud on the part of this administration in November is not beyond the scope of reality; in fact it is a likelihood (since they’ve done it before, i.e., Florida 2000). Consequently, I’d like to urge InTheseTimes to begin a campaign to bring in international observers to watch the Nov. 2004 elections. Too much is at stake to allow multinational corporations run our elections. Our very democracy is in the balance.
Posted by Ric Doringo on Feb 6, 2004 at 10:02 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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Posted by piet on Dec 13, 2003 at 1:21 PM 
Posted by interesting on Dec 14, 2003 at 1:41 AM 
Also by Mark Lewellen-Biddle
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