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,… return to article
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Reader Comments (15)Page 1 of 1 pagesExcellent article. I will pass the info along to my circle.
Posted by Kurt Konietzko on Aug 26, 2004 at 5:47 AM You left out a measure: insist that all design specs for voting machines be made publically available, and their programming open source.
Posted by Andrew Thompson on Aug 26, 2004 at 9:44 PM This article, and the facts they report gives the lie to the claim that the touchscreen machines are safe. It is clear that when power is at stake, people will seek to steal elections, no matter the vote method. With the touchscreen machines, however, the very counters of the votes can steal at will - and seem to be doing it widely. Florida, beware!
Posted by Rick Cass on Aug 27, 2004 at 10:57 AM Andrew - Both good suggestions, but I just read that most, if not all, the software spits out the results in a standard MS Excel sheet. Of course, no one would simply open the file and change the numbers…
Posted by Jerry on Aug 28, 2004 at 2:31 AM Excellent article. I attended the Take Back Democracy convention last fall in D.C., to attend the seminars on electronic voting machines, inspired by Bev Harris’s Black Box. Maybe the simplest way to insure verifiable results is to use simple fill in the bubble optical scan. At least the results could be verified. Canada seems to count their ballots marked by pencil on paper without controversy.
Posted by Vaughn Beams on Aug 29, 2004 at 7:29 PM Why isn’t John Kerry doing anything? Every time he gives a speech, he should demand that these fake voting machines be taken out of service immediately. If he won’t stand up for the rights of his supporters, who will?
Bev Harris will, but she doesn’t have national media attention. Kerry has the media attention, why doesn’t he use it? Doesn’t he want to win?
Posted by Anonymous on Aug 29, 2004 at 9:36 PM Legislation is needed to mandate open source, peer reviewed software development. What better way to demonstrate a transparent democracy.
Posted by Brian Nelson on Sep 1, 2004 at 6:22 PM I just sent the URL for this article to my Senator. Hope it convinces her to take action even at this eleventh hour.
Posted by Anonymous2 on Sep 1, 2004 at 9:55 PM Open source is not sufficent, because it is fairly simple to hide bugs which will not be found by simple inspection even by expert programmers.
Only vigorous auditing procedures (which would require voter verifed paper ballots) can ensure that election tampering is found.
Therefore, there is minimal additional safty from demanding open source software, and it will make you sound like a lunatic to many.
I’m not against Open Source Software. I’ve written quite a bit myself. (I’m sommere on sourceforge) However, autiting results is a much more effective method of ensuring fair elections. Bringing up OSS only difuses your efforts and confuses those you are trying to convince.
Posted by Ethan Sommer on Sep 3, 2004 at 7:35 PM Australia uses open source and seems to have fairly good results in their elections. Why all the secrecy and propietary rights being put forth by the vendors like Diebold and ES&S;? Could it be that the fix is in? Oh, say it is not true…
Posted by Vaughn Beams on Sep 3, 2004 at 9:13 PM Bev Harris is such a hero, and all you good people working to stop the theft.
Regarding your debates about what kind of auditing, they seem to presume the use of electronic voting machinery. If paper ballots are also printed out what happens if the machines jam? and if they don’t and the voter gets to carry out proof of how they voted to whom do they give them to? to local mafiosi promising money or beatings? Or to public officials who store them in black sealed boxes, why not? And when should those back-up ballots be counted? Only when the candidates are sufficiently close? Well that just creates an incentive to electronic cheats to fix a big enough percentage margin of ‘victory’ so the back-up count isn’t activated. So they need counting either if it is close or if it looks as if it wasn’t very close. So why not count them every time and forget the fancy machinery in the first place?
Harris’es good will and attempts to work with the election officials are in danger of obscuring the cnetral message that Black box voting, with proper seals and counted in public, is the perfectly evolved level of technology we need already! Any more is less! Anything fancier and we straight away run into the danger of high-tech fraud. Even if this is just a perceived danger (and the independent auditors both know their stuff really well and are really honest - and how can any of us judge?) an election which is believed even by a small but mistaken majority to be rigged is one that is by that very fact a flawed election. Even a tiny majority can let off a lot of bombs to protest a perceived vote-theft, or at the least spread damaging cynicism which stops poor folks from turning out.
In my opinion, THE ONLY VOTING SYSTEM WHICH REALLY ENABLES TRUST TO BE BUILT IS SEALED BLACK BOXES AND PAPER COUNTS IN PUBLIC.
(Incidentally, good people, I hope more and more of you will join the struggle for voting systems which are voter-empowering and proportional. Why should the winner of Florida send all the delegates, why not just 23/22 (or whatever the ratio)? - which could also enable third parties to play more than a wrecking role if they got one or two delegates to send and things were tight at the national level.)
Posted by keith Mothersson on Sep 5, 2004 at 1:33 PM Hi, Those are very thoughtful comments. I have gained some experience with the touchscreen machins in the latest Florida primary, and I was impressed with the possibilities for elections that are difficult to tamper with and can leave a paper trail. The machines we used, from ESS, were all standalone machines with no modem or other telecommunications connection with any othe place or machine. In the morning, three of us inpected each machine, and ran a report on each, with printed tapes for each machine, showing a zero vote count, and a random start number for each machine. Thereafter, the machines could not be voted on unless one of the inspectors placed an electronic device into the voting machine. There were a large number of voulunteer inspectors from all over the political spectrum, the voting was secret, but no one could practically vote a second time. Each voter was signed in, signed the voyer book and then given a pass, a different color for each of the parties holding primary elections, and green for the independents. Over the course of the day, in 2 hour increments, the number of voters having signed in was counted, and the voter count checked against the vote count on the machines.
At the end of the day, some of us counted up the final number of voters, while others of us went from machine to machine with the same electronic vote collector that was used to open the machines that morning. During the enire day, no one knew which voters had used which machine, so when the final tally of votes, final tally of voters, counted up from the random number for each seperate machine, is counted up and printed on paper tapes, three of which are printed up, and one is posted on the door of the voting place for public view. These counts are taken from flash memory #1, with two seperate complete records left undisturbed in the machines.
There is more, butfrom having been involved in a number od election challenges and recount matters in a machine voting state, this system, as far as it goes, is as secure as the old machines, which could be and were fixed to miscount votes. What remains to be done, it seems, is to allow the printing of the votes. As each voter votes from a summary page or pages showing each of his or her votes in a list, there should be little problem in printing each SCREEN that constitutes the actual votes cast by the voters in the event of any controversy. The machines can do this, but Florida has made such a recount illegal in this state, although there is litigation on this.
It seems to me that the combination of the stand alone machines, together with the written record of who voted, added to the publishing of precinct results as soon as they are produced by the printed tape, added to a printable individual “ballot”, i.e the actual votes cast, should provide some comfort, inasmuch as the possibility of fixing an election with the actual votes there to be counted, exit interviews, and the number of people that would have to be in on a fix, is somewhat harder than with machines, and probably only only marginally less difficult than with optical scan. Of course, if machines are electroniclly or telephonically connected either to each other or to a board of elections, all bets are off.
On the issue of proportionality, this can be avoided by making the presidential election one by popular vote. Though proportional voting is attractive, all counntries which have has this over time have proven less stable than majority selection ( not to be confused with majority rule)
Posted by Rick Cass on Sep 5, 2004 at 4:31 PM I write software for a living and writing a vote tally system is not difficult. I fail to see why Diebold and the other vendors have so much difficulty producing an accurate and reliable system.
Given the various attempts, with increasing blatancy, to cook the upcoming election, I am reminded of Vladimar Lenin’s comment on elections:
“Those who vote don’t count. Those who count the votes count absolutely.”Whatever the technology, we MUST have a paper trail, and at this point I would be all for UN observers.
Posted by Anna Harding on Sep 6, 2004 at 9:48 PM Simple Solution
Paper ballots stuffed into sealed boxes, which are opened and counted in lots of 100, in plain view of all the people who voted, who care to see for themselves what the actual vote count is and videoed for good measure.
How many millions of $s were spent on criminal companies who were in on the fix and designed their machines to deliver the result?
What a waste!!!
The old rule works perfectly here. K I S S !
“Keep It Simple Stupid”!
What could be more simple than a complete paper trail?
Other things that needs to be accomplished:
Stop dead people from voting,
make certain that all minority voters are allowed to vote and not kept forcibly from the polling places.Absentee ballots, mail-in votes, etc., need to be counted by the same people who counted the regular votes in a PUBLIC PLACE WITH ALL EYES ON THE VOTE COUNTERS SO NOTHING DISAPPEARS OR IS ALTERRED.
Why such dishonesty is rampant is easy to see when you look at how much money was spent by the major parties - almost $2 billion!!!
People who spend that much money are looking for a return on their investment.
Posted by Roberto Mazzarella on Dec 17, 2004 at 6:34 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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