Stand Up and Be Miscounted

Linda Franz is a resident of Ferndale and is a member of Whatcom Fair Voting and Citizens for Voting Integrity–WA.

The integrity of voting in the United States is coming under increasing scrutiny. Grassroots activists across the country are fighting a battle for democracy’s very soul—the right to vote and to have that vote counted as cast.

In the aftermath of the 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. After the hullabaloo over chads, electronic touch-screen voting machines were offered as the solution. (The name for the new computer voting technology is “Direct Recording Electronic Voting Machine” or DRE. We’ll call them touch-screen machines.) However, a number of serious concerns about the viability of these machines have been raised. The matter at stake is “will our votes be counted as cast?”

American vote counting is primarily controlled by three major corporate players—Diebold, ES&S (Election Systems & Software), and Sequoia. The Help America Vote Act makes available billions of dollars to centralize computer voter registration in each state and update voting machines by 2004 or 2006, if states apply for a waiver, as Washington has. Computer voting systems, many using 'touch-screen' technology that leaves no paper ballot at all—are open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, John Hopkins and other universities.

Several states used touch-screen technology in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, using the Diebold touch-screen systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls (see sidebar, “Evidence Suggests 2002 Georgia Election Was Rigged”).

Touch-screen systems cannot be audited unless they produce a voter-verified paper ballot that is deposited in a ballot box. Without physical evidence of your vote, there’s no independent record. That’s the crux of the problem. The computer provides only an electronic copy and you can’t check that for accuracy. What’s on the screen may have nothing to do with how the vote is tallied. A computer count equates to a secret, unobservable, vote count.

Voting is supposed to be secret. Vote counting is to be done in the open, with witnesses. There are no witnesses to how a computer counts votes.

Optical-scan ballots can be recounted by hand but recounts are not possible with touch-screen systems. We have laws about recounts and touch-screen machines without a voter-verified paper ballot violate those laws. Election officials repeat the mantra about computers recounting the votes, or they mention printing results after the voters leave, but these are not audits or recounts. All such information comes from one source, the computer program.

It’s the same as single entry bookkeeping and there’s a reason business doesn’t do that. It will get interesting when candidates realize election outcomes cannot be challenged. A computer regurgitates the same result, over and over. Without voter-verified paper ballots, there’s no way to tell if the computer program did its job correctly.

Most states require voting machines to be certified. Election officials repeatedly claim that certification provides protection. But it’s becoming rapidly apparent that the certification process is a failure. Certification is done in a couple places in the United States. After review by the Independent Testing Authorities (ITAs), a report is generated about a voting system that only the vendor sees. No one has access to the code because the private companies that manufacture voting systems claim it’s proprietary. The private corporations counting your vote use a process you, as a voter, are not allowed to see.

Integral to the certification process is The Election Center, a nonprofit entity in Texas, headed by R. Doug Lewis. The Election Center materialized along with the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). NASED’s Voting Systems Board oversees touch-screen machine standards but The Election Center runs certification. According to Election Center information, the center assisted NASED in its early years and Lewis is the Voting Systems Board committee secretariat. The Election Center picks the Independent Testing Authorities.

Several companies have served as Independent Testing Authorities over the years. Some companies certify hardware and others software. No matter which company is contracted, software certification always involves one person, Shawn Southworth. Southworth moves wherever software certification moves. Recent revelations about Diebold election systems reveals the certification process is flawed—there are no checks and balances in the system to catch problems.

The Election Center forbids contacting the Independent Testing Authorities and will not answer questions about certification. Even the California Ad Hoc Touch-Screen Task Force, assembled by the California Secretary of State to make recommendations on voting systems, received no response from the center about basic questions. No one’s ascertained who started The Election Center or where all of its funding is derived. In spite of appearances, it’s not a federal entity.

The Election Center also works with state lawmakers to craft election law. When some state laws forbid counting paper ballots, it’s crucial to ask what influence The Election Center is wielding and if that influence on officials with little oversight but great power, like Secretaries of State, is appropriate.

A John’s Hopkins study of part of the Diebold touch-screen code revealed serious security problems (see sidebar, “Security Fears Grow Over Electronic Voting Systems”). According to one scientist, a knowledgeable 12-year-old could hack into it. A flaw in password protection, discovered in 1997, was never repaired. In Georgia before the 2002 election, 20,000 new Diebold touch-screen machines required patches (which were not certified) to stop screens from freezing up. How do machines get through quality control much less certification?

Because of the Diebold touch-screen voting machine security problems, several states have backed off purchases of machines. Maryland ordered a code review by Science Application International Corporation (SAIC). However, SAIC has ties to the voting industry including VoteHere, of Bellevue, Washington. When it was revealed that Avi Rubin, one of the scientists on the Hopkins Report, had ties to VoteHere, Diebold cried foul. Rubin, on the VoteHere advisory board but supposedly never contacted, resigned from that position and dropped unexercised stock options. However, through VoteHere's CEO, former Admiral Bill Owens, a SAIC Vice Chairperson, VoteHere has heavy-duty ties to SAIC. Yet Diebold hasn’t said a word about this relationship.

VoteHere, which also offers Internet voting, is an interesting player. After the Hopkins report, VoteHere officially partnered with Sequoia, a top vendor of voting machines in the country. VoteHere’s Jim Adler backs vote auditing, but stops short of advocating voter-verified paper-except for VoteHere’s system, which provides a coded “receipt” the voter takes with them. VoteHere is poised to market its verification scheme for touch-screen machines. While voters get a coded paper slip to verify via computer or a posted list, it won’t allow auditing of an election with verified, physical evidence like ballots in a ballot box.

Recently, Congressman King of Iowa tried to introduce an amendment to audit requirements of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that seemed customized for VoteHere’s “solution.” It called for “individual” verification but not “election” verification—in which the election is verified by counting all the ballots from an independent source. Another proposed legislation, HR2239, put forth by New Jersey Congressman Holt, would provide greater protection for voter verification. Washington Congressman Rick Larsen supports passage of HR 2239.

Known as the Holt Bill, this legislation would amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and would require that a voting system, “ shall produce a voter-verified paper record suitable for manual audit.” Each paper record would be available to the voter for inspection and verification at the time the vote is cast and would be preserved. It provides for the opportunity to correct an error and allows for an official paper record should there be a need for a confirming recount.

VoteHere’s potential to corner the market in machine code is only one avenue pursued by corporate voting interests, interests that do not include making voting more accountable to citizens. Some voting companies spend a lot of money to avoid a paper ballot system. Industry leaders participated recently in a conference call with the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) and The Election Center to discuss a draft plan for an eVoting Industry Coalition. The meeting and plan were supposed to be secret. However, a reporter who crashed the meeting obtained the draft plan. Thus, we got a look into the voting future that big business and the defense industry wants to plan for us.

The coalition’s purpose is to create public confidence and trust in the elections industry and promote adoption of technology-based solutions for elections. Their agenda is to “create” confidence—not earn it. There’s no desire to make voting transparent, accountable and verifiable. When certification is mentioned, it’s to create a Blue Ribbon panel controlled by industry. They want to “Help assure the integrity of information technology used in the electronic voting process.”

The Information Technology Association of America wants the industry to speak with one voice on standards and create positive public perception. They plan to develop liaisons with key constituencies, promote public awareness and reduce criticism, especially from computer scientists and security experts. These experts are the ones who actually know what computer systems can and cannot do and are warning us about the folly of totally trusting any computer system. It seems the coalition forgot that critiques are an important part of security analysis.

Because of The Election Center involvement in the Information Technology Association of America proposal and its close ties with NASED, the potential of collusion for profit is dangerously close to state and local officials.

The solution to voting problems is to return control of the process back to the people and not vested with corporations and defense contractors. Standards should never be set in collusion with business, and vote counting should not be a secret, corporate controlled process. Tangible evidence of voter intent is the most important criteria for any system. This cannot be achieved electronically.

Touch-screen voting machine companies are willing to spend more to avoid a system with a paper audit trail than it would cost to outfit touch-screen voting machines with printers. Paper leaves evidence of the voter’s real intention, evidence useful to show electronic voting systems don’t stand up to their hype. Companies can claim no fraud has occurred because their systems can’t be examined and there is no voter-verified paper ballot to audit results.

Fortunately, a few touch-screen vendors are trying to get it right. But they find it difficult to compete with companies with more money to throw around.

In Washington state, the elections office has rebuffed vendor attempts to certify a voter-verified paper ballot touch-screen system. This in spite of the statement made on the Dave Ross show by Washington State Assistant Director of Elections, David Elliott on January 3, 2003. Referring to a voter-verified paper ballot touch-screen: ”….and if anybody comes to market with something like that we’ll certify it for use in Washington state. No one has presented a system like that for certification yet.”

What’s curious about Elliott’s statement is that he’s been on NASED’s Voting Systems Board for years. Yet he’s unaware of a system that qualified last December to be certified in Washington? As recently as July the company confronted Elliot and still the delay continues.

Washington state auditors have four touch-screen choices, including Diebold. None print a voter-verified paper ballot. Although Secretary of State Sam Reed says county auditors have freedom of choice, that choice is limited to what is state certified. Current systems don’t meet 2002 standards, which must be met by 2006, as required by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). It makes no sense to purchase systems that will need upgrading at our expense later. Fortunately, Washington has until 2006 to meet HAVA requirements.

If Washington pursues HAVA money to purchase machines, it must require voter-verified paper ballot systems. HAVA demands this by mandating a permanent paper record with audit capacity. Audit capacity only comes from an independent, voter-verified record—the paper ballot.

Diebold should be decertified in Washington state, since it has proven severe security flaws in both touch-screen and optical scan systems. Proof comes from examination of their files and from evidence in its own internal memos (recently leaked to the press). See sidebar, “How Diebold Machines Failed in Missouri in 2002.” While the security flaws are supposed to be addressed in Maryland’s new machines, Diebold stated they will not remedy these problems in existing machines. Diebold systems count votes in Chelan, Klickitat, San Juan and King Counties.

Other systems should be independently reviewed in the interests of the security and accuracy of citizens’ votes. To avoid conflicts of interest, qualified experts not affiliated with the State Elections administration must conduct such a review. Citizens’ right to have their votes counted as cast supercedes any corporate proprietary argument to protect what amounts to a program a college computer science class could produce.

The most common complaint I hear is, “My vote doesn’t count.” Not that it’s hard to vote, not that people deplore paper, but that voting is meaningless because something is wrong with the system. Call it intuition, people just know.

Voter-verified paper ballots that are put into a ballot box are the only way people can prove their vote was recorded correctly. Such verification cannot be done with a machine interface, either, except for the visually disabled who must have such help. People are the core of democracy; not machines and votes made up of bits and bytes. However, by using current technology, like bar code and optical character recognition (OCR), paper ballots can be cross-referenced with the electronic record making ballot box shenanigans virtually impossible. If we use the best of both worlds of paper and technology, we just might run the most accurate and tamper-proof elections ever. §