February 02, 2004
True e-voting stories
Real-life drama from the e-voting front! You’ll get gripping tales of voting error, fantastic frauds, and sup-par software! Act now... there’s more!
Poll workers in Alameda County noticed something strange on election night in October. As a computer counted absentee ballots in the recall race, workers were stunned to see a big surge in support for a fringe candidate named John Burton.Concerned that their new $12.7 million Diebold electronic voting system had developed a glitch, election officials turned to a company representative who happened to be on hand.
Lucky he was there. For an unknown reason, the computerized tally program had begun to award votes for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to Burton, a socialist from Southern California.
Similar mishaps have occurred across the country since election officials embraced electronic voting in the wake of the Florida vote-counting debacle of 2000.
When Californians go to the polls next month to choose a presidential candidate, many voters will cast a virtual ballot by pressing a computer touch screen that records their votes digitally. The only tangible proof that a citizen has voted -- and how he voted -- will be fingerprints left on the machine's screen.
Electronic voting removes the risk of election officials misinterpreting hanging chads. But it raises another electoral peril: that a digital ballot box might miscount votes without anyone noticing.
As the black box replaces the ballot box, concern is growing that local officials are becoming dependent on a handful of corporations to guarantee the integrity and accuracy of elections.
Counties, including Santa Clara County, rely on these voting-equipment companies to manage the software that runs digital voting machines and counts electronic votes -- and to fix things when they go wrong on election night. The companies, however, consider such software a trade secret, making independent confirmation of contested elections difficult, if not impossible.
To guard against error and fraud, the state requires that the companies only install approved software on electronic voting machines. But in California, one of the biggest voting-equipment companies, Diebold Election Systems, provided 17 counties with uncertified software that was used in recent elections.
......``My biggest concern is the lack of accountability,'' said David Dill, a Stanford University computer-science professor and a leading expert on electronic voting.
......Alameda County officials still don't know why the computer program failed on election night. In fact, they only discovered the malfunction because they could compare the paper absentee ballots the software was counting to the computer's tally. The rest of the county's voters cast electronic ballots. Nor were election workers aware at the time that their touch-screen machines were running unauthorized Diebold software in violation of California law, as a state investigation later discovered.
``There was something in the software,'' said Elaine Ginnold, assistant registrar of voters for Alameda County. Alameda County officials refused to allow the Mercury News to review the software code used to test its electronic voting system, saying it was a Diebold trade secret.
......``The counties are in over their heads,'' said Kim Alexander, founder of the California Voter Foundation, a Davis-based election watchdog group. ``People are left depending on the vendors to tell them who won the elections.''
That is especially the case on election night, when mechanical mishaps and buggy computer code could create crises only company employees could resolve.
For instance, in Riverside County during the 2000 presidential election, a computer from Sequoia began dropping touch-screen ballots from the vote tally. A Sequoia salesman who was on hand intervened and fixed the problem.
Unnoticed error
Two years later in Bernalillo County, N.M., neither local election officials nor a Sequoia representative noticed on election night that a programming error was causing a computer running Microsoft SQL server software to delete 25 percent of ballots cast by early voters. Three days later, a Democratic Party lawyer spotted a discrepancy between the number of voters who signed in at the polls and the number of digital ballots counted. Sequoia then managed to recover the lost votes.
......Critics are alarmed that touch-screen voting systems do not create a paper record that allows for a physical recount of ballots. Rather, the machines record votes on digital memory cartridges. When the polls close, the cartridges are removed from the touch-screen machines and plugged into a computer which downloads and tabulates the voting data.
......Until voting machines produce paper receipts, the only way a candidate can investigate questionable election results is by examining the voting systems' software code.
But there's a catch: Election companies consider such software a trade secret not open to public scrutiny -- or subject to challenge from losing candidates, as Emil Danciu found out.
Danciu ran for city council in Boca Raton, Fla., in March 2002. A popular former mayor of the seaside town in Palm Beach County, Danciu expected to win in a landslide but lost by 16 percentage points.
After some voters complained that Sequoia's touch-screen machines appeared to have recorded ballots cast for Danciu as votes for his opponents, Danciu sued to obtain the Sequoia software code.
But Palm Beach County didn't have the code. ``All of this stuff that they are asking for are all proprietary items owned by the manufacturer,'' a county attorney told the judge hearing the case. The attorney argued that even if the county did have the documents, it would be a felony to disclose ``trade secrets.''
The judge denied Danciu's request for the software code.
Hmmmm, no paper trail, miscounted votes, secret software based on flawed Microsoft products (just like your buggy home and office computers), mysterious technicians and sales people who are “fixing” machines and data during elections... but no one in America would ever actually try to steal an election or cheat to get ahead, would they?
More on e-voting problems
Posted by Norwood at February 2, 2004 08:19 AM