- Stealing an election used to take some doing. Sometimes
the dead had to vote. At other times it took the intervention of the supreme
court, as in Florida three years ago. Maybe not a theft in that case, but
certainly a spirited getaway.
-
- With new voting equipment in use today in California,
Georgia and Maryland for the Super Tuesday primaries, it now may be possible
to hijack the results with nothing more than a phone call into a computer
modem.
-
- Electronic theft may not be necessary. Last time around,
election officials in at least two swing states launched a coordinated
campaign to inhibit many residents of inner city areas from voting. Tens
of thousands were wrongly denied a say in the Gore-Bush race in Missouri
and Florida. They were disproportionately Democrats.
-
- If intimidation, bureaucratic roadblocks and arbitrary
enforcement based on antiquated records don't work this time, there may
be an electronic backup.
-
- The new hardware has been rushed into service as a preventative
for the kind of chaos that prevailed in Miami, Palm Beach and other areas
of Florida after the Gore-Bush election. Tens of thousands of polling places
now have colour screens in place of paper ballots or old mechanical voting
machines. Yet, in spite of passwords and press releases insisting on the
integrity of vendors and designers, the election process has become more
vulnerable to systemic fraud than at any time in US history.
-
- State boundaries and competing political bosses often
stood as firewalls against wholesale, national election fraud. The new
standardised systems with poor security arrangements allow theft to be
automated and instantaneous from coast to coast.
-
- More worryingly, with public opinion so evenly divided,
a president can be elected on the basis of 537 votes in one state. The
new systems appear so easy to crack that a hacker armed with a telephone
and the right numbers can dial into numerous access points, change a few
votes for each precinct or hundreds of votes in several - leaving no trail.
-
- There is nothing fanciful about the possibility of things
going wrong. In one election last year in Indiana, the new electronic equipment
recorded more than 100,000 votes in an election with only 19,000 registered
voters.
-
- Another example comes from Georgia, one of the Super
Tuesday primary states. In 2002, voters there used new electronic systems
to throw out a popular incumbent governor and a serving US senator, both
Democrats, in favour of little-known Republican opponents. Though polls
right up to the election indicated that both Democrats would be re-elected
comfortably, the tally on election night showed massive swings against
them.
-
- Oddly, the swings occurred in only a part of the state,
indistinguishable from areas that conformed very closely to the pre-election
polls. Based on the number of votes counted, commentators reported turnout
of more than 70% of the voters in some areas. These same districts mustered
no more than 45% in the presidential election two years earlier.
-
- The explanation, according to the winners, was that rural
voters came out in force to voice outrage at the governor's alteration
of the state flag to remove the Confederate battle emblem, the familiar
crossed stars on a red background. Later analysis indicated that no more
voters than normal came to the polls that day.
-
- No one has found any proof that the results were tampered
with, though a number of investigators have looked. On the other hand,
no one has been able to audit the results, because the voting machines
provide no paper receipts. A hanging chad on a paper ballot may be difficult
to interpret, as election officials learned in Florida three years ago,
but at least there was something to look at.
-
- The flag has a place in today's voting, too. The new
Georgia governor managed to convince the legislature to change the flag
once more, reverting to an older design with the words "In God we
trust" emblazoned across the centre.
-
- To settle things flag-wise once and for all, the choice
of banners has been put to the voters. When Georgia voters show up at the
polls today to choose presidential candidates, they will also have a chance
to pick a flag - on electronic voting machines.
-
- The polls show the Democratic governor's design is heavily
favoured to win, but voter interest is low, so turnout may not be very
good - unless the same counter mysteriously reappears after the polls close,
as happened two years ago.
-
- The new voting systems have an incestuous parenthood.
The Republican candidate in 2000 became president with help from local
cronies who purged Democrats from the rolls. As president, he cut taxes
on the wealthy while proposing to spend $3.7bn to help states to modernise
their voting systems.
-
- The biggest beneficiary so far has been Diebold Electronic
Voting Systems, part of a company that makes bank vaults and automatic
teller machines and has now become a leading supplier to the newly created
voting systems market.
-
- Since entering the business in 2002, Diebold has won
contracts to supply more than 50,000 voting machines, for California, Georgia,
Maryland and Ohio. Independent software experts concerned about the security
of the systems found that Diebold had posted the source code for the software
on the company's web site.
-
- In short order, they found ways to manipulate the code
to produce fraudulent results and then hacked their way into a list of
phone numbers for the modems being installed on Diebold servers. For more
information see blackboxvoting.org.
-
- Diebold employees turned whistleblowers last year to
reveal that the company had produced fixes for some flaws, then altered
the software without consulting election officials. Whether the fixes worked
or not, the fact that a vendor could alter a voting machine's operating
system without the approval of the authorities has itself caused alarm.
-
- Government officials responsible for the integrity of
voting systems in their states and counties then demanded a formal investigation
of Diebold's vulnerabilities. In an interview last week on Britain's Channel
4, the investigators said that the systems could be easily hacked, totals
altered and results overturned in a matter of minutes.
-
- Diebold's chief executive and other company officers
have contributed more than $600,000 to the Bush re-election campaign and
pledged to fellow Republicans that he would do everything in his power
to ensure Bush's re-election (a statement he now regrets, according to
a spokesman).
-
- Diebold is now lobbying state officials to require each
county to use its machines, to be paid for, at least in part, with the
money appropriated by congress to modernise the system. By November, millions
of voters will go to the polls to cast ballots on Diebold machines that
can be easily tampered with to produce a desired result.
-
- Things used to be so much more straightforward than this.
In an election in the 1980s, the incumbent mayor of Jersey City, an old
industrial centre in northern New Jersey, feared that he had lost the support
of his most elderly constituents. Many of them lived in city-owned apartment
towers. On election morning workers removed the control panels of the lifts
"for routine maintenance".
-
- His opponent rounded up weight lifters from nearby gyms
to carry voters down the stairs to vote and then haul them back up. The
challenger won.
-
- The electronic voting story may be nothing more than
a case of engineering incompetence blended with corporate greed living
alongside political expediency. On the other hand, it may be more sinister.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing," said Josef Stalin.
"Those who count the votes decide everything."
-
- - Albert Scardino is an executive editor of the Guardian.
You can email him at albert.scardino@guardian.co.uk John Scardino owns
a public relations firm and is a former congressional candidate
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1160482,00.html
|
