IS HUMBOLDT COUNTY VOTING MACHINE TECHNOLOGY SECURE AND IN THE RIGHT HANDS?

Ellen Komp for The Civil Liberties Monitoring Project

 The CEO of the Ohio-based company that manufactures and programs voting machines for Humboldt county wrote a fundraising letter for G.W. Bush's re-election campaign on August 14, stating he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." The Cleveland Plain Dealer also reported that Walden O'Dell, Diebold Inc.'s chief executive, held a $500,000 fundraiser at his home for Vice President Dick Cheney in July. Concerns about the security of Diebold's voting machines were raised in a report issued by the State of Maryland earlier this year.

Humboldt was the first county in California to switch to Diebold's optical-scan voting system, called AccuVote, in 1995. Lindsey McWilliams, Humboldt county elections manager, suggested the switch after experiencing problems with the old punch-card ballots, which have now been decertified by the state. Now McWilliams wants to move Humboldt county to touch-screen voting, trying to get federal funding for the switch before other counties grab it. He said that the "exact same" computer software is used in both touch-screen and optical-scanning voting machines.

Diebold Election Systems is the nation's second largest voting technology company, tabulating 33-35% of the electronic vote nationwide. In California, 14 counties use Diebold technology, two of them touch-screen terminals and the rest optical-scanning systems. Fifteen California counties use voting machines from ES&S, the nation's largest voting machine company. ES&S is owned by the Omaha World Herald Company, which also has solid ties to the Republican Party.

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has been elected twice on ES&S machines, the only certified voting machines in his state of Nebraska. ES&S formerly operated as American Information Systems Inc. (AIS), and Hagel was investigated by a Senate ethics committee because he did not report that he was still chairman of AIS the year before he was first elected in 1996. ES&S claims on their website that they tabulated "56% of the U.S. national vote for the past four presidential elections."

Security systems used in computerized voting machines have been difficult to judge because companies have claimed that releasing the computer codes would compromise their integrity. However, Diebold made news when source codes used in their voting machines were discovered by others on a publicly available Diebold ftp site in January. In August, the state of Maryland hired a third-party consulting firm, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the nation's largest employee-owned research and engineering company, to perform an analysis of Diebold's AccuVote-TS (touch-screen) voting system. On September 24, Maryland made SAIC's report public (at http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf).

Diebold's touch-screen machines and computer code were analyzed by SAIC researchers from Johns Hopkins and Rice University, who concluded, "this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards…common voters, without any inside privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal." Furthermore, the report concluded, insiders such as election officials, the developers of the voting system, and the developers of the embedded operating system on which the voting system runs could exploit security flaws in the Diebold systems.

Despite the problems identified in the SAIC report, the Maryland State Board of Elections is proceeding with the $55.6 million purchase of Diebold voting terminals, stating that "an alternative system could not be implemented in time to conduct the March 2004 Presidential Primary election and could jeopardize the November 2004 Presidential General election."

In 2002, Georgia became the first state in the country to adopt the Diebold touch-screen technology. Pundits were at a loss to explain why in those elections Democratic incumbent governor Roy Barnes was unseated by Republican challenger Sonny Perdue despite polls that showed Barnes lead by between nine and 11 points up to the eve of the election. In the Senate race, Democrat Max Cleland was ahead by two to five points but lost to Republican Saxby Chambliss with a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.

John Zogby, arguably the most reliable pollster in the United States, does not exclude the possibility of foul play in last November's elections, when Zogby polls proved invalid. "We're sloughing into a brave new world here," he told The Guardian (UK). "We have machines that break down, or are tampered with, or are simply misunderstood. It's a cause for great concern." The results of California's October 7 special election matched those of the exit polls conducted that day by the LA Times and Edison/Mitofsky, a Boston-based company reconstituted from the ashes of Voter News Service. VNS supplied all the major networks with their polls in the 2000 election, and blamed themselves for choosing Gore as winner in Florida. In 2002, they also declared their own results invalid before going out of business. Although whites make up less than 50% of California's population, voters in the LA Times poll were 74% white.

McWilliams said he understands peoples' concern for the integrity of elections, especially after Florida's results in 2000. He had not read the SAIC report but was quick to opine that some "well meaning progressives" who "don't trust the technology" have a "reactionary approach," "labeling people unfeeling or traitors" and that their criticism of the technology is "inappropriate and unwarranted." He invites anyone who wants to know more about the voting process to attend a Logic and Accuracy test he holds on the equipment before each election.

Humboldt County has 250 precincts, but the precincts are combined for various elections, depending upon local issues on the ballot. The Presidential election in 2002 was held in 132 combined precincts; the special gubernatorial recall election last Oct. 7 was held in 81 precincts, some of them by mail. Each precinct has a Precinct Inspector (a few PI's oversee two precincts). The PI's, who are paid a stipend for their work, pick up the AccuVote computers in McWilliams' office on Thursday or Friday before the election and charge them up over the weekend, taking them in and connecting them to the ballot box the morning of the election. After the election, regulations require that 1% of the vote is hand counted and compared to the electronically tabulated vote. For the special election, the smallest precinct was chosen and the machines were found to be accurate, said McWilliams.

 Optical scan technology has the advantage of retaining a copy of the ballot for hand counting, if required. But optical scan systems are not without their problems. An optical scan of ballots in Scurry County, Texas, last November erroneously declared a landslide victory for the Republican candidate for county commissioner; a subsequent hand recount showed that the Democrat had in fact won. In Comal County, Texas, a computerized optical scan found that three different candidates had won their races with exactly 18,181 votes. There was no recount or investigation.

 Experts say a printed-paper copy produced at the time a vote is cast is the best way to ensure accuracy of touch-screen units. However, a task force convened by California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley could not reach consensus on the issue in a report issued earlier this year. So far, the state has determined that touch screen voting meets the requirements voters enacted in Prop. 41, which states a voting system must, "produce, at the time the voter votes his or her ballot or at the time the polls are closed, a paper version or representation of the voted ballot or of all the ballots cast on a unit of the voting system." 

 The U.S. Healthy American Voter Act of 2002 (HAVA) requires states to accommodate handicapped voters by 2007, and as of now, the only certified system to serve those voters is touch-screen voting. HAVA provides billions of federal dollars for states to purchase Republican-owned voting machine technology. And the contract for overseeing internet voting for overseas citizens and military personnel in the 2004 presidential election was recently awarded to Accenture, formerly part of the Arthur Andersen group (whose accountancy branch, a major campaign contributor to President Bush, imploded as a result of the Enron bankruptcy scandal).

 In a move critics characterize as well meaning but misguided, the ACLU filed suit against the state of California and briefly held up the October 7 special gubernatorial election because five California counties (Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, Santa Clara, Solano, and Mendocino) were still using Florida-style punch-card paper ballots. Those ballots have now been decertified by the state and the counties using them are required to replace them with electronic machines by the primary election of 2004. ACLU has not taken a position on electronic voting.

 Mendocino County clerk recorder Marsha Wharff is reluctantly abandoning punch cards, which she says, "have always worked well for Mendocino County." The county will adopt Diebold touch-screen voting next year.  In heavily Democratic Broward County, Florida - which had switched to touch screens in the wake of the hanging chad furor - more than 100,000 votes were found to have gone "missing" on election day last November. The votes were reinstated, but the glitch was not adequately explained. One local official blamed it on a "minor software thing."

 So far, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin have rejected touch-screen machines without a verifiable paper trail, and New York is considering a similar injunction, at least for its state assembly races. A bill in congress, HR 2239 (Holt), the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, would require voting systems to produce a permanent paper record at the time each vote is cast. Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee, Howard Berman and six other California representatives are among the 45 co-sponsors of the resolution. (Mike Thompson is not.) It was introduced on May 22 and referred to the House Committee on House Administration. (Mike Thompson can be reached in his Eureka office at 269-9595.)

 Russian dictator Joseph Stalin once said: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." Anyone up for a citizen's task force to investigate and oversee Humboldt County's voting practices? Call the CLMP office at 923-4646.