The biggest threat to democracy is proprietary (secretly programmed) computer voting machines!
by kathy@truthisbetter.org Last updated 2004-09-12

Electronic voting machines in the U.S. are permitted to have proprietary (secret) programming instructions, hardware, and operating systems, all of which can be set up to allow “back door” access into voting machines to allow tampering with vote tallies during elections.

Vote tampering is more likely to occur by an insider working for the manufacturer of the voting system than by independent hackers because the creators of the systems know how to exploit their systems to change vote tallies during elections and know any network locations of voting machines they set up for election districts. Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Diebold Voting Systems control about 80% of the electronic vote count in the U.S. Diebold’s President has publicly promised to deliver votes for GW Bush, and its system was discovered to have numerous security flaws which permit vote tampering during elections. Computer programmers, Internet service providers and students from at least 20 universities have received cease-and-desist orders from Diebold but many are refusing to remove from their web sites Diebold documents that demonstrate a threat to the U.S. elections process. ES&S was partly owned by Republican Congressman Chuck Hagel. ES&S counts the votes in Hagel’s own election district.

If vote counts are electronically tampered with in selected election districts, no evidence is available of the crime. No vote recounts are possible. You may only imagine that your vote was counted. For example, vote tallies can be shifted from Democrats to Republicans in predominantly Republican districts so it would look like there was heavy Republican turnout (or vice-versa because nothing precludes a Democrat from becoming a programmer for a voting machine company or learning how to hack into voting machines.)

The secret programs on voting machines can be written to add more votes for a particular party or candidate, so no tampering during the elections is even needed to rig an election. An electronic voting machine can easily be programmed to print a paper ballot showing that you voted for one candidate, while counting your vote for another candidate.

The failure of the storage device on any voting machine discards all votes done on that machine. There are dozens of ways for electronic failures or inadvertent errors in programming or election officials' ballot definitions to cause voting machines to miscount votes. The error rate of computerized voting systems has been much higher than the error rate of punch-card voting machines.

To summarize, vote counts can be tampered with during elections by pre-programmed instructions, by direct access to a voting machine, by access via wireless cards inside the machine, or by access via a local or wide area network connection during the voting or during the vote tallying process. If an electronic voting machine "server" tallies all the votes, the votes can be manipulated there also.

In the rush to remedy the problems of punch-card ballots, election districts have jumped from the frying pan into the fire of electronic voting machines. Election equipment tests are performed in secret and often monitored by unqualified election officials who do not have the technical expertise to judge what they see.

The Independent Testing Authorities (ITAs) and the US Election Assistance (EAC) are funded and paid by the same voting machine vendors they purport to certify, test, and regulate.

Even if the electronic voting machines are required to use public “open source” programming instructions and produce voter verifiable paper ballots, there is still no way to determine if the machines actually use the stated public instructions unless, prior to the election, full disclosure, examination, and documentation of all the minute details of the voting machine’s hardware, software, and installation configuration are performed. Then duplicate compiled “machine language” programs can be created and compared byte for byte with the programs running the voting machines, to see if they are the same. If random audits compare paper ballot counts with electronic counts, state-wide paper ballot recounts would be necessary to correct discrepancies. In order to make sure elections are accurate, the paper ballots must be counted every time using optical scan machines and the two machine counts reconciled.

Both ES&S and Diebold voting machines were involved in suspicious elections in where unexplained jumps in vote tallies that were well above the margin of error of any scientifically conducted polls. There was anecdotal evidence that electronic voting machines rigged the 2002 election in Georgia where polls showed that Democrats were likely to win the Governor’s office and Senate race, but electronic voting machine results showed that the numbers mysteriously flip-flopped. Some of the vote tallies didn’t “add up” but there was no way to research or recount the election. ES&S voting machines have had similar unexplained results in Alabama and Ohio.

However, there are glimmers of hope.

Representative Rush Holt, D-NJ has proposed an amendment to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to require a paper ballot and open source public programming. Holt’s proposed amendment, while a necessary start, is insufficient because it does not include a requirement that the voting machines be documented and examined to verify that they actually use the open source public programming instructions during elections. Please fax and write your US Congressional Representatives now and tell them to push this bill forward and to create a Senate version.

A nation-wide group of PhD university computer scientists have begun a research project to study procedures for handling state centralized voter rolls and how to manufacture and test low-cost, environmentally friendly, fair voting machines from standard recycled computers with the Open Voting Consortium. (Standard hardware is less likely to have any “back door” programming for rigging votes.)

If US elections are to be fair, the U.S. Congress must amend HAVA to require that all electronic voting machines that are used to talley votes provide: open source public programming instructions; a scan-able paper ballot printout for each voter; a significant percentage of random audits that trigger automatic state-wide paper ballot recounts (or scans) when errors are found; a technical procedure for documenting and checking each voting machine’s hardware, drivers, operating system, and software for fairness; and anti-tampering procedures that election officials to follow; or count the paper ballots by scanning them in every election.

Progress on all other issues can continue only if “elected” officials remain accountable to the public. If electronic voting machines are used to talley votes, then it will be a cat-and-mouse game from now on to prevent electronic election fraud. Electronic voting machines are “shiny new Touch Screen Trojan horses” that must be stopped from stealing elections.

An open source computerized voting system with voter verified paper ballots that are counted using optical scan machines and the two tallies reconciled, is available at Open Voting Consortium. Here is a concept for using HAVA funding to develop better voting systems.