It's The Computers' Turn To Mess Up Elections

["Paul Tiger" <tigerp@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's The Computers' Turn To Mess Up Elections

By Hiawatha Bray, 11/17/2003

Nearly a year before the presidential election, concerned citizens are
already crying foul. But nobody's arguing over butterfly ballots or punch
cards this time, as they did during the interminable Florida recount of
2000. After all, it's the 21st century now. All future elections will be
screwed up with the aid of computers. Various local elections throughout the
United States early this month provided worrisome hints of the woes to come.

In Boone County, Ind., a high-tech voting machine counted 144,000 electronic
ballots, in a precinct that contained fewer than 19,000 voters. In Fairfax
County, Va., a Republican school board candidate lost by a handful of votes,
then learned that at least one of the computerized ballot boxes had a glitch
that may have subtracted some of her votes. ''It's hard not to think that I
have been robbed,'' the irate candidate told The Washington Post.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Replacing punch cards with digital touch
screens was supposed to deliver the accuracy we've learned to expect from
computers.

Now that you've stopped laughing, you're probably all thinking the same
thing. Anybody with a PC knows that computers can be wildly unreliable.
What's being done to ensure that computerized voting systems are
trustworthy?

Not nearly enough, according to the activists trying to force major
modifications in digital voting systems. Bev Harris, author of the book
''Black Box Voting,'' is the godmother of the movement. Harris said she's in
favor of computerized voting, but not the way it's usually done.

''It's not a computing problem,'' said Harris. ''It's an auditing problem.''

The digital voting machines offer no independent way of double-checking the
results they spit out at the end of the day. Election officials must simply
take the machine's word for it. They're what engineers call a ''black box,''
a device whose function isn't understood by those who use it.

One key reason is the secret software that runs the machines. Just as
Microsoft Corp. owns Windows, Diebold Election Systems Inc. owns the code
that runs its voting machines. That means the code is accessible only to its
makers, and anyone with whom they might share it.

No big deal. Nearly all software is sold this way. But what if the secret
code is insecure and badly written? When Johns Hopkins University computer
scientist Aviel Rubin studied a leaked copy of Diebold's program, he was
appalled.

''We found problems in the code that anyone who'd ever taken a single
computer security course would have found,'' Rubin said. ''I'd be willing to
bet that the people who designed this system had no security expertise.''

A study done for the state of Maryland by Science Applications International
Corp. wasn't as scathing, but also found ''a significant number'' of
security glitches.

So maybe the software shouldn't be secret. The Australian government has
developed a digital voting system based entirely on open source software.
All of the code is published so everybody knows exactly how it works. Voters
who happen to be computer programmers can quickly identify glitches that
could ruin an election.

But American voting machine makers aren't interested in sharing their
software with rival firms.

''Our proprietary software is part of our company assets. It is something
that we created,'' said Howard Van Pelt, CEO of Advanced Voting Solutions
Inc., the Texas company whose machines were involved in the disputed
Virginia election.

There's a better way to pry open the black box. All it takes is an
old-fashioned ballot.

The concept is called voter verification. It would simply require that each
machine would print a ballot after a voter has made his selections. The
voter could then read the printout to ensure that he didn't somehow mistake
Pat Buchanan for Al Gore, or vice versa. It'd be like double-checking your
receipt at the supermarket checkout line.

Only this receipt doesn't get crumpled into a coat pocket. This one gets fed
into an optical scanner at the polling place. The scanner records the votes
on the printed ballot. At the end of the day, the tallies of the scanner and
the touch screen computers are compared. They should match exactly. If they
don't, you've got a boxful of paper ballots to recount.

Diebold spokesman David Bear said his firm is open to this idea.

''We do what our customers ask of us,'' he said. But will anyone ask? US
Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, has offered legislation
that would require all electronic voting systems to include voter
verification, but there's little hope of passage anytime soon. It's
certainly too late to affect the 2004 election.

The first generation of digital voting machines is already being deployed --
thousands of black boxes that may or may not work as intended. Get to bed
early next Nov. 1. It could be a long Tuesday.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@xxxxxxxxxx


This story ran on page C3 of the Boston Globe on 11/17/2003.
(c) Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.