"Hack the Vote"

[Paul Walmsley <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is showing up in Tuesday's New York Times:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/opinion/02KRUG.html>


- Paul

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Hack the Vote
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 2, 2003

Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, "I am committed 
to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." 
No surprise there. But Walden O'Dell -- who says that he wasn't 
talking about his business operations -- happens to be the chief 
executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in 
increasingly widespread use across the United States.
	
For example, Georgia -- where Republicans scored spectacular upset 
victories in the 2002 midterm elections -- relies exclusively on 
Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 
2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is 
also no evidence that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold 
machines leave no paper trail.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill 
requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their 
software be available for public inspection, is occasionally told that 
systems lacking these safeguards haven't caused problems. "How do you 
know?" he asks.

What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The details are 
technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at the very 
least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to cover 
up product defects.

Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, 
found Diebold software -- which the company refuses to make 
available for public inspection, on the grounds that it's proprietary 
-- on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it. (The 
software was in a folder titled "rob-Georgia.zip.") The server was used by 
employees of Diebold Election Systems to update software on its machines. 
This in itself was an incredible breach of security, offering someone who 
wanted to hack into the machines both the information and the opportunity 
to do so.

An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice 
Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A later report 
commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently reached similar 
conclusions. (It's hard to be sure because the state released only a 
heavily redacted version.)

Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate 
officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would 
have revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the 
authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions 
to prevent their dissemination.

Why isn't this front-page news? In October, a British newspaper, The 
Independent, ran a hair-raising investigative report on U.S. touch-screen 
voting. But while the mainstream press has reported the basics, the 
Diebold affair has been treated as a technology or business story -- 
not as a potential political scandal.

This diffidence recalls the treatment of other voting issues, like the 
Florida "felon purge" that inappropriately prevented many citizens from 
voting in the 2000 presidential election. The attitude seems to be that 
questions about the integrity of vote counts are divisive at best, 
paranoid at worst. Even reform advocates like Mr. Holt make a point of 
dissociating themselves from "conspiracy theories." Instead, they focus on 
legislation to prevent future abuses.

But there's nothing paranoid about suggesting that political operatives, 
given the opportunity, might engage in dirty tricks. Indeed, given the 
intensity of partisanship these days, one suspects that small dirty tricks 
are common. For example, Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary 
Committee, recently announced that one of his aides had improperly 
accessed sensitive Democratic computer files that were leaked to the 
press.

This admission -- contradicting an earlier declaration by Senator 
Hatch that his staff had been cleared of culpability -- came on the 
same day that the Senate police announced that they were hiring a 
counterespionage expert to investigate the theft. Republican members of 
the committee have demanded that the expert investigate only how those 
specific documents were leaked, not whether any other breaches took place. 
I wonder why.

The point is that you don't have to believe in a central conspiracy to 
worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable 
voting system to manipulate election results. Why expose them to 
temptation?

I'll discuss what to do in a future column. But let's be clear: the 
credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake.