new article by JFK Jr in Rolling Stone

["Margit Johansson" <margitjo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Will the Next Election Be Hacked?

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Rolling Stone

Thursday 05 October 2006 Issue

Fresh disasters at the polls - and new evidence from an industry insider -
prove that electronic voting machines can't be trusted.

Read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" in the June
15th, 2006, issue of "Rolling Stone," his investigation into how Republicans
prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having
their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to
most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector
entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines,
promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and
reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds
for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the
nation's election systems - with much of the money devoted to installing
electronic voting machines in each of America's 180,000 precincts.

But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines
are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that
hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the
country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly
undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines
counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than
were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for
unsupervised "sleepovers" before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable
to tampering. And in Ohio - where, as I recently reported in "Was the 2004
Election Stolen?" [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the
presidency - a government report uncovered large and unexplained
discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County.

Even worse, many electronic machines don't produce a paper record that can
be recounted when equipment malfunctions - an omission that practically
invites malicious tampering. "Every board of election has staff members with
the technological ability to fix an election," Ion Sancho, an election
supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me. "Even one corrupt staffer can
throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and
there is no way I'd ever find out about it. With a few key people in the
right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential election."

Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what
was really going on in Georgia. An African-American whose parents fought for
voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to be working as
a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company promote its
new electronic voting machines. During the presidential election two years
earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in Georgia -
almost double the national average - and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was
under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly.

Hood had been present in May 2002, when officials with Cox's office signed a
contract with Diebold - paying the company a record $54 million to install
19,000 electronic voting machines across the state. At a restaurant inside
Atlanta's Marriott Hotel, he noticed the firm's CEO, Walden O'Dell, checking
Diebold's stock price on a laptop computer every five minutes, waiting for a
bounce from the announcement.

Hood wondered why Diebold, the world's third-largest seller of ATMs, had
been awarded the contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition
of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology
Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among
nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was
in.

"The Diebold executives had a news conference planned on the day of the
award," Hood recalls, "and we were instructed to stay in our hotel rooms
until just hours before the announcement. They didn't want the competitors
to know and possibly file a protest" about the lack of a fair bidding
process. It certainly didn't hurt that Diebold had political clout: Cox's
predecessor as secretary of state, Lewis Massey, was now a lobbyist for the
company.

The problem was, Diebold had only five months to install the new machines -
a "very narrow window of time to do such a big deployment," Hood notes. The
old systems stored in warehouses had to be replaced with new equipment;
dozens of state officials and poll workers had to be trained in how to use
the touch-screen machines. "It was pretty much an impossible task," Hood
recalls. There was only one way, he adds, that the job could be done in time
- if "the vendor had control over the entire environment." That is precisely
what happened. In late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, Cox
quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized
Georgia's entire electoral system.

The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and
train poll workers across the state - all without any official supervision.
"We ran the election," says Hood. "We had 356 people that Diebold brought
into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes.
Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything
due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election,
she let us do it."

Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president
of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his
headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally
distributing a "patch," a little piece of software designed to correct
glitches in the computer program. "We were told that it was intended to fix
the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood says. "The curious thing
is the very swift, covert way this was done."

Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by
the state. But thanks to Cox's agreement with Diebold, the company was
essentially allowed to certify itself. "It was an unauthorized patch, and
they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were
told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions
directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company
would give an order like that and be involved at that level."

According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines
in DeKalb and Fulton counties - the state's largest Democratic strongholds.
To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in
the morning. "We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11," Hood says. "There
was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it's easy to get access. The
machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The
state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of
our way." Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch
being applied to more than 1,200 others.

The patch comes on a memory card that is inserted into a machine.
Eventually, all the memory cards end up on a server that tabulates the votes
- where the patch can be programmed to alter the outcome of an election.
"There could be a hidden program on a memory card that adjusts everything to
the preferred election results," Hood says. "Your program says, 'I want my
candidate to stay ahead by three or four percent or whatever.' Those
programs can include a built-in delete that erases itself after it's done."

It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the
election in Georgia: Diebold's machines provided no paper trail, making a
recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November surprised even
the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote, polls
showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent,
leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss - darling of the Christian
Coalition - by five percentage points. In the governor's race, Democrat Roy
Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican Sonny
Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three percent of the
vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent.

Diebold insists that the patch was installed "with the approval and
oversight of the state." But after the election, the Georgia secretary of
state's office submitted a "punch list" to Bob Urosevich of "issues and
concerns related to the statewide voting system that we would like Diebold
to address." One of the items referenced was" Application/Implication of
'0808' Patch." The state was seeking confirmation that the patch did not
require that the system "be recertified at national and state level" as well
as "verifiable analysis of overall impact of patch to the voting system." In
a separate letter, Secretary Cox asked Urosevich about Diebold's use of
substitute memory cards and defective equipment as well as widespread
problems that caused machines to freeze up and improperly record votes.

The state threatened to delay further payments to Diebold until "these punch
list items will be corrected and completed."

Diebold's response has not been made public - but its machines remain in
place for Georgia's election this fall. Hood says it was "common knowledge"
within the company that Diebold also illegally installed uncertified
software in machines used in the 2004 presidential primaries - a charge the
company denies. Disturbed to see the promise of electronic machines
subverted by private companies, Hood left the election consulting business
and became a whistle-blower. "What I saw," he says, "was basically a
corporate takeover of our voting system."

The United States is one of only a handful of major democracies that allow
private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes using their
own proprietary software. Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in
America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software
(ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. In 2004, 36 million
votes were cast on their touch-screen systems, and millions more were
recorded by optical-scan machines owned by the same companies that use
electronic technology to tabulate paper ballots. The simple fact is, these
machines not only break down with regularity, they are easily compromised -
by people inside, and outside, the companies.

Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S,
in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996
became the first Republican elected to the 
U.S. Senate from Nebraska in
twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the
votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its
investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George
W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according
to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their
families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party
funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National
Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden
O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004. That
year, Diebold would count the votes in half of Ohio's counties.

The voting-machine companies bear heavy blame for the 2000
presidential-election disaster. Fox News' fateful decision to call Florida
for Bush - followed minutes later by CBS and NBC - came after electronic
machines in Volusia County erroneously subtracted more than 16,000 votes
from Al Gore's total. Later, after an internal investigation, CBS described
the mistake as "critical" in the network's decision. Seeing what was an
apparent spike for Bush, Gore conceded the election - then reversed his
decision after a campaign staffer investigated and discovered that Gore was
actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes.

Investigators traced the mistake to Global Election Systems, the firm later
acquired by Diebold. Two months after the election, an internal memo from
Talbot Iredale, the company's master programmer, blamed the problem on a
memory card that had been improperly - and unnecessarily - uploaded. "There
is always the possibility," Iredale conceded, "that the 'second memory card'
or 'second upload' came from an unauthorized source."

Amid the furor over hanging chads and butterfly ballots in Florida, however,
the "faulty memory card" was all but forgotten. Instead of sharing
culpability for the Florida catastrophe, voting-machine companies used their
political clout to present their product as the solution. In October 2002,
President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, requiring states and
counties to upgrade their voting systems with electronic machines and giving
vast sums of money to state officials to distribute to the tightknit cabal
of largely Republican vendors.

But according to recent e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone, Diebold not only
failed to follow up on most of the recommendations, it worked to cover them
up. Michael Wertheimer, who led the RABA study, now serves as an assistant
deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "We
made numerous recommendations that would have required Diebold to fix these
issues," he writes in one e-mail, "but were rebuffed by the argument that
the machines were physically protected and could not be altered by someone
outside the established chain of custody."

In another e-mail, Wertheimer says that Diebold and state officials worked
to downplay his team's dim assessment. "We spent hours dealing with Diebold
lobbyists and election officials who sought to minimize our impact," he
recalls. "The results were risk-managed in favor of expediency and potential
catastrophe."

During the 2004 presidential election, with Diebold machines in place across
the state, things began to go wrong from the very start. A month before the
vote, an abandoned Diebold machine was discovered in a bar in Baltimore.
"What's really worrisome," says Hood, "is that someone could get hold of all
the technology - for manipulation - if they knew the inner workings of just
one machine."

Election Day was a complete disaster. "Countless numbers of machines were
down because of what appeared to be flaws in Diebold's system," says Hood,
who was part of a crew of roving technicians charged with making sure that
the polls were up and running. "Memory cards overloading, machines freezing
up, poll workers afraid to turn them on or off for fear of losing votes."

Then, after the polls closed, Diebold technicians who showed up to collect
the memory cards containing the votes found that many were missing. "The
machines are gone," one janitor told Hood - picked up, apparently, by the
vendor who had delivered them in the first place. "There was major chaos
because there were so many cards missing," Hood says. Even before the 2004
election, experts warned that electronic voting machines would undermine the
integrity of the vote. "The system we have for testing and certifying voting
equipment in this country is not only broken but is virtually nonexistent,"
Michael Shamos, a distinguished professor of computer science at Carnegie
Mellon University, testified before Congress that June. "It must be
re-created from scratch."

Two months later, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team - a division of
the Department of Homeland Security - issued a little-noticed
"cyber-security bulletin." The alert dealt specifically with a database that
Diebold uses in tabulating votes. "A vulnerability exists due to an
undocumented backdoor account," the alert warned, citing the same kind of
weakness identified by the RABA scientists.

The security flaw, it added, could allow "a malicious user [to] modify
votes."

Such warnings, however, didn't stop states across the country from
installing electronic voting machines for the 2004 election. In Ohio, jammed
and inoperable machines were reported throughout Toledo. In heavily
Democratic areas of Youngstown, nearly 100 voters pushed "Kerry" and watched
"Bush" light up. At least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the
middle of the voting process for flipping Kerry votes to Bush. Similar "vote
hopping" was reported by voters in other states.

The widespread glitches didn't deter Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell
- who also chaired Bush's re-election campaign in Ohio - from cutting a deal
in 2005 that would have guaranteed Diebold a virtual monopoly on vote
counting in the state. Local election officials alleged that the deal, which
came only a few months after Blackwell bought nearly $10,000 in Diebold
stock, was a violation of state rules requiring a fair and competitive
bidding process.

Facing a lawsuit, Blackwell agreed to allow other companies to provide
machines as well. This November, voters in forty-seven counties will cast
their ballots on Diebold machines - in a pivotal election in which Blackwell
is running as the Republican candidate for governor.

Electronic voting machines also caused widespread problems in Florida, where
Bush bested Kerry by 381,000 votes. When statistical experts from the
University of California examined the state's official tally, they
discovered a disturbing pattern: "The data show with 99.0 percent certainty
that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a
disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared to counties
with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were
significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush
between 2000 and 2004." The three counties with the most discrepancies -
Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade - were also the most heavily Democratic.
Electronic voting machines, the report concluded, may have improperly
awarded as many as 260,000 votes to Bush. "No matter how many factors and
variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the
votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said
Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor who specializes in voter behavior and
methodology, was initially skeptical of the study - but was unable to find
any flaw in the results. "You can't break it - I've tried," he told The
Washington Post. "There's something funky in the results from the
electronic-machine Democratic counties."

Questions also arose in Texas in 2004. William Singer, an election
programmer in Tarrant County, wrote the secretary of state's office after
the vote to report that ES&S pressured officials to install unapproved
software during the presidential primaries. "What I was expected to do in
order to 'pull off' an election," Singer wrote, "was far beyond the kind of
practices that I believe should be standard and accepted in the election
industry." The company denies the charge, but in an e-mail this month,
Singer elaborated that ES&S employees had pushed local election officials to
pressure the secretary of state to accept "a software change at such a last
minute there would be no choice, and effectively avoid certification."

Despite such reports, Texas continues to rely on ES&S.

In primaries held in Jefferson County earlier this year, electronic votes
had to be recounted after error messages prevented workers from completing
their tabulations. In April, with early voting in local elections only a
week away, officials across the state were still waiting to receive the
programming from ES&S needed to test the machines for accuracy.

Calling the situation "completely unacceptable and disturbing," Texas
director of elections Ann McGeehan authorized local officials to create
"emergency paper ballots" as a backup. "We regret the unacceptable position
that many political subdivisions are in due to poor performance by their
contracted vendor," McGeehan added.

In October 2005, the government Accountability Office issued a damning
report on electronic voting machines. Citing widespread irregularities and
malfunctions, the government's top watchdog agency concluded that a host of
weaknesses with touch-screen and optical-scan technology "could damage the
integrity of ballots, votes and voting-system software by allowing
unauthorized modifications." Some electronic systems used passwords that
were "easily guessed" or employed identical passwords for numerous systems.
Software could be handled and transported with no clear chain of custody,
and locks protecting computer hardware were easy to pick. Unsecured memory
cards could enable individuals to "vote multiple times, change vote totals
and produce false election reports."

An even more comprehensive report released in June by the Brennan Center for
Justice, a nonpartisan think tank at the New York University School of Law,
echoed the GAO's findings. The report - conducted by a task force of
computer scientists and security experts from the government, universities
and the private sector - was peer-reviewed by the National Institute of
Standards and Technology. Electronic voting machines widely adopted since
2000, the report concluded, "pose a real danger to the integrity of
national, state and local elections." While no instances of hacking have yet
been documented, the report identified 120 security threats to three widely
used machines - the easiest method of attack being to utilize corrupt
software that shifts votes from one candidate to another. Computer experts
have demonstrated that a successful attack would be relatively simple.

In a study released on September 13th, computer scientists at Princeton
University created vote-stealing software that can be injected into a
Diebold machine in as little as a minute, obscuring all evidence of its
presence. They also created a virus that can "infect" other units in a
voting system, committing "widespread fraud" from a single machine. Within
sixty seconds, a lone hacker can own an election.

And touch-screen technology continues to create chaos at the polls. On
September 12th, in Maryland's first all-electronic election, voters were
turned away from the polls because election officials had failed to
distribute the electronic access cards needed to operate Diebold machines.
By the time the cards were found on a warehouse shelf and delivered to every
precinct, untold numbers of voters had lost the chance to cast ballots. It
seems insane that such clear threats to our election system have not stopped
the proliferation of touch-screen technology. In 2004, twenty-three percent
of Americans cast their votes on electronic ballots - an increase of twelve
percent over 2000.

This year, more than one-third of the nation's 8,000 voting jurisdictions
are expected to use electronic voting technology for the first time.

The heartening news is, citizens are starting to fight back. Voting-rights
activists with the Brad Blog and Black Box Voting are getting the word out.
Voter Action, a nonprofit group, has helped file lawsuits in Arizona, New
York, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico to stop the proliferation of
touch-screen systems. In California, voters filed suit last March to
challenge the use of a Diebold touch-screen system - a move that has already
prompted eight counties to sign affidavits saying they won't use the
machines in November.

It's not surprising that the widespread problems with electronic voting
machines have sparked such outrage and mistrust among voters. Last November,
comedian Bill Maher stood in a Las Vegas casino and looked out over
thousands of slot machines. "They never make a mistake," he remarked to me.
"Can't we get a voting machine that can't be fixed?" Indeed, there is a
remarkably simple solution: equip every touch-screen machine to provide
paper receipts that can be verified by voters and recounted in the event of
malfunction or tampering. "The paper is the insurance against the cheating
machine," says Rubin, the computer expert.

In Florida, an astonishing new law actually makes it illegal to count paper
ballots by hand after they've already been tallied by machine.

But twenty-seven states now require a paper trail, and others are
considering similar requirements. In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson has
instituted what many consider an even better solution: Voters use paper
ballots, which are then scanned and counted electronically. "We became one
of the laughingstock states in 2004 because the machines were defective,
slow and unreliable," says Richardson. "I said to myself, 'I'm not going to
go through this again.' The paper-ballot system, as untechnical as it seems,
is the most verifiable way we can assure Americans that their vote is
counting."

Paper ballots will not completely eliminate the threat of tampering, of
course - after all, election fraud and miscounts have occurred throughout
our history.

As long as there has been a paper trail, however, our elections have been
conducted with some measure of public scrutiny. But electronic voting
machines are a hacker's dream. And today, for-profit companies are being
given unprecedented and frightening power not only to provide these machines
but to store and count our votes in secret, without any real oversight.

You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity
of our electoral system: The right to vote is simply too important - and too
hard won - to be surrendered without a fight. It is time for Americans to
reclaim our democracy from private interests.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__wil