Critics punch at touch-screen voting security
Cox defends technology

By CARLOS CAMPOS
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 02/14/04

Cathy Cox looks at a Diebold AccuVote TS machine and sees the future of voting.
Georgia's secretary of state gushes over its high-tech features, which she says have significantly lowered the number of uncounted votes and the possibility of election fraud.

Ginny Howard looks at the same machine and sees the mechanism that will undo democracy.
 
Greedy corporations and power-hungry politicians will conspire to steal elections by manipulating results electronically, the retired math teacher from Smyrna believes.
 
In the chasm between Cox and Howard, a debate is growing over touch-screen voting.
 
There is no evidence that any American election has been manipulated through the use of electronic touch-screen voting machines since they were first used in 1996. Yet as Cox's employees prepare 28,000 machines for Georgia's March 2 presidential primary, accusations that they can be rigged have put the state's top election official on the defensive.
 
Computer experts at respected universities have sounded the alarm over the potential for high-tech chicanery. Grass-roots activists, leaders of alternative political parties and others have stoked the flames, mostly via the Web. Touch-screen-related legislation is pending in Congress and the General Assembly.
 
Some critics suspect the machines might have played a role in the surprise defeats in 2002 of two Democrats — Gov. Roy Barnes and U.S. Sen. Max Cleland.
 
Anyone who knows computers can wreak havoc in an election, they say. Cox and her allies say the possibility of tampering is low — certainly no higher than with paper ballots, optical scanners and lever machines.
 
"I have no doubt that a mediocre kind of computer scientist could probably wreak havoc on this machine if you let them play with it, take it home, hook it up to the Internet, attach a keyboard to it," Cox said. "But that is not the real world of elections."
 
The stakes are extraordinarily high. With a nationwide rush on to replace old punch card and lever machines, there are millions of dollars to be made by the companies that produce touch-screen machines. Cox's political future — she has said she wants to run for governor eventually — may hinge on the system's success or failure.
 
Most importantly, the integrity of one of America's most essential institutions is on the line.
 
Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) counts himself among the suspicious. The civil rights veteran is the co-sponsor of a bill to require the machines to verify voters' choices on paper.
 
"The ballot is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democracy," Lewis said. "And if that is threatened, we won't have much left."
 
Swiftly adopted
 
Touch-screen voting came to Georgia largely because of the 2000 presidential vote count debacle in Florida.
 
Florida came under intense scrutiny over uncounted punch card ballots — the dimpled, hanging and pregnant chads that couldn't be tallied — and other irregularities because the Bush-Gore margin was so narrow. Georgia had a higher percentage of uncounted votes, but Bush's easy win here meant the state avoided embarrassment. Even so, Cox saw a problem and decided to change the state's patchwork of voting mechanisms, which included paper ballots.
 
In 2002, Congress passed legislation encouraging states to get rid of their punch card and lever machines by 2006, essentially clearing the way for electronic machines. But Cox saw no reason to wait.
 
Diebold Election Systems won a $54 million contract to provide touch-screen machines for Georgia, which in 2002 became the first state in the nation to implement electronic voting statewide. Maryland is the only other state to use the machines exclusively. Officials say 50 million people will cast votes on touch-screen machines in other states.
 
The machines work much like the ATMs made by Diebold Election's parent company. The voter s an access card, which has been programmed with the races for his precinct. The card activates a screen and the voter presses electronic squares containing a candidate's name. After the voter reviews his choices and presses "cast ballot," the card is ejected and cannot be used again until it is reprogrammed.
 
At the end of an election, memory cards are removed from the machines and fed into a central computer kept in county election offices. The results of federal and state elections are then transmitted to the secretary of state's office, where they are tabulated electronically.
 
In the machines' November 2002 Georgia debut, voters and officials reported some glitches, mostly frozen screens. Republican poll monitors reported that about 100 voters in 20 counties complained the machines didn't properly record their intentions — they tried to vote for GOP candidates but the machines highlighted the Democratic candidate instead. When the voters alerted poll workers, the machines were adjusted and the votes corrected. Officials said the problems were misaligned screens — not evidence of hacking.
 
Overall, the machines received rave reviews. In two subsequent University of Georgia telephone polls, people said they found the machines easy to use and generally trustworthy.
 
Still, something didn't feel right to Kevin Murray when he voted that day. The Atlanta computer technician described his vote as slipping into the "ether."
 
"We've been asked to make a leap of faith. . . . It's a virtual ballot," Murray said. Murray, Howard and Mark Sawyer, who develops music class curricula, formed the League Opposed to Virtual Elections.
 
Vulnerable to attack?
 
In July, concerns about electronic voting were catapulted from Web conspiracy and technology industry sites to the front pages of major newspapers.
 
Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University, issued a 24-page report asserting that touch-screen machines could be manipulated to produce bogus results. Rubin wrote that software developers, poll workers, voters and "even janitors" could access Diebold's voting system for nefarious purposes.
 
The researchers concluded the system is vulnerable to attacks that use software programs designed to discreetly activate themselves and change election results. Also, Rubin said, blank smart cards could be bought and programmed by someone able to decipher the necessary computer language to make "homebrew" voter access cards. The privacy of the voting booth would allow someone to sneak in a stack of the homebrew cards and vote multiple times, he said.
 
Rubin later revealed he held stock options for and served on the technical advisory board of VoteHere, a Diebold competitor that manufactures election software. He maintains the stock options were worthless and that he hadn't had contact with the company for two years. But the disclosure gave his critics ammunition to discredit his report.
 
If Rubin's report detailed the means by which votes could be altered, Ohio-based Diebold's CEO provided what critics see as a motive.
 
In an invitation to a fund-raiser for President Bush, Walden O'Dell wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
 
O'Dell said later his comments had nothing to do with operations of his company's Texas-based subsidiary, Diebold Elections Systems. But critics saw it as evidence of malicious intent on the part of a Bush supporter responsible for supplying a third of the world's electronic voting machines.
 
Diebold is poised to capture much of the market, having nailed down Maryland's statewide account as well as Georgia's. In the third quarter of 2003, voting machine revenues exceeded $47 million out of total company revenues of $570 million.
 
"Who would want to rig an election? One would be, certainly, the major corporate players who have tens of billions at stake," said Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century."
 
Harris, a literary publicist who lives outside Seattle, has led the crusade against the voting machines. Her investigative work helped prompt the Rubin study and is often cited by touch-screen opponents.
 
"There are some people who are quite extremist who do have access to large amounts of money," Harris said. "My theory has always been that the weak point in a voting system is inside access and the ability to buy inside access."
 
Issue brewed on Web
 
Touch-screen opponents have alleged that Barnes' and Cleland's 2002 upset defeats are suspicious because of a last-minute fix to the machines.
 
The state had to apply "patches" — software repairs — at the last minute because many of the screens were freezing during tests. Patches are common in the computer world. But the state didn't have time to recertify the machines to make sure the fixes contained no malicious commands. The patches were tested after the election and found to be legitimate, Cox said.
 
Bobby Kahn, Barnes' chief of staff and now the interim chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, has found himself in the odd position of defending his boss's loss.
 
"I would love to believe that Governor Barnes really won and that he lost because of a computer meltdown or a grand conspiracy," Kahn has said. But the count was accurate, he said.
 
In an interview, Kahn said the last poll conducted before Election Day by Barnes' pollsters showed the governor with a 5 percent edge. The polls underestimated the number of rural whites who turned out against Barnes, Kahn said.
 
Howard, the League Opposed to Virtual Elections co-founder, admitted "we don't know" if the elections were fixed. That's not her point. "What we do know is that every condition needed for fraud did exist. The question is not whether it has happened. The question is whether it can happen."
 
Like others, Howard first learned about the controversy via the Internet. She was angry at America's involvement in Iraq and sought information from alternative media sources. She was "horrified" by what she learned about the American government's policies and actions. Howard said she was motivated by her 28-year-old son to act on her anger, and found others who felt the same way.
 
"What I came to feel is that our democracy is literally on the line . . . in a way that it never has been before," Howard said. "The vote is our core way that the people have of establishing control over the government."
 
Many critics of touch-screen voting are intimately familiar with computers. Andrew F. Seila, a management information systems professor at the University of Georgia for 26 years, said that's not surprising.
 
"Familiarity breeds contempt," said Seila, who has signed an Internet petition seeking to have the machines print out a paper verification of the voter's choices that goes into a ballot box and can be counted by election workers as the official vote. "If you're more familiar with the system, you understand its insecurities, its problems."
 
Opposition to electronic voting continues to rage on the Internet. Harris has a Web site (blackboxvoting.com), and a site called Scoop in New Zealand — similar to the Drudge Report — has picked up on the controversy, as have countless Web logs.
 
Other sites — including conspiracyplanet.com — have regular features on touch-screen voting. The site also has features claiming the moon landing was a hoax.
 
Activist Richard Searcy of Voter Independence Project, a grass-roots group, said at a town hall meeting on electronic voting in Atlanta that "today's conspiracy theorist is tomorrow's sage."
 
The audience of about 200, some representing the Green, Libertarian, Constitution, Independence and Natural Law parties, roared its approval.
 
Receipt, please
 
To many people, the solution seems simple. Consumers go to a store and are given a receipt listing what they purchased. So why can't voting machines produce a similar piece of paper the state can use to ensure the integrity of elections?
 
Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) has introduced legislation that would require electronic voting machines to produce a "voter-verified paper trail" — a receipt of a final ballot. The bill is pending in a House committee. The receipts would serve as the official tally in the event of a close race or a recount. State Sen. Tom Price (R-Roswell) has introduced a similar bill.
 
Lewis, whose skull was fractured by police during a civil rights march in Selma, Ala., said: "It means a great deal to me, because I almost gave my life for all of our citizens to participate in the democratic process. Not just to get to vote, but to have all of the votes counted."
 
Cox says printed receipts will create problems that the electronic machines were designed to eliminate. Election fraud has often centered on paper ballots that mysteriously disappeared, Cox said, or bogus ballots that were illegally "stuffed" in ballot boxes in favor of a particular candidate.
 
"It really adds nothing to the system, [and] the people who think it will don't understand the history of voter fraud we've had with paper," she said.
 
Cox strongly defends electronic voting, calling Georgia's voting machines "the best solution available."
 
She points out that computers have been used to count votes for decades. "The big change is that the computer, instead of being squirreled away in the back room, has been put directly in front of the voter. And the perception of vulnerability has therefore skyrocketed."
 
The machines dramatically reduced the number of undervotes, Cox said. In the 1998 U.S. Senate race, more than 88,600 votes — almost 5 percent of the total — were not counted. When the touch-screen machines were used in 2002, the number of uncounted votes ped to 17,728, less than 1 percent.
 
And Cox points out that the new machines are equipped with audio equipment that allows blind people to vote without assistance.
 
Watchdog gives OK
 
Cox has found an unlikely ally in Common Cause Georgia. The government watchdog has issued a position paper backing touch-screen voting.
 
"No system is perfect," wrote Executive Director Bill Bozarth, "but we see nothing in the current Georgia implementation to warrant any consideration for going back to other voting systems. The level of collusion required to carry out vote stealing is so great as to render it extremely unlikely. The chance of a fraud occurring and subsequently going undetected is virtually zero."
 
Bozarth, who worked for IBM for 30 years, said he spoke with touch-screen opponents. "The people really adamant about this are people in the political extremes who believe there is a conspiracy afoot," he said.
 
In October, the Fulton County Elections Board sent Cox a letter that asked pointed questions about the security of Georgia's voting machines. The state's largest county uses 2,975 machines. Harry MacDougald, a Republican board member, wrote the letter after hearing about Rubin's report.
 
Cox wrote a six-page response explaining the procedures in place to ensure the machines cannot be manipulated.
 
The Fulton board replied Dec. 1, telling Cox she had alleviated members' concerns.
 
"I feel reasonably comfortable," MacDougald said recently. "There's always a theoretical possibility [of tampering]. That can never be excluded, regardless of the voting technology. But the measures that were previously in place, with the new measures and technical fixes that are being made, bring the issue within a reasonable degree of security."
 
Cox often talks about the machines to churches, civic clubs and chambers of commerce while traveling the state.
 
"I get good feedback about how much the voters liked these machines," Cox said. "For all of our terrible standings on some educational lists . . . my experience is, the voters are very pleased that we did this, that we took the lead, that we are doing something progressive, and they liked it."
 
Her critics are just as adamant.
 
"We'll be vindicated," said the League Opposed to Virtual Elections' Sawyer. "There's no question about it."