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By Jacob Fenston
Six years after the presidential election highlighted flaws in the election system, voter-rights groups say those defects haven’t been fixed, and in some cases have only gotten worse. As state primaries are held across the country, voter rights advocates point to a swath of voting machine malfunctions and programming flaws that they say could lead to a “trainwreck” this fall when voters in all 50 states simultaneously cast their ballots in general elections.
Oregon votes may be at risk too. Though Oregonians cast votes on paper, those paper ballots are tallied by machine — the same machines getting flack nationwide for their vulnerability to fraud or malfunction. Voter-rights groups say Oregon needs a mandatory audit, requiring a hand count of some portion of ballots to compare with the machine-tallied results.
Much of the national debate has recently focused around touch-screen voting terminals, also known as Direct
| ES&S failures over the past two months | |
| Pottawattamie County, Iowa, June 2006 Ballot programming error causes ES&S optical scanners to tabulate votes incorrectly. Dallas County, Iowa, June 2006 White County, Arkansas, June 2006 Cascade County, Montana, May 2006 Harrison County, Indiana, May 2006 West Virginia, May 2006 West Virginia, May 2006 Wichita Falls, Texas, May 2006 Arkansas, May 2006 Arkansas, May 2006 List compiled from media reports by www.votersunite.org. |
Electronic Recording machines (DERs). Following the 2000 presidential election’s hanging-chad debacle, DERs were promoted as a more reliable way to tally votes. But computer experts warn that these machines are susceptible to hackers or programming errors. So far this year, lawsuits have been filed in four states to either ban or restrict the use of DERs. New Mexico has passed a law prohibiting their use.
In May, the organization Black Box Voting released a report by computer expert Harri Hursti, detailing weaknesses in Diebold touch screen terminals that could leave the door open to malicious election workers or others intent on altering the vote. Kathleen Wynne of Black Box Voting says that the security issues are so deeply imbedded in the system’s architecture it would be impossible for a diagnostic test to detect contamination. In 2005 the group reported that Diebold’s optical scan machines — similar to those used to tally Oregon’s paper ballots — could be hacked by anyone with “a few hundred dollars, mediocre technical skills [and] just a touch of inside access.”
“It’s not a matter of ‘did someone do it?’ It’s a matter that someone could,” Wynne says. In addition to potential vote fraud, DERs also threaten the complete loss of votes in case of malfunction. In one such instance during the 2004 election, more than 4,500 votes disappeared forever in North Carolina when a memory card was overloaded. According to the Election Incident Reporting System, 2,269 voting machine-related problems were reported on election day that year.
The 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was intended to prevent the problems created by punch-card ballots in the 2000 elections. The act allocated $3.9 billion in matching federal funds to help states upgrade to electronic systems. But by helping states replace paper-ballot systems with paperless DERs, HAVA opened the door to the irregularities seen in 2004. Several states still use paperless touch screens; both Georgia and Maryland use them statewide.
John Gideon, Executive Director of VotersUnite.org, has compiled a list of 51 reported machine programming errors so far this year. Gideon says that given the number of problems in this primary season, and the failure of voting machine vendors to support their systems, the general elections in November could prove to be a disaster. “Right now, the four major vendors have oversold their product, and they don’t have the technical support behind what they’ve sold to be able to hold an election in all 50 states, and be able to support an election like that. It’s just not going to happen,” he says.
But Oregonians vote on paper ballots, leaving a verifiable record of voter intent. Any recount is done manually, using the original ballots. So isn’t Oregon immune from worries about machine malfunction and fraud? Not unless election officials can prove the system is accurately counting ballots, says Pamela Smith, nationwide coordinator for the Verified Voting Foundation. She lists two criteria that ensure an election system is verifiably accurate: a hard-copy record of voter intent and mandatory random manual audits. Smith says Oregon’s system meets the first standard but not the second.
Oregon election officials conduct Logic and Accuracy (L&A) tests to verify that the optical scan machines are counting correctly. Test ballot decks are fed through each scanner five days before the vote count, the day before, and the day after. “It would take some kind of real wizard of a programmer to tell it to count correctly all those times, but incorrectly somewhere in the middle,” says Secretary of State Bill Bradbury.
But Wynne says optical scan machines run in a different mode during tests than during the actual election. “It’s just being tested, and it passed a test. But it didn’t pass the election,” says Wynne.
Jerry Adams, an analyst on the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition’s Verification Team, says that the machines could be programmed so that a vote-tallying flaw would be invoked only after a high number of votes are counted. This, says Adams, would allow the machines to pass any L&A test, but still miscount votes during an actual election. Gideon of VotersUnite.org says the test decks, often provided by voting machine vendors themselves, could reproduce the same flaws exhibited in the programming.
Gideon points to Iowa’s June primaries to highlight the inadequacy of L&A tests. Pottawattamie County, Iowa, uses the M-650 optical scanner, manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), the same scanner that many Oregon counties use. When Pottawattamie officials started scanning absentee ballots, the county auditor noticed one of the races wasn’t proceeding as expected. A hand count revealed that the machines were, in fact, miscounting. The ballot programming done by ES&S had failed to account for ballot rotation, a common practice whereby candidates’ names appear in different orders in different precincts. While this particular problem won’t occur in Oregon because our ballots don’t rotate, similar programming errors are possible. For each Oregon election, vote scanners must be reprogrammed with new ballot definitions, enabling them to read each county’s various ballot styles. Since election officials don’t have the expertise to do the programming themselves, they hire ES&S to do it for them.
Kathy Jackson of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition (OVRC) says given the history of ES&S programming errors, Oregonians shouldn’t trust the company to scan votes accurately. According to a list compiled by VotersUnite.org, 33 counties nationwide have reported ES&S ballot programming errors in the past two months alone (see sidebar).
Voter-rights activists also raise concerns about who controls companies like ES&S and Diebold, which together count 80 percent of the nation’s electronic votes. Activists link executives at these companies to criminal activities and political bias. Tom Eschberger, Vice President of ES&S, was involved in a bribery and kickback scheme in Arkansas.Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a former ES&S executive who retains holdings in that company, was elected to the Senatein a surprise victory in 1996, only months after quitting his job at ES&S. Eighty-five percent of the votes in that race were counted on ES&S machines. Activists also trace ES&S origins and current ownership to right-wing extremists. These allegations, voter-rights groups say, only reinforce the need for more public oversight of the industry that tallies the nation’s votes. The software used by voting machines is proprietary, meaning election officials and citizens do not have the right to examine it for flaws. Election officials have become dependent on voting machine vendors, says Wynne, essentially outsourcing elections to private companies.
“The certification process is a joke,” says Wynne, referring to the process by which voting machines are tested. “The certifiers are paid directly by the vendors, which I would consider a conflict of interest.” The certification is conducted by private companies, whose procedures and reports are not made public.
Still, says the OVRC’s Adams, “Oregon has by and large among the most professional and conscientious election officials and policies.” But, he says, without a verification system, such as a mandatory manual audit, “we’re really doing a faith-based election.”
Activists across the country support legislation to amend HAVA, and many have gotten behind HR 550, which would mandate manual audits, as well as voter verifiable paper trails. Though the bill currently has 191 cosponsors — nearly the number it needs to be brought to the floor — it will not be passed before the upcoming general elections. The only path to verifiably accurate elections this November, says Beth Hahn of the OVRC, is for Bradbury to issue an administrative rule requiring audits. Hahn encourages voters to email their county election officials and demand a verifiably accurate election.
For more information, or to find out how you can help bring verified elections to Oregon: www.oregonvrc.org/verification
Jacob Fenston is a journalist and stage manager who lives in Portland.
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The Portland Alliance
2807 SE Stark Portland,OR 97214 Last Updated: July 11, 2006 |