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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
A Salon special report reveals how new voting machines could result in a rigged presidential race -- and we'd never know.
Feb 9, 2004 | A few weeks after Election Night 2002, Roxanne Jekot, a computer programmer who lives in a northeastern suburb of Atlanta, Ga., began fearing demons lingering in the state's voting machines. The midterm election had been a historic one: Georgia became the first state to use electronic touch-screen voting machines in every one of its precincts. The 51-year-old Jekot, who has a grandmotherly bearing but describes herself as a "typical computer geek," was initially excited about the new system.
"I thought it was the coolest thing we could have done," she says.
But the election also brought sweeping victories for Republicans, including, most stunningly, one for Sonny Perdue, who defeated Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democrat, to become Georgia's first Republican governor in 135 years, while Rep. Saxby Chambliss upset Vietnam veteran Sen. Max Cleland. The convergence of these two developments -- the introduction of new voting machines and the surprising GOP wins -- began to eat away at Roxanne Jekot. Like many of her fellow angry Democrats on the Internet discussion forums she frequented, she had a hard time believing the Republicans won legitimately. Instead, Jekot began searching for her explanation in the source code used in the new voting machines.
What she found alarmed her. The machines were state-of-the-art products from an Ohio company called Diebold. But the code -- which a friend of Jekot's had found on the Internet -- was anything but flawless, Jekot says. It was amateurish and pocked with security problems. "I expected sophistication and some fairly difficult to understand advanced coding," Jekot said one evening this fall at a restaurant near her home. But she saw "a hodgepodge of commands thrown all over the source code," an indication, she said, that the programmers were careless. Along with technical commands, Diebold's engineers had written English comments documenting the various functions their software performed -- and these comments "made my hair stand on end," Jekot said. The programmers would say things like "this doesn't work because that doesn't work and neither one of them work together." They seemed to know that their software was flawed.
To Jekot, there appeared to be method in the incompetence. Professional programmers could not be so sloppy; it had to be deliberate. "They specifically opened doors that need not be opened," Jekot said, suggesting the possibility that Diebold wanted to leave its voting machines open to fraud. And, ominously, the electronic voting systems used in Georgia, like most of the new machines installed in the United States since the 2000 election, do not produce a "paper trail" -- every vote cast in the state's midterm election was recorded, tabulated, checked and stored by computers whose internal workings are owned by Diebold, a private corporation.
Jekot was particularly alarmed -- and outraged -- to learn that company CEO Walden O'Dell is one of the GOP's biggest fundraisers in his home state of Ohio and nationally. Right after the Georgia elections, an O'Dell e-mail began making the rounds of Web logs and other Internet sites that were tracking the Diebold security flaws, in which the CEO bragged that he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." What better way to deliver electoral votes for President Bush, some reasoned, than to control the equipment Americans use to cast their ballots?
"I believe that the 2002 election in Georgia was rigged," Jekot insists today. "I don't believe that Saxby Chambliss or Sonny Perdue won their races legally."
Despite Jekot's technical expertise, officials in Georgia consider her theories baseless. Roy Barnes, the defeated Democratic governor, says that blaming his loss on voting machines is "ridiculous." And, to be sure, there is no evidence proving malfeasance, and there probably never will be. The only trouble is, the state cannot furnish any definitive evidence to show that the 2002 election was not fraudulent. Proving that the machines didn't malfunction, or that they weren't hacked, is impossible. And since scores of computer scientists say that voting systems are vulnerable to attack, and because activists have raised legitimate concerns about election equipment vendors' politics and processes, Jekot's fears have come to seem, to many, entirely reasonable.
Even a self-described Christian arch-conservative, former Diebold systems manager Rob Behler, says the company failed to adequately test its troubled equipment -- and balked when he warned them of widespread problems with the machines. Last summer, computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University found major security flaws in the Diebold machines, concluding that the Georgia system falls "far below even the most minimal security standards." And in January, experts at RABA Technologies, a consulting firm in Maryland, discovered additional failures in that state's Diebold systems. Internal Diebold e-mail shows that company engineers knew about the problems and in some instances chose to ignore them.
Some elections officials are beginning to see the profound dangers inherent in this process; California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has ordered that all systems in his state implement a paper record by 2006. Activists hailed Shelley's decision as evidence that he understands the fundamental principle at stake: Elections should be sacrosanct.
But on Election Day this November, more than 20 percent of American voters will cast their ballots on paperless electronic machines; voters across the nation will encounter them during the primaries. Critics of touch-screen systems point to the controversy surrounding the vote in Georgia as a sign of things to come nationally. If there's an upset in a close presidential race, will we be able to trust it? Ironically, the paperless systems were supposed to restore trust in a democracy that saw the presidency hang by a few thousand chads in Florida three years ago. In Georgia, and increasingly across the nation, they're in danger of doing quite the opposite.
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