Nov 15
“Reconsidering Digital Votes”
David Pogue
The New York Times
“”If there’s one thing you learn as you grow older, it’s that life is
painted in shades of gray. I find it harder and harder to view any issue
in black and white; if you really think about it, you can almost always
see the other guy’s point of view.
Take electronic voting, for example. In 2000, it sure looked like the
old voting systems punch cards, hanging chads, all that were
desperately in need of upgrading. It seemed pretty obvious that
electronic voting systems would have avoided the whole Florida ballot
controversy. I, for one, spent two months walking around muttering,
“Gimme a break. They can drive the Nasdaq to 5,000, but we’re still
voting with punch cards?!”
Then came last Sunday’s New York Times, which presented a terrifying
report on Diebold, a leading maker of paperless touch-screen voting
machines. Eight million of us will be tapping on Diebold computers in
the next Presidential election.
So what’s wrong with that?
Wrong Thing 1: Wally O’Dell, the company’s chief executive, is a
Republican fundraiser. He writes letters to wealthy Bush contributors
vowing to “deliver” his state’s electoral votes to the Bush campaign. He
hosts campaign meetings at his house. He’s also a member of Bush’s
“Rangers and Pioneers” club (each member of whom must contribute at
least $100,000 to the 2004 re-election campaign).
No matter what your politics, you can’t deny that there’s a strong whiff
of conflict of interest here.
Still, Mr. O’Dell wouldn’t and couldn’t go so far as to program his
voting machines to deliver the next election to Mr. Bush, right? Even
Oliver Stone would laugh at that conspiracy theory. But then:
Wrong Thing 2: The code in these machines is so insecure, somebody
managed to copy a version of it from Diebold and post it online. Two
studies one by professors at Johns Hopkins and Rice University, one by
engineering firm SAIC found the current code to be sloppily written,
with weak cryptography and “no evidence of rigorous software engineering
discipline.”
Wrong Thing 3: This one boggles the brain: The Diebold systems don’t
print. There’s no paper trail, no “voting receipts.” Data is transferred
to the election precinct on a memory card in a format that only Diebold
can read. If an election is ever in dispute, nobody can compare the
digital results against a backup system. As an individual, you’d have no
way of confirming that your vote was properly recorded.
(My favorite part of the Times article was the story told by New Jersey
Representative Rush D. Holt, who’s trying to make electronic voting more
transparent: “Someone said to me the other day, ‘We’ve had these
electronic voting machines for several years now, and we’ve never had a
problem.’ And I said, ‘How do you know?’”) ******
Without a paper trail, there’s all kinds of opportunity for mischief.
******
Wrong Thing 4: Diebold points out that the software is inspected and
tested by election officials before it’s certified. There’s only one
problem: Diebold engineers can slip in and make changes to the software
even AFTER it’s been certified.
Worse, they do exactly that. A Wired article quoted a Diebold engineer
as saying that his team made no fewer than three rounds of software
changes to the machines in Georgia’s 2002 election for governor after
the machines had been certified but before the election began. (That
election “ended in a major upset that defied all polls and put a
Republican in the governor’s seat for the first time in more than 130
years.”)
But Ren Bucholz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (action.eff.org)
told me that this kind of thing casual, uninspected software updates
to voting machines that have already been certified goes on all the
time.
The bottom line: Diebold’s voting machines appear to present an
undetectable, easy and tempting target for manipulating elections.
See what I mean? Even electronic voting turns out to be a gray area.
No, wait come to think of it, maybe it’s a black-and-white issue after
all.”
David Pogue
