US voting system vulnerable to fraud - part 4

Part 4 of a 4-part investigation by ANDREW GUMBEL of the Independent

The possibility of flaws in the electoral process is not something that gets discussed much in the United States. The attitude seems to be: we are the greatest democracy in the world, so the system must be fair.

That has certainly been the prevailing view in Georgia, where even leading Democrats – their prestige on the line for introducing touchscreen voting in the first place -- have fought tooth and nail to defend the integrity of the system.

In a phone interview, the head of the Georgia Technology Authority who brought Diebold machines to the state, Larry Singer, blamed the growing chorus of criticism on "fear of technology", despite the fact that many prominent critics are themselves computer scientists.

He said: "Are these machines flawless? No. Would you have more confidence if they were completely flawless? Yes. Is there such a thing as a flawless system? No."

Mr Singer, who left the GTA straight after the election and took a 50 per cent pay cut to work for Sun Microsystems, insisted that voters were more likely to have their credit card information stolen by a busboy in a restaurant than to have their vote compromised by touchscreen technology.




Voting machines are sold in the United States in much the same way as other government contracts: through intensive lobbying, wining and dining.

At a recent national conference of clerks, election officials and treasurers in Denver, attendees were treated to black-tie dinners and other perks, including free expensive briefcases stamped with Sequoia's company logo alongside the association's own symbol.

Nobody in power seems to find this worrying, any more than they worried when Sequoia's southern regional sales manager, Phil Foster, was indicted in Louisiana a couple of years ago for "conspiracy to commit money laundering and malfeasance".

His charges were dropped in exchange for his testimony against Louisiana's state commissioner of elections.

Similarly, last year, the Arkansas secretary of state Bill McCuen pleaded guilty to taking bribes and kickbacks involving a precursor company to ES&S. The voting machine company executive who testified against him in exchange for immunity is now an ES&S vice president.

If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years.

The ownership issue is, of course, compounded by the lack of transparency. Or, as Dr Mercuri put it: "If the machines were independently verifiable, who would give a crap who owns them?"

As it is, fears that US democracy is being hijacked by corporate interests are being fuelled by links between the big three and broader business interests, as well as some frankly extremist organisations.

Two of the early backers of American Information Systems, a company later merged into ES&S, are also prominent supporters of the Chalcedon Foundation, an organisation that espouses theocratic governance according to a literal reading of the Bible and advocates capital punishment for blasphemy and homosexuality.

The chief executive of American Information Systems in the early 1990s was Chuck Hagel, who went on to run for elective office and became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected to the Senate from Nebraska, cheered on by the Omaha World-Herald newspaper which also happens to be a big investor in ES&S.

In yet another clamorous conflict of interest, 80 per cent of Mr Hagel's winning votes - both in 1996 and again in 2002 -- were counted, under the usual terms of confidentiality, by his own company.

In theory, the federal government should be monitoring the transition to computer technology and rooting out abuses. Under the Help America Vote Act, the Bush administration is supposed to establish a sizeable oversight committee, headed by two Democrats and two Republicans, as well as a technical panel to determine standards for new voting machinery.

The four commission heads were supposed to have been in place by last February, but so far just one has been appointed.

The technical panel also remains unconstituted, even though the new machines it is supposed to vet are already being sold in large quantities, a state of affairs Dr Mercuri denounces as "an abomination".

One of the conditions states have to fulfil to receive federal funding for the new voting machines, meanwhile, is a consolidation of voter rolls at state rather than county level.

This provision sends a chill down the spine of anyone who has studied how Florida consolidated its voter rolls before the 2000 election, purging the names of tens of thousands of eligible voters, most of them African Americans and most of them Democrats, through misuse of an erroneous list of convicted felons commissioned by Katherine Harris, the secretary of state who doubled as George Bush's Florida campaign manager.

Despite a volley of lawsuits, the incorrect list was still in operation in last November's mid-terms, raising all sorts of questions about what other states might now do with their own voter rolls.

It is not that the Act's consolidation provision is in itself evidence of a conspiracy to throw elections, but it does leave open that possibility.

Meanwhile, the administration has been pushing new voting technology of its own to help overseas citizens and military personnel, both natural Republican Party constituencies, to vote more easily via the internet.

Internet voting is notoriously insecure and open to abuse by just about anyone with rudimentary hacking skills. Last January, an experiment in internet voting in Toronto was scuppered by a Slammer worm attack.

Undeterred, the administration has gone ahead with its so-called SERVE project for overseas voting, via a private consortium made up of major defence contractors and a Saudi investment group.

The contract for overseeing internet voting in the 2004 presidential election was recently awarded to Accenture, formerly part of the Arthur Andersen group (whose accountancy branch, a major campaign contributor to President Bush, imploded as a result of the Enron bankruptcy scandal).

Not everyone in the United States has fallen under the spell of the big computer voting companies, and there are signs of growing wariness.

Oregon decided even before HAVA to conduct all its voting by mail.

Wisconsin has decided it wants nothing to do with touchscreen machines without a verifiable paper trail, and New York is considering a similar injunction, at least for its state assembly races.

In California, a Stanford computer science professor named David Dill is screaming from the rooftops on the need for a paper trail in his state, so far without result.

And a New Jersey Congressman, Rush Holt, has introduced a bill in the House of Representatives, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, asking for much the same thing.

Not everyone is heeding the warnings, though.

In Ohio, publication of the letter from Diebold's chief executive promising to deliver the state to President Bush in 2004 has not deterred the secretary of state (a Republican) from putting Diebold on a list of preferred voting-machine vendors.

Similarly, in Maryland, officials have not taken the recent state-sponsored study identifying hundreds of flaws in the Diebold software as any reason to change their plans to use Diebold machines in March's presidential primary.

John Zogby, arguably the most reliable pollster in the United States, freely admits he "blew" last November's elections and does not exclude the possibility that foul play was one of the factors knocking his calculations off course.

"We're ploughing into a brave new world here," he said, "where there are so many variables aside from out-and-out corruption that can change elections, especially in situations where the races are close.

We have machines that break down, or are tampered with, or are simply misunderstood. It's a cause for great concern."

Roxanne Jekot, who has put much of her professional and personal life on hold to work on the issue full-time, puts it even more strongly.

"Corporate America is very close to running this country. The only thing that is stopping them from taking total control are the pesky voters. That's why there's such a drive to control the vote. What we're seeing is the corporatisation of the last shred of democracy."

- INDEPENDENT