Here is a safe prediction for this year’s general election: If any contest is remotely close, there will be litigation about the accuracy of the vote.
Indeed, there already has been litigation. Denver District Judge Lawrence Manzares ruled last week that the electronic voting machines to be used in this election do not comply with the security procedures required by state law. Even so, he declared, to switch to another voting method now, just six weeks before the election, “would create more problems than it would solve.”
No voting system is perfect, including the traditional paper ballot. In my days as editor of the Breckenridge newspaper, nearly 30 years ago, I occasionally drank lunch with an attorney who had many years under his belt. He had been quite active in precinct-level machine politics during his youth, he said, and he once reminisced about how “the damn Republicans in North Denver used such soft lead pencils that it was really hard to erase their votes and fix their ballots.”
But at least there’s some physical evidence of tampering with paper ballots. (For these electronic wonders, you might find something educational at http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting.)
Edward W. Felton, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, as well as a few of his students, arranged to get a Diebold Accuvote machine. It might tell you something that Diebold refused to supply a machine for their investigation, and so they had to go through a third party.
The Accuvote is a small computer that runs off a memory card which stores its program and data. It is inside a locked compartment.
The researchers found that the key to the locked compartment is a common type – one from a hotel mini-bar could open the machine. Even without the key, one student could pick the lock in 10 seconds. Or just remove some screws and open the machine from the back.
The old memory card can then be pulled out and replaced with one with malicious software. Reboot the machine, then put the original memory card back in place, with the malicious software still controlling the machine. This can be done in a minute or less.
What does the malicious software do? Every so often, three or four times a minute, it checks the vote tally, then adjusts vote totals to reach its programmed goals. It also makes the same changes in the backup file. There’s no way to detect these changes because the total number of votes matches the total number of voters, and at the end of the election, the program erases itself.
It might be noteworthy that these machines use the “CE” variety of Microsoft Windows as their operating system, and that very few geeks can say “Windows” and “security” in the same sentence with a straight face.
Diebold argues that the machine the researchers used has “old security software.” But Diebold did not make a current version available for testing, and the “old security software” was federally certified.
And that, alas, is basically the argument that our chief Colorado elections official, Secretary of State Gigi Dennis, uses: The machines are federally certified, so we ought to trust them.
Whatever electronic device I used in the meaningless primary here last month was not from Diebold. But it was still hard to trust, because I was supposed to get a Democratic ballot for Chaffee County Precinct 2, and instead I was presented with a Republican ballot for Precinct 15. After I told the nearby judge about the wrong ballot, I got the right one – but this does not instill confidence in the system, since there was nothing to stop me from casting a ballot I was not entitled to cast.
So we face an election where a Colorado judge has said the state did an “abysmal” job of testing and certification. It has been demonstrated that it’s quite possible to hack at least one brand of voting machine to have it produce whatever results the hacker desires.
This comes as no surprise to my high-tech friends who are programmers, technicians and administrators. As one of them told me, “The more you know about computers, the less you trust them.”
So, unless every contest is a landslide this fall, look for a lot of litigation based on the voting machinery.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
