I’m in Canton, Ohio this week to attend the annual shareholders’ meeting of Diebold, Incorporated, the leading manufacturer of touch-screen voting machines that don’t work. I’m not a shareholder; I’m an unwelcome guest. I’ll explain why shortly.
After the fiasco that was the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed, the Help America Vote Act. (Those two developments alone should have put us on our guard.) The ostensible purpose of HAVA was to provide states with federal funds to upgrade obsolete voting technology. No sooner had the bill passed than state and local election officials were inundated by high-pressure sales reps from vendors of touch-screen voting machines.
Secretaries of state and boards of election were carried away on a schmoozy tide of extravagant promises – Faster and more accurate vote tallies! Ballots can be displayed in several languages! No hanging chads, pregnant chads, swinging chads! No confusing butterfly ballots that cause people to vote for Pat Buchanan!
Problem was, in the rush to high-tech wonderland, no one made sure the machines would actually work. HAVA provided funds for establishing commissions to set standards, but while that was moving at the speed of government (which is to say that two years later, it really hasn’t gotten off the ground), vendors were moving at the speed of business. Some states like Nevada, Maryland and Georgia, bought in big and early, converting all their ballot technology to touch-screen machines. Doesn’t everyone want to spend all their money on first-generation computer technology, with all the bugs?
This led to what Don Rumsfeld might call a “know-unknown” problem. What was known is that the computer voting technology was built on a Microsoft Windows platform, like the one you have on your home computer. Just as it does on your computer, Microsoft Windows on voting machines has crashed again and again and again. When the machines crash, there is huge potential for votes to be lost and once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. Also, because the voting technology is built on Microsoft, it makes it easy for hackers, who’ve been slicing and dicing Microsoft for years.
The “unknown” problem is the vote-counting software. Because the voting tech vendors claim their software is “proprietary,” their contracts bar election officials from seeing the source code. So, hackers get in and root around and figure out how the system works, but the people who are supposed to guard the integrity of our elections don’t know enough about the system to catch the hackers. Instead, we have to rely on low-wage workers for vendors like Diebold, who are under enormous pressure to never admit a machine has malfunctioned or been hacked, because doing so would make the home office look bad. The short version of this is that we’re privatizing our elections and putting them in the hands of people who have a vested interest in not telling us the truth.
You can observe this in action in California, where journalists – not county election supervisors – discovered the Diebold installed defective software in thousands of voting machines in 17 counties and is actively pursuing a coverup.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to respond to this democratic crisis. Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller called Sequoia, the company that made all his state’s computer voting machines and told them they had to refit the machines by November to produce a paper version of each ballot cast. The voter will check the paper ballot for accuracy and turn it over to election officials to be used for random audits and to resolve disputes.
Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox chose the wrong way. She refuses to admit there is a problem (although the Diebold machines in Georgia have failed repeatedly) and allows Diebold to use her photo and the Georgia State seal to be used in Diebold ads. Look for Ms. Cox to accept a job from Diebold when she leaves office.
Today is Diebold’s annual shareholders’ meeting and I’m here – outside – to spread the word about what may be the greatest current threat to American democracy and to suggest a remedy.
Elections should be fair, transparent and verifiable. Put the ballots on paper and keep them for audits. Elections should be decided by citizens, not computer errors.
The Computer Ate My Vote
I’m in Canton, Ohio this week to attend the annual shareholders’ meeting of Diebold, Incorporated, the leading manufacturer of touch-screen voting machines that don’t work. I’m not a shareholder; I’m an unwelcome guest. I’ll explain why shortly.
After the fiasco that was the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed, the Help America Vote Act. (Those two developments alone should have put us on our guard.) The ostensible purpose of HAVA was to provide states with federal funds to upgrade obsolete voting technology. No sooner had the bill passed than state and local election officials were inundated by high-pressure sales reps from vendors of touch-screen voting machines.
Secretaries of state and boards of election were carried away on a schmoozy tide of extravagant promises – Faster and more accurate vote tallies! Ballots can be displayed in several languages! No hanging chads, pregnant chads, swinging chads! No confusing butterfly ballots that cause people to vote for Pat Buchanan!
Problem was, in the rush to high-tech wonderland, no one made sure the machines would actually work. HAVA provided funds for establishing commissions to set standards, but while that was moving at the speed of government (which is to say that two years later, it really hasn’t gotten off the ground), vendors were moving at the speed of business. Some states like Nevada, Maryland and Georgia, bought in big and early, converting all their ballot technology to touch-screen machines. Doesn’t everyone want to spend all their money on first-generation computer technology, with all the bugs?
This led to what Don Rumsfeld might call a “know-unknown” problem. What was known is that the computer voting technology was built on a Microsoft Windows platform, like the one you have on your home computer. Just as it does on your computer, Microsoft Windows on voting machines has crashed again and again and again. When the machines crash, there is huge potential for votes to be lost and once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. Also, because the voting technology is built on Microsoft, it makes it easy for hackers, who’ve been slicing and dicing Microsoft for years.
The “unknown” problem is the vote-counting software. Because the voting tech vendors claim their software is “proprietary,” their contracts bar election officials from seeing the source code. So, hackers get in and root around and figure out how the system works, but the people who are supposed to guard the integrity of our elections don’t know enough about the system to catch the hackers. Instead, we have to rely on low-wage workers for vendors like Diebold, who are under enormous pressure to never admit a machine has malfunctioned or been hacked, because doing so would make the home office look bad. The short version of this is that we’re privatizing our elections and putting them in the hands of people who have a vested interest in not telling us the truth.
You can observe this in action in California, where journalists – not county election supervisors – discovered the Diebold installed defective software in thousands of voting machines in 17 counties and is actively pursuing a coverup.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to respond to this democratic crisis. Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller called Sequoia, the company that made all his state’s computer voting machines and told them they had to refit the machines by November to produce a paper version of each ballot cast. The voter will check the paper ballot for accuracy and turn it over to election officials to be used for random audits and to resolve disputes.
Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox chose the wrong way. She refuses to admit there is a problem (although the Diebold machines in Georgia have failed repeatedly) and allows Diebold to use her photo and the Georgia State seal to be used in Diebold ads. Look for Ms. Cox to accept a job from Diebold when she leaves office.
Today is Diebold’s annual shareholders’ meeting and I’m here – outside – to spread the word about what may be the greatest current threat to American democracy and to suggest a remedy.
Elections should be fair, transparent and verifiable. Put the ballots on paper and keep them for audits. Elections should be decided by citizens, not computer errors.
(c) Mark Floegel, 2004