http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/35447.html
By Mark Rasch
SecurityFocus
Posted: 10/02/2004
Did Republican staffers commit a crime by clicking on the "My Network
Places" icon to access Democratic memos, asks SecurityFocus columnist
Mark Rasch.
Politics is dirty business, and rarely so much as in the area of
patronage: appointments to sought-after federal jobs in general, and
to the federal bench in particular. So it should be little surprise
that, with so much at stake, one political party would want to use the
insecurity inherent in computerized databases to its political
advantage.
What is surprising, however, is that, caught with their hand in the
cookie jar, Senate Republicans employed the tactic of blaming the
victim: they said, in essence, It's your fault that we got and used
your information. If successful, this tactic does not bode well for
the government's ability to prosecute computer crimes, and to protect
critical infrastructures.
With the resignation last Thursday of Senate staffer Manuel Miranda as
the first victim of what I might call "cybergate," we may learn
whether this tactic will be pursued and whether it will be ultimately
successful.
The scandal itself revolves around the process by which federal judges
are appointed, and more importantly, how such appointments are blocked
by the opposing party. When President George W. Bush came to office,
he sought to make numerous appointments to the federal bench -- some
to positions that conservative Republicans had deliberately left
vacant for years of Democratic administrations.
The Democrats, at the time a majority in the Senate, sought to use
tactics similar to those they criticized Republicans for in preventing
such nominations from reaching a vote on the floor of the Senate. The
key Senate Committee responsible for such appointments was the
Judiciary Committee.
Democratic staffers wrote and transmitted confidential memoranda
describing the means they would use to block such nominations in
general, and the nomination of conservative Republican Miguel Estrada
in particular. A year ago, in February 2003, columnist Robert Novak --
the same columnist responsible for revealing the name of a CIA
operative on a leak from government officials -- published information
from these Democratic strategy memos. Novak reported that the
information came from "internal Senate sources" but refused to
identify these sources when questioned by Boston Globe reporter
Charlie Savage.
It now appears that the memos were stored on a computer server that
also served the Judiciary Committee. When the Republicans regained
control of the Senate, they regained control of the Judiciary
Committee as well. Eager young staffers apparently discovered that
access to the Democratic strategy memos was not password-protected,
and was located on the shared server, where they could access it by
clicking on the "My Network Places" icon on their own desktops.
There is some dispute over what happened next -- though in my opinion
it makes no difference. The Republicans argued that a computer
technician told the Democrats about the configuration problem in the
summer of 2002, and the Democrats claim they knew nothing about it
until November of 2003. In either event, it's clear that Republican
staffers, learning of the lack of protection to the documents, used
the opportunity to take, read and leak the contents of the memos.
The 'They Deserved It' Defense
When the source and method of the leaks became apparent, the Senate
Sergeant at Arms launched an investigation. Former Republican Senate
Judiciary Committee Staffer Manuel Miranda came under suspicion, as he
was one of the committee's point people on judicial appointments, and
had since left the Judiciary committee to work for Senate Majority
Leader Bill Frist.
What is amazing is what comes next. When interviewed by the Boston
Globe about the incident, Miranda reportedly claimed that the only
wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats, both for the content of
their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could
be seen.
"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation
of any Senate rule," the Globe quoted Miranda as saying. "Stealing
assumes a property right and there is no property right to a
government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the
Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to
the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by
negligent [Democratic] staff."
So, Miranda claims it isn't stealing because you can't steal
government documents, and it's not a violation of the rules because
they aren't government documents. Or something like that. He also
seems to argue that the password misconfiguration made the documents
fair game.
There was a time when that would have been true.
When the federal computer crime law passed was passed by Congress in
1986, the statute only made it illegal to access certain computers
(deemed "federal interest computers") without authorization, and made
no provision for those who exceeded the scope of authorized access.
This was not an oversight, but a deliberate limitation on the scope of
the statute, and it was cited by courts in, for example, dismissing
computer crime charges against Boston IRS employee Richard Czubinski
who repeatedly violated rules and searched IRS databases for
information about friends, relatives and political enemies. Congress
specifically indicated that people who were authorized users of a
computer system, and who used that access to look at individual files
they were not supposed to see, should not be covered by the law.
But in one of the many amendments to the federal computer crime
statute, Congress changed the wording, and explicitly criminalized the
act of exceeding the scope of authorized access to a system. Doing
this to federal computers is outlawed by Title 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2),
which makes it a crime to intentionally access a computer without
authorization or to exceed authorized access, and thereby obtain
"information from any department or agency of the United States."
So, did the Republican Judiciary Committee staffers violate the law?
What I love about being a lawyer is that the answer to any question is
always the same: "It depends." The law requires proof that the
unauthorized access, or the exceeding of authorized access, was done
intentionally.
With no passwords, and no lines of demarcation, it is possible to
argue that the Republicans' access to the Democratic strategy
documents was not deliberate, or that it was not exceeding the scope
of authorization, because all of the documents were on a single,
unprotected server.
This, of course, defies common sense, but the law often defies common
sense. Similarly, the federal law requires proof that the information
obtained be obtained from "an agency or Department of the United
States." It seems that Miranda is arguing that, when the Democratic
staffers act in a political capacity, their documents no longer relate
to an Agency or Department - it's just politics. Finally, Miranda
seems to argue that there is no proprietary right to government
documents. While he is correct that government documents are not
entitled to copyright protection, this does not imply that it is
therefore okay to break into a computer database and take them.
The investigation continues, and Miranda, while continuing to proclaim
his innocence, is so far the only casualty. But if his argument that
failures of security excuse the taking of documents is accepted,
truth, justice and information security may be the next casualties of
political warfare.
Mark D. Rasch, J.D., is a former head of the Justice Department's
computer crime unit, and now serves as Senior Vice President and Chief
Security Counsel at Solutionary Inc.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/021104J.shtml
Will the Election Be Hacked?
By Farhad Manjoo
Salon
Monday 09 February 2004
A Salon special report reveals how new voting machines could result in a
rigged presidential race -- and we'd never know.
A few weeks after Election Night 2002, Roxanne Jekot, a computer
programmer who lives in Cumming, 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.
Many in Georgia dismiss Jekot and her Web-based acolytes as blinded
partisans, conspiracy nuts, or even "wack-jobs."
But if you dismiss Roxanne Jekot as a wack-job, you still have to deal
with her friends. Jekot represents only the most strident quarter of an
emerging national movement aimed at slowing the spread of the kind of
touch-screen systems that were first used in Georgia. While the movement
counts as members some of the most shrill partisans on the Web, it also
includes some of the most well-regarded computer scientists in the world
-- and together, these groups have been unexpectedly successful in
changing the national perceptions of touch-screen machines.
Until just about a year ago, these systems were considered the natural
replacement to the punch-card machines that so roiled the last
presidential election. The new machines are easy to maintain, they can
accommodate multiple languages, they can be used by people with
disabilities, and they have the backing of influential groups like the
League of Women Voters and the ACLU. The Help America Vote Act of 2002,
which doles out a total of $650 million in federal money to state and
local officials who upgrade their aging voting systems, has already
prompted dozens of counties and a handful of states to deploy the
touch-screen systems.
The activists have upended the process. Fear of the voting machines is
now a red-meat issue not just for online lefties but also for
libertarians, for many on the right, and, increasingly, for the
establishment. National newspapers run Op-Eds on the issue, network news
shows feature the movement's proponents, and officials like Shelley, in
California, have been pressed to change their positions on the systems.
If you spend much time in the world of the activists, you'll
understand why. In the fall, I sat with Jim March, an anti-Diebold tech
expert in Sacramento, Calif., while he showed me on his home PC how to
steal an election. March, an ardent libertarian whose apartment is
decorated with political posters -- "Politicians Prefer an Unarmed
Populace," one announces -- spent months investigating security flaws in
touch-screen systems. Thanks to his network of fellow geek-activists, he'd
found flaws in the system Diebold used to tally election results, a
program called GEMS. The GEMS software runs on a standard PC that's
usually housed in a county election office. The system stores its votes in
a format recognizable by Microsoft Access, a common office database
program. If you've got a copy of Access and can get physical access to the
county machine -- or, some activists say, if you discover the county's
number and call into the machine over a phone line -- the vote is yours to
steal.
While I sat at his computer, March helped me open a file containing
actual results from a March 2002 primary election held in San Luis Obispo
County, Calif. -- a file that March says would be accessible to anyone who
worked in the county elections office on Election Day. Following March's
direction, I changed the vote count with a few clicks. Then, he explained
how to alter the "audit log," erasing all evidence that we'd tampered with
the results. I saved the file. If it had been a real election, I would
have been carrying out an electronic coup. It was a chilling realization.
The person who discovered the problems with the GEMS program -- she's
singularly responsible for almost every bit of attention recently paid to
electronic voting machines, and for almost every juicy detail uncovered
about the vote in Georgia -- is a middle-aged
publicist-turned-investigative-journalist in Seattle named Bev Harris.
Harris began thinking about voting machines in late 2002, when, after
reading some claims on the Web that the election equipment firms were
being infiltrated by foreign nationals, she decided, almost on a lark, to
investigate the matter.
Harris had no journalistic experience, but she'd always harbored
fantasies of uncovering something big. She turned out to be exceptionally
talented at reporting. Within a few weeks of her investigation, she'd dug
up many compelling nuggets. She found, for instance, that in the early
1990s, before he was elected to office, Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska
Republican, served as the president of American Information Systems, the
company that built most of the voting machines used in his state. Harris
also discovered that Diebold, the firm that produced the machines used in
Georgia, had left the software used to run its systems on a public server
online. Harris downloaded these files and looked through them. She saw
that she had the company's source code as well as several other curiously
named files -- one, for example, was called "rob-georgia.zip."
Before Bev Harris found the files used in Georgia, the software in the
machines had essentially been secret. Although the code had been reviewed
by government testing authorities, nobody outside those labs had been
allowed to see the programs, which is a standard provision in most
electronic voting systems. When the computing public got a peek at the
files Harris found, experts were not kind.
In July, a team of four computer scientists at Johns Hopkins
University and Rice University announced that they'd uncovered major
security flaws in the machines used in Georgia's elections. "Our analysis
shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security
standards applicable in other contexts," the team wrote. Diebold has long
boasted that votes in its system are stored in an encrypted manner, hidden
to anyone who didn't have a valid password; the computer scientists found
that Diebold's programmers left the "key" to decrypt the votes written
into the code, which is a bit like locking your door and placing the key
on the welcome mat. The Hopkins/Rice scientists also said that they saw no
adequate mechanism to prevent voters from casting multiple ballots,
viewing partial election results, or terminating an election early.
On Jan. 19, a team of computer scientists working with RABA
Technologies set up a red-team exercise -- a one-day attempt to hack into
Diebold machines configured as they would be on Election Day. They were
successful. In a short time, the hackers managed to guess the passwords
securing the voting system, allowing them to cast multiple ballots. They
found that with a standard lock-pick set, they could inconspicuously open
up each machine -- sometimes in less than 10 seconds -- and remove or
attach various pieces of hardware, letting them erase or change electronic
ballots. They concluded that Diebold's touch-screen machines contain
"considerable security risks," and they suggested that Maryland put in
place stringent safeguards before its March 2 primary, and that the state
overhaul the system before the presidential election.
Diebold fiercely disputes that its technology is vulnerable to
attacks. Mark Radke, a spokesman for Diebold, says that the RABA study
pointed out some areas in which Maryland could improve its voting
procedures, and he's pleased that Maryland is instituting those changes.
As for the Hopkins study, Radke says the scientists who looked at the
system erred in their assessment by examining only a small bit of the code
and by neglecting the "checks and balances" that occur in an actual
election. He pointed to a study of the company's system that was performed
by Science Applications International Corp., a consulting firm, at the
behest of the state of Maryland. The SAIC report gives Diebold a clean
bill of health, and Georgia officials say it proves their system is safe.
(The study is available here in PDF format.)
There is no evidence that someone tampered with the votes in Georgia.
But certainly it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone
could do so in the future. The history of American democracy is replete
with allegations of vote fixing and stolen elections -- from Rutherford
Hayes' disputed victory over Samuel Tilden in 1876 to Illinois in 1960
(there were vote fraud allegations against both Richard Nixon and John F.
Kennedy) to the Florida debacle in 2000. Leaving the security of such a
crucial government function in the hands of private companies motivated
primarily by a desire to make a quick buck seems like a loopy idea to many
people. And the more one listens to the activists' complaints about how
Diebold does business, the more one comes to understand their worries
about election security.
Bev Harris says that in August, a former employee at Diebold handed
her a trove of documents from the company, representing years of
discussions on an internal company Web site. In the memos, Diebold
programmers seem to acknowledge security holes in their system, and they
appear to discuss methods of evading testing authorities. In one e-mail,
Ken Clark, a programmer at the company, acknowledges that vote data can be
viewed with Microsoft Access, but he says that fixing the problem will be
difficult, and it would be easier to feel out the testing labs and "find
out what it is going to take to make them happy." In another e-mail, Clark
recommends to his co-workers that if the state of Maryland -- which has
also purchased the company's touch-screen machines -- decides to require a
paper trail in its voting systems, the company should exact a high price
for the required upgrades. Diebold should charge Maryland "out the yin,"
Clark wrote. In yet another e-mail, Clark does an impression of how voters
in Georgia might react to touch-screen machines: "Yer votin thingamajig
sure looks purdy," he writes. (Calls to Clark were routed to Diebold's
P.R. office. While the company concedes that the memos are authentic, it
disputes Harris' claim that the files came from a Diebold employee.
Instead, says Mark Radke, Diebold's computers were hacked. The firm
initially threatened to sue people who posted the files on the Web, but it
has backed off that threat.)
In the spring of 2003, Harris received an e-mail that read, "I think I
may be the Rob in rob-georgia." The message was from Rob Behler, a
laid-off telecom worker who found a contract job at Diebold's Atlanta
warehouse in the summer before the midterm election. Behler, a friendly
fellow in his 30s who speaks with a disarming Southern drawl, paints a
disastrously unflattering picture of the company that provided his state
with its voting equipment. He told Harris that his time at Diebold was
marked by confusion and chaos, a month of 16-hour days in which he did
nothing but fix broken machines, broken management techniques, and deal
with incompetent people.
On his first day on the job, Behler, who had never worked on election
systems before, was promoted to a manager's position and put in charge of
the team assembling, testing and deploying all of the voting machines in
the state. He says that when he checked the machines that employees had
been assembling for months, he discovered that large numbers of them were
defective.
During the few weeks that followed, Behler spent his time fixing the
machines. He says that each time he discovered a new problem with the
systems, he would call up the tech experts at Diebold, and they would
determine a way to fix it. The programmers would put a file on the company
server -- a file like rob-georgia.zip -- and Behler would download it to
his laptop, store it on a memory card, then install the memory card on the
touch-screen machines. The process steered clear of any certification
authorities; no independent body was checking to see what was being
installed on the system.
Indeed, Behler remembers a conference call with Diebold executives in
which they specifically discussed what to tell Georgia authorities if
Diebold engineers were caught installing software on the machines. "Can't
we just tell them we're updating?" Behler wondered in the meeting.
"They're like, 'No, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. It has to be
certified.' And I say, 'Oh? So we don't want them to know that we're
fixing a problem?' So I was like, 'OK -- we can tell them that we're doing
a quality check and that we're making sure that they're all the same.' And
that's exactly what we did."
Mark Radke of Diebold says, "All I can tell you about these situations
is that before the units are deployed they are fully tested, and that
final testing was proof-positive about how those units were going to
function."
The Georgia secretary of state's office dismisses most of Behler's
claims. Chris Riggall, press secretary to Cathy Cox, the secretary of
state, says that at some point before the 2002 election, Diebold did
discover that Windows CE, the version of the Microsoft Windows operating
system that runs on the touch-screen machines, needed to be upgraded. But
this was a one-time fix that Cox was fully aware of, he said. This fix was
not formally certified by state and federal testing authorities, as
Georgia law requires. But Riggall says that the state's testing experts
determined that because the upgrade was only to the Windows operating
system and not to the other software in the touch-screen machine, it did
not need to be certified. The election was fast approaching, Riggall said,
and there simply was no time for certification. Doing it this way was "not
our preferred best option," he wrote in an e-mail, "but nevertheless
justifiable under the circumstances." As for Behler's claim that the
software was downloaded from Diebold's publicly accessible server, Riggall
says that's not true. "No, we never used that site during any aspect of
the 2002 elections."
Behler, who has seven children, is an arch-conservative. One night
this fall, standing outside his five-bedroom house in one of Atlanta's
affluent northern suburbs, he described his politics in detail -- why he
favored the ban on late-term abortions, why he considers the minimum wage
a foolish idea, why he prefers George W. Bush to Bill Clinton, and why,
despite what he knows of working at Diebold, he does not believe that the
2002 election in his state was rigged. For one thing, he doesn't consider
the GOP's wins very surprising; to him, the Republicans running that year
were fine candidates. But he does believe the Diebold flaws are an open
invitation to election mischief.
The transition to touch-screen machines in Georgia was proposed and
championed by Democrats, and the state's elected Democrats remain the
machines' fiercest defenders. It is an irony of this story, then, that
while Roxanne Jekot and her friends claim that Republicans rigged the 2002
election, it is for Democrats -- or, for one Democrat in particular,
Georgia's secretary of state, Cathy Cox -- that they reserve their
contempt. Cox, a former journalist and attorney who was first elected to
office in 1998, is the nation's leading proponent of electronic voting
systems. After the 2000 election, Cox grasped, long before her peers in
other states, that electronic voting would be the future of elections. It
was a future that she was determined to bring to her state.
Georgia has 159 counties, more than any state except Texas, and,
before the new machines were installed, there were nearly as many
different voting systems in use -- old-school lever machines (which also
produce no paper trail), punch-card machines, and optical scan systems
(which use SAT-style fill-in-the-bubble ballots), all of varying makes and
models. Shortly after the 2000 election, Cox commissioned a study on the
accuracy of these systems, looking at one measure in particular, the
presidential-race undervote. (The undervote in a given race is the number
of ballots on which voters failed to register any choice for a candidate.)
Cox found that the highest undervote rates occurred in neighborhoods where
there were large groups of minorities.
In a sample of predominantly black precincts Cox examined, for
instance, she found that the undervote was an alarming 8.1 percent. What
was mysterious was that optical scan voting systems -- which are really
the only alternative to touch-screen machines still available for sale --
did not seem to greatly improve the undervote rate among minorities. While
the undervote rate on optical scan machines in white neighborhoods was
just 2.2 percent, in black neighborhoods it was 7.6 percent. The situation
in Georgia was so obviously discriminatory that in 2001, the ACLU sued Cox
to force her to upgrade the state's elections systems. Cox says that she
chose touch-screen systems because, among other attributes, they had the
best chance of reducing the undervote. She was right: In the 2002
election, using the new machines, the undervote rate in Georgia was less
than 1 percent.
In the online forums where voting-machine critics assert that
Republicans fixed the 2002 election in Georgia, it's often said that the
results in the state surprised everybody. This isn't exactly the case. The
Senate race, which pitted the incumbent Democrat Max Cleland against Saxby
Chambliss, a Republican, was widely considered a tossup by Election Day.
The big surprise, perhaps the largest upset anywhere in the country
that night, was in the governor's race. Roy Barnes had been all but
assured a win. He had everything on his side, including money (Barnes
outspent Sonny Perdue by a margin of 6 to 1), history (Georgia is the only
state in the nation that did not elect a Republican governor in all of the
20th century) and a commanding lead in the polls.
But when Barnes eventually lost (with 46 percent to Perdue's 51
percent), his campaign did not suspect the voting machines, not even for a
second. According to Bobby Kahn, Barnes' chief of staff and an old-time
political hand in Georgia, there was an obvious political reason for the
defeat -- the Confederate flag. In an e-mail, Roy Barnes wrote that "you
will see that the dominant factor in my defeat in 2002 was anger over my
actions in changing the Georgia flag to reduce the size of the Confederate
battle emblem. I knew from my travels around the state that there was a
lot of anger over the change -- I had believed, or at least hoped, I could
overcome the anger, but I couldn't." Voter turnout among white Georgians
in 2002 was unexpectedly high, much higher than in the 1998 race.
In his office this fall, Chris Riggall, Cox's press secretary, said
that many of the computer scientists who have questioned electronic voting
systems have little firsthand experience in elections, and are therefore
unqualified to judge a voting system's security. And those who say there
was something amiss with the 2002 election don't have a clue about how
politics works in Georgia, he said. "When I see the Independent" -- the
London newspaper -- "saying the only way Max Cleland could have lost was
because of the voting machines, I have to laugh. What in the hell do you
know about Georgia political history? The last time he won with [just]
30,000 votes!"
"Our system is not perfect," says Riggall. "Our system is vulnerable,
but we believe it's less so than all of the alternatives. So our
frustration is the lack of context, perspective and knowledge of what
happens in Georgia."
But the movement to challenge electronic voting is not confined to
Georgia, or to those who worry about the 2002 election results. David
Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University, has been among the one
or two activists most responsible for the shift. Dill says that when he
first heard that systems were being installed in Georgia and in some of
California's largest counties -- including his own, Santa Clara -- he
initially figured "that somebody was minding the store and making sure
that the equipment is somehow trustworthy."
Then he did some research into how the systems were designed and
implemented, and "I began to feel that maybe that wasn't true," he says.
Dill says that he was particularly annoyed that election officials seemed
to ignore the concerns of computer security experts, who've warned of the
dangers of electronic voting for decades. So early in 2003, Dill posted a
petition online demanding that all computerized voting equipment produce
what he called a "voter-verifiable audit trail."
The audit trail (an idea that was first developed by Rebecca Mercuri,
a computer scientist who has long studied the voting systems and is now a
research fellow studying transparency in computational systems at
Harvard's Kennedy School) works as follows: When a voter casts a ballot on
a touch-screen machine, she'll be presented with a paper version of her
votes to look over. Once she approves this paper ballot, it becomes the
official record of her vote (she is not allowed to remove the paper ballot
from the voting precinct). If there is a question about the accuracy of
the electronic count, election officials would be required to manually
count the paper ballots; if there's a discrepancy between the two counts,
the manual count would be considered the official result of the election.
Thousands of computer scientists have signed Dill's demand; attaining it
nationally has become the paramount goal for the critics of the
touch-screen systems.
"It's not just one computer scientist whining about this," Dill says.
"It's a lot of very reputable people who are willing to say that as far as
they can see this voter-verifiable audit trail idea is the only way you
can conceive the necessary level of confidence in the equipment."
Kevin Shelley's decision, in late November, to require a paper trail
in California's electronic voting machines was gutsy -- and some say
precipitous. No paper-equipped touch-screen system has ever been used in a
real election in the state, and a few election experts have expressed
serious concerns about the viability of such a machine. Ted Selker, a
computer scientist at MIT who has studied election procedures, fears that
the paper trail would be prone to accidents and attacks: Paper ballots are
tricky to count accurately by machine, are almost impossible and
time-consuming to count by hand, and, of course, they can easily be
tampered with. It's not clear how the paper ballots would be made
accessible to the blind, either, and nobody knows how much upgrading to
the paper system would cost. Selker, who worked on a landmark study of the
2000 election, says that millions of votes each year are lost because of
faulty registration databases, flawed ballot design, and poorly trained
poll workers. Spending money on a paper trail rather than to fix these
known problems, he says, is a waste.
Officials in Shelley's office acknowledge the concerns with paper, but
they insist that voting firms will overcome them. Most major voting
companies, including Diebold, already say they can build systems that
include a paper trail. "Our perspective is that voter confidence is
paramount in terms of the election process," Tony Miller, an attorney in
Shelley's office, says. "Even if this costs a few thousand dollars, the
cost of democracy is not necessarily cheap and it shouldn't be the
determining factor."
David Dill describes Shelley's decision as "the biggest breakthrough
that the paper trail movement has had to date," and he says that he's
certain "it will affect the attitude of people in other states." He was
right: In December, Nevada also acted to require paper receipts. Dill also
has high hopes for the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of
2003, a bill introduced in Congress by Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey
Democrat, which would require a paper trail nationally. Three Democrats in
the Senate -- Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton and Bob Graham -- have each
proposed companion legislation.
But officials who've already invested in paperless machines will have
a hard time joining the paper-trail bandwagon. In Georgia, for instance,
Cathy Cox is sticking by her decision. In a speech to the state's
political scientists in November, she assailed the critics who've lately
attacked touch-screen voting systems, saying they "approach the issue of
election technology as if on a mission to save humanity from the scourge
of a worldwide conspiracy." But Cox, it should be noted, is massively
invested in the reliability of the Diebold systems she purchased, having
staked her political career -- and the millions it cost to purchase them
-- on the new system.
The people who insist that Georgia's 2002 election was stolen may well
be wrong. But the attention that they are focusing on voting machines is
anything but misplaced. An election has to be above suspicion, even above
the suspicion of some of the most suspicious people in a democracy. Says
California's Tony Miller: "If people don't have confidence in the voting
systems being used, then they lose faith in the voting process itself."
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