Hack the Vote

It’s not hard to get away with rigging an electronic voting machine. No matter how thoroughly the machine is tested, you could always hack it to, say, give every tenth vote for Candidate A to Candidate B, but only if it’s November 4. Anyone testing the machine on November 3 or 5 would find everything functioning properly.

Electronic rigging is irrelevant if people can verify questionable results by hand-counting the ballots. The problem is, a lot of new touch-screen technology doesn’t create anything hand-countable. You touch the screen, the machine asks you, “Are you sure you want to vote for X?” and at the end of the day, it announces a winner. The correlation between the voters’ intentions and the recorded results is purely a matter of faith.

Although touch-screen voting machines are becoming more common in elections nationwide, there are no federal laws requiring that a paper ballot be kept and stored. “We have much more control over cement trucks in this country than over voting machines,” says Rebecca Mercuri, who wrote her doctoral thesis on electronic voting technology. She spends much time testifying before various government bodies and officials, and they largely ignore her.

Our fair state has not. Minnesota statutes require that paper ballots be kept after every election. Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer personally contacted Mercuri to discuss security issues, and told voting-machine companies that Minnesota will only consider machines that meet certain requirements, including voter-verifiable paper ballots.

Minnesota is looking at new technology in order to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act. Unfortunately, our statutes only detail the certification process for optical scanners, which read and tabulate results from paper voting cards. We will have to come up with new statutes to certify touch-screen technology—and some voting-machine companies will certainly try to persuade us that the paper ballot is obsolete.

During last year’s election, three companies provided machines for free demonstrations in St. Cloud, Minneapolis, and Elk River. After casting their real ballots, voters could try out the new machines, choosing between candidates such as Abraham Lincoln and Mickey Mouse. This November, Minnesota voters will be testing machines provided by Diebold, ES&S, and Avante.

Avante machines have always printed out a paper ballot (“only because I yelled at them,” insists Mercuri, who lives down the street from the company’s headquarters). Both Diebold and ES&S, however, are fighting hard against voter-verifiable paper trails, and there may be some doubt as to whether either of them will fulfill the requirements laid out by the Minnesota Secretary of State. Becky Vollmer, a spokesperson for ES&S, told The Rake that their machine prints out a paper audit when the election is over and stores ballot images in the computer’s memory. But voters have no way to verify that the image stored actually matches their vote.

Diebold brags on their website that their technology has managed to “eliminate the need for paper ballots” — this despite a recent study by Johns Hopkins saying Diebold’s machines are rife with security flaws. And more than a few eyebrows went up when Diebold’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, wrote in a fundraising letter for the GOP that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

ES&S has had its own share of scandals, especially when it was learned that Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel was a former chairman of the company that became ES&S. Eighty percent of the election results in Nebraska last year were calculated on ES&S machines, and Hagel won by a landslide. According to the electronic vote, he was the clear choice of every demographic group in the state and won in communities that decided to vote Republican for the first time in history.

No one yet knows what Minnesota will use in future elections. With any luck, we’ll keep our paper ballots and use frequent hand recounts to keep our computers in line. It is discouraging, though, that no one seems to know who is responsible for testing the accuracy and security of the machines. They are certified at the state level, but who monitors last-minute patches and upgrades and vulnerabilities? Well, according to Kent Kaiser at the Secretary of State’s Office, “County by county, they test the machines before elections.” But Ramona Doebler, auditor treasurer for Sherburne County, has other ideas. “Security? That’s all handled through the Secretary of State.”—Katherine Glover


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