In 1988 Ronnie Dugger wrote the definitive
article [to that point in time] on computerized vote fixing. Much of what we saw in
Florida in 2000 was covered in his article, almost as though
someone used it as a guide. It's never before been on the web
since it predates the internet. But here it is,
digitized.
Post a link to it from your site. Save it
to your hard drive. Put it on your own site. Email it
to everyone you know.
Alllie
(alllie@newsgarden.org)
ANNALS OF DEMOCRACY
COUNTING VOTES
By Ronnie Dugger
(Txt Version)
The New Yorker, November 7, 1988
DURING the past quarter of a century, with
hardly anyone noticing, the inner workings of democracy have
been computerized. All our elections, from mayor to President,
are counted locally, in about ten thousand five hundred
political jurisdictions, and gradually, since 1964, different
kinds of computer-based voting systems have been installed in
town after town, city after city, county after county. This
year, fifty-five per cent of all votes-seventy-five per cent
in the largest jurisdictions-will be counted electronically.
If ninety-five million Americans vote on Tuesday, November
8th, the decisions expressed by about fifty-two million of
them will be tabulated according to rules that programmers and
operators unknown to the public have fed into computers.
In many respects, this electronic conversion
has seemed natural, even inevitable. Both of the old ways --
hand-counting paper ballots and relying on interlocked rotary
counters to tabulate votes that are cast by pulling down
levers on mechanical machines -- have been shown to be
susceptible to error and fraud. On Election Night, computers
can usually produce the final results faster than any other
method of tabulation, and so enable local officials to please
reporters on deadlines and to avoid the suspicions of fraud
which long delays in counting can stimulate.
Recently, however, computerized vote-counting
has engendered controversy. Do the quick-as-a-wink,
computerized systems count accurately? Are they vulnerable to
fraud, as well, even fraud of a much more dangerous,
centralized kind? Is the most widely used computerized system,
the Votomatic, which relies on computer punch-card ballots,
disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters?
It appears that since 1980 errors and
accidents have proliferated in computer-counted elections.
Since 1984, the State of Illinois has tested local
computerized systems by running many thousands of
machine-punched mock ballots through them, rather than the few
tens of test ballots that local election officials customarily
use. As of the most recent tests this
year, errors in the basic counting instructions in the
computer programs had been found in almost a fifth of the
examinations. These
"tabulation-program errors" probably would not have been
caught in the local jurisdictions. "I don't understand why nobody cares," Michael
L. Harty, who was until recently the director of voting
systems and standards for Illinois, told me last December in
Springfield. "At one point, we had
tabulation errors in twenty-eight per cent of the systems
tested, and nobody cared."
Robert J. Naegele, who is the State of
California's chief expert on certifying voting systems and is
also the president of his own computer consulting firm, has
been hired by the Federal Election Commission (F.E.C.) to
write new voluntary national standards for computerized
vote-counting equipment and programs. Last spring, in San
Francisco, at a national conference of local-election
officials, I asked Naegele whether computerized voting as it
is now practiced in the United States is secure against
fraud.
He pointed a thumb at the floor. "When we first started looking at this issue,
back in the middle seventies, we found there were a lot of
these systems that were vulnerable to fraud and out-and-out
error," he said.
I asked him whether he regarded as adequate
the typical fifty-five-ballot "logic-and-accuracy public test"
that is conducted locally on the Votomatic computerized
punch-card vote-counting system-which about four in ten voters
will use on November 8th-and he said, "No."
Would such a test
discover, for example, a "time bomb" set to start transferring
a certain proportion of votes from one candidate to another at
a certain time, or any other programmers' tricks?
"Of course not," Naegele
said. "It's not a test of the system. It's not
security!"
The old mechanical machines prevent citizens
from "overvoting"-voting for more candidates in a race than
they are entitled to vote for-but the Votomatic systems do
not. Not only can people using these systems overvote but
election workers, if they are dishonest, can punch extra holes
in ballots to invalidate votes that have been correctly cast
or to cast votes themselves in races the voter has skipped. In
the 1984 general election, about a hundred and thirty-seven
thousand out of a total of 4.7 million voters in Ohio did not
cast valid ballots for President-mostly, according to Ohio's
secretary of state, because of overvoting. The computerized
punch-card voting system is "a barrier to exercise of the
franchise," and causes "technological disenfranchisement,"
Neil Heighberger, the dean of the College of Social Sciences
at Xavier University, in Cincinnati, concluded in a recent
study he made of the subject.
A federal judge, William L. Hungate, ruling
last December on a lawsuit in St. Louis, declared that the
computerized punch-card voting system as it has been used in
that city denies blacks an equal opportunity with whites to
participate in the political process. The suit was filed by
Michael V. Roberts, a black candidate for president of the
Board of Aldermen who in March of last year had lost to a
white by a fourth of one per cent in a city election in which
voting positions on ballots in the black wards were more than
three times as likely not to be counted as those in white
wards. Roberts, who was joined in the suit by the St. Louis
branch of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, contended that computerized voting is such a
relatively complex process that it is tantamount to a literacy
test, and literacy tests have been prohibited by federal law
as an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. Judge Hungate found that
in four local elections since 1981 voting positions had not
been counted by the computerized system on anywhere from four
to eight of every hundred ballots in black wards, compared
with about two of every hundred in white wards
(and also found that in the March, 1987,
election the computerized returns from six per cent of the
precincts had "irreconcilable discrepancies"). The evidence
indicated that the computer had passed over the uncounted
positions because of either overvoting or undervoting, which
is failing to cast a vote in a race. The Judge ordered
officials to count by hand all ballots that contained
overvotes or undervotes and to intensify voter education in
the black wards, but the city appealed, arguing that the
racial differential does not always hold true in the city's
elections. The Missouri secretary of state, Roy Blunt, called
the order to recount the ballots by hand unfair and said that
it could "make punch-card voting unworkable."
In Pueblo, Colorado, in 1980, suspicions
about the vote-counting on punch-card equipment led to an
investigation by a computer expert, but nothing was
proved. In Pennsylvania, in 1980, two of three examiners
recommended that the Votomatic punch-card system marketed by
Computer Election Services (C.E.S.), of Berkeley, California,
be rejected, on the ground that it was fraud-prone, but the
secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania approved it
anyway. In Tacoma,
Washington, in 1982 and 1987, in the only known local
referendums on computerized voting, citizens' crusades, led by
a conservative Republican, Eleanora Ballasiotes, that focused
on the vulnerabilities of computers to fraud resulted each
time in the voters' three-to-one rejection of the systems that
their local officials were about to buy. A group of
defeated Democratic candidates in Elkhart, Indiana, sued local
election officials in 1983, alleging that
computer-based irregularities had occurred in a 1982 election;
they have since lost three lawsuits, and a fourth one
continues. In Dallas, Terry Elkins, the campaign manager for
Max Goldblatt, who in 1985 ran for mayor, came to believe, on
the basis of a months long study of the surviving records and
materials of the election, that Goldblatt had been kept out of
a runoff by manipulation of the computerized voting system.
The attorney general of Texas, Jim Mattox, was impressed by
the charges and conducted an official investigation of
them. Dallas authorities have declared that since there is no
evidence of criminal behavior the case is closed, but Mattox
has refused to close it. "I do not think that there were
adequate explanations for the anomalies," he told me, in
Austin.
COMPUTER programmers working for the private
companies that sell election equipment write their programs in
higher computer languages or the intermediate assembly
language, and these are translated or compiled into the binary
language of ones and zeros which computers understand. The original programs, which are centrally
produced, are commonly called "source codes;" only a few local governments own and
control the source codes that are used in their
jurisdictions. According to Jack Gerbel, a founder of
C.E.S., who has sold more computerized vote-counting equipment
than any other individual in the country, about half the time
the companies' programmers also write the codes that
"localize" (or "initialize") vote-counting systems for the
specific elections of each jurisdiction. The source and local codes together tell the
computers how to count the votes. Local public tests may or
may not adequately test the local codes, but, as Naegele said,
they do not test the source codes.
The election-equipment
companies, which thus both sell and program the computers that
tabulate public elections, have long contended, in and out of
court, that they own the source codes and must keep them
secret from everyone, including the local officials who
conduct elections.
n 1985, Jack Kemp (no relation of the
congressman), the president of C.E.S., which was then the
leading election-equipment company in the country, warned in
so many words that an outsider who got the company's source
code could compromise elections with it. Through an affidavit
that Kemp furnished for a lawsuit in Charleston, West
Virginia, the company affirmed that the security of the
vote-counting in C.E.S.equipped jurisdictions depended in
large measure on its retention of the secrets of the code, and
that there would be "a grave risk" to this security if the
defeated candidates were permitted to see the code. "The
significance of the company's proprietary interest in its
software is incalculable from our perspective," Kemp
asserted.
That significance is incalculable from the
voter's perspective, too. Insofar as source codes have not
been opened to examination on behalf of the public-and most
have not-instructions to computers on how to count votes
appear to have become a trade secret. Only a few states have
demanded copies of the source codes, and only in the last year
or two have any states examined them. Thus most of the local
officials who preside over computerized elections do not
actually know how their systems are counting the votes, and
when they officially certify that the election results are
correct they do not and cannot really know them to be
so.
After systems that use computer punch cards as ballots have
counted the votes, manual recounts of the holes in the punch
cards can be demanded, provided the cards have not yet been
destroyed by local officials-as is permitted by most local
laws after a specified period of time. But in a new computerized system,
"direct-recording electronic" (D.R.E.), which is becoming more
widespread, there are no individual ballots, and, the way
these new machines are now being used in many jurisdictions,
recounts are impossible, for the program destroys the
electronic record of each voter's choices the instant after it
counts them.
The dominant company now in the sale and
programming of computerized vote-counting systems for public
elections, Cronus Industries, of Dallas, is better known as
its sole and wholly owned subsidiary, the Business Records
Corporation (B.R.C.). Cronus/ B.R.C. has accused the R. F.
Shoup Company, of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania-one of its rivals
for a fortymillion-dollar voting-equipment order from New York
City-of infringing B.R.C. patents in the very D.R.E.
vote-counting machine, the Shouptronic, that Shoup is trying
to sell to New York. In a lawsuit filed last November in
Philadelphia, Cronus, on whose equipment between thirty and
forty-five million votes will be counted this year, has also
sought to discredit Shoup, on the basis of a 1979 conviction of Ransom
Shoup II, the president of the company, of two federal
felonies-conspiracy and obstruction of justice-in connection
with an F.B.I. investigation of an election in Philadelphia
that had been counted on mechanical-lever
machines.For these offenses, Ransom Shoup was fined
ten thousand dollars and given a three-year suspended
sentence. Counterattacking, the Shoup firm, whose equipment
will tabulate an estimated million and a half votes on
November 8th, has accused Cronus of reaching for "a virtual
monopoly on the entire business of supplying voting equipment
for use in political elections in the United States" and
has alleged that the Cronus
vote-counting systems that are in use "inherently facilitate
the opportunity for various ... forms of fraud" and "create
new and unique opportunities for fraudulent and extremely
difficult-to-detect manipulation and alterations with respect
to election results."
In 1985 and 1986, Cronus bought Computer
Election Systems and also eight smaller election-equipment and
election-printing firms, while selling off three other
subsidiaries, thereby transforming itself, in eighteen months,
from a small conglomerate of disparate industrial businesses
into the titan of the computerized-vote-counting business.
Cronus is now responsible for most C.E.S.
systems that are still in service and for a computer-based
"mark-sense" voting system that B.R.C. has sold in the past
few years. B.R.C. also sells computerized voter-registration
systems; election supplies, including, this year, perhaps a
hundred and sixty million punch-card ballots; election
assistance and service; and other computerized information
services for local governments. C.E.S. used to take pride in
publicizing the millions of votes cast on its machines (a
total of three hundred and fifty million between 1964 and
1984), and after Cronus bought C.E.S.,
in 1985, C. A. Rundell, Jr., then the chairman and chief
executive officer of Cronus, told a reporter that his company
had about forty per cent of the election-service
market.But when I asked Rundell earlier this year
how many votes Cronus systems will count in 1988 and in which
jurisdictions, he refused to say. "We certainly are not going
to provide you with a list of customers and the kinds of
systems they have," he declared. "We've got to ask how much
competitive intelligence we divulge to our competition." He
did volunteer that the total for votes counted by Cronus
systems was below thirty-five million. Officials at R. F.
Shoup, however, seeking to prove that Cronus is a monopoly,
charge that Cronus systems will count fifty or sixty million
votes on November 8th. In any case, Cronus and C.E.S. systems
are used by the voters in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago,
Detroit, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Seattle, Minneapolis,
Cincinnati, and Cleveland.
On Election Day, about one in every three
American voters still pulls down the lever on an old
thousand-pound mechanical-lever machine, and about one in
every nine still marks the old-fashioned paper ballot that is
counted by hand. In the past two years, however, more than
eighty United States counties have abandoned lever machines,
and more than ninety have abandoned paper ballots, the
replacements being in most cases either D.R.E. or mark-sense
systems. In mark-sense systems, which are also called
"optical-scan," computers employing light or electrical
conductivity count votes that have been cast on ballots with
pencils or markers. Mark-sense is now used by about eight per
cent of the voters; a multi-punch-card, count-the-holes
computer system called Datavote, which is sold by Sequoia
Pacific Systems Corporation, of Exeter, California, is used by
about four per cent; and electronic D.R.E. systems, the newest
computerized voting technology, are used by about three per
cent. "The election business is shifting into the mark-sense
and the electronic [D.R.E.] stuff," according to Richard J.
Stephens, the president of a small election company in
Escondido, California, who has been in the field since 1966.
"The punch-card systems will remain out there, but B.R.C. is
not trying to sell punch-card anymore-it's selling mark-sense
now."
THE private business of counting votes in
public elections can be realistically understood only as a
small, if extremely important, segment of the computer
industry itself, and thus a business that has both the
strengths and the weaknesses of the over-all industry. The
computer industry's strengths-astoundingly vast and rapid
computational power, the automation of trillions of
transactions have been well known for some time, but the
weaknesses have come to be understood only lately. In recent
years, the vulnerability of computers to tampering and fraud
has become a commonplace in many industries. Computer operators do
not leave fingerprints inside a computer, the events that
occur inside it cannot be seen, and its records, and printouts
can be fixed to give no hint of whichever of its operations an
operator wants to keep secret. The practical problem of the
computer age is invisibility. Hackers-adventurous
programmers-penetrate corporate and governmental computers for
fun and jimmy the programs in them for gain. "Electronic cat
burglars" have stolen billions of dollars from banks and other
businesses-a billion a year by a recent estimate of the
American Bar Association. By means of computer fraud employees
have raised their salaries and students have raised their
grades. Caltech students printed out more than a million entry
blanks for a McDonald's contest and won a Datsun station
wagon. Employees of a federal agency diverted tens of
thousands of dollars to nonexistent employees. In the infamous
1973 Equity Funding Corporation fraud, company officials and
other employees typed into their computers names of about
sixty-four thousand people who didn't exist as holders of more
than two billion dollars' worth of life-insurance policies
that didn't exist but were "resold" to reinsurers. "Electronic
dead souls," the writer Thomas Whiteside has called these
fabricated customers.
Whether or not elections have ever been
stolen by computer before, some citizens and some officials
are asking if it could happen in the future. Could a local or state office or a seat in the
United States House of Representatives be stolen by computer?
Might the outcome of a close race for a United States Senate
seat be determined by computer fraud in large local
jurisdictions?Since, under the state-by-state, winner-take-all rules
of the electoral college, a close Presidential election can be
decided by relatively few votes in two or three big states,
could electronic illusionists steal the Presidency by fixing
the vote-counting computers in just four or five major
metropolitan areas?Could people breaking
into or properly positioned within a computerized-vote
counting company, acting for political reasons or personal
gain, steal House or Senate seats, or even the White House
itself?
Randall H. Erben, the assistant secretary of state in
Texas, who served as special counsel on ballot integrity to
President Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1984 and, in 1986,
headed a similar group for Governor Bill Clements, of Texas,
told me in Austin, "I have no question
that somebody who's smart enough with a computer could
probably rig it to mistabulate. Whether that has happened yet
I don't know. It's going to be virtually undetectable if it's
done correctly, and that's what concerns me about it."
Willis Ware, a Rand Corportion
computer specialist, warned those attending a 1987 conference
on the security of computer-tabulated elections, "There is
probably a Chernobyl or a Three Mile Island waiting to happen
in some election, just as a Richter 8 earthquake is waiting to
happen in California." The chief
counsel of the Republican National Committee, Mark Braden,
told me that he has yet to see a proved case of computer-based
election fraud, but added, "People who work for us who know
about computers claim that you could do it."
Some
officials concerned with elections think about the unthinkable
in their field; namely, the stealing of a Presidential
election by computer fraud in the vote-counting in
metropolitan areas of key states. Steve White, the chief
assistant attorney general of California, said to me last
spring in Sacramento, "It could be done relatively easily by
somebody who didn't necessarily have to be all that
sophisticated. Given the importance of the national election,
sooner or later it will be attempted. There is a real
reluctance to concede the gravity of the
problem."
Jim Mattox, the Texas attorney general, while
discussing Cronus/B.R.C./ C.E.S., exclaimed to me in dismay a
year ago, One thing is clear:
one company in the United States should not have as big an
impact on elections as this company has got. Nobody should
have in a democracy. The right to vote is too
sacred."
COMPUTERS can be
ordered to transfer votes from one candidate to another, to
add votes to a candidate's total, to determine an outcome in
accordance with a specified percentage spread. All the
computer experts I have spoken with agreed that no computer
program can be made completely secure against
fraud.Where they differed was in their
characterizations of this fact. Local election officials and
election equipment-company specialists, executives, and
salesmen usually took the position that state certification
procedures and local logic-and-accuracy tests provide enough
security for reasonable assurance that elections are honestly
counted. The independent computer specialists I interviewed
were divided, generally speaking, into two camps. One, led by
Roy Saltman, of the National Bureau of Standards, Robert
Naegele, and Lance Hoffman, of George Washington University,
sees local-election theft by computer as possible, but
stresses the fact that no case of program tampering has been
proved. This camp attributes the manifold problems of
computerized vote-counting entirely or almost entirely to
inadequacies in the administration of elections and
insufficient testing of the equipment, and regards the theft
of the Presidency by computer as, in effect, impossible. The other, led by the Pennsylvania
voting-systems examiner Michael Shamos and the computer
specialists Howard Jay Strauss, of Princeton, and Peter G.
Neumann, of S.R.I. International, a nonprofit research
institution in Menlo Park, California, emphasizes the ease of
concealing theft by computer "without a trace;" characterizes
local elections as very vulnerable to fraud; and regards
the theft of the
Presidency by computer as entirely possible.
Should citizens delegate the job of
vote-counting to technicians? Most people
do not know enough about computers to be able to tell what is
happening during computerized vote-counting, even if they are
looking straight at the card readers and computers. In
Dallas last year, during a conference of citizens concerned
about this issue, David T. Stutsman, an Indiana attorney with
experience in contested-election cases, said, "In traditional elections, the people in your
neighborhood, your neighbors, had the responsibility and the
legal duty to supervise an election. They counted the votes.
The precinct officials don't count the votes anymore. The
power-that is, political power-has gone to the venders, to the
venders' representatives, and to the people that operate those
machines." He also said, "You're putting more power in the
hands of fewer people."
Demands for much stricter security in
computerized elections appear to be gaining adherents in many
quarters. Sometime after the November election, results the
National Clearinghouse on Election Administration, a grandly
named four-person office in the F.E.C., will publish
voluntary, but potentially influential, national standards for
the security and accuracy of computerized elections. In a
late-summer draft, the Clearinghouse proposed that the
election-equipment companies place their source codes in
escrow, the idea probably being that in the event of seriously
disputed election results the codes could be obtained and
examined by representative's of the public.
THE evolution from counting paper ballots one
at a time to counting as many as a thousand punch-card ballots
a minute occupied about seventy years-a period that can be
seen as having opened in 1892, when lever voting machines
first appeared. Four years later, Joseph P. Harris, the
inventor of the Votomatic system, was born, on a farm in North
Carolina. In the First World War, Harris was a flying
instructor, and afterward he helped pay for his doctorate in
political science at the University of Chicago by flying the
mail between Chicago and Cleveland in open-cockpit planes. A
favored student of Charles Merriam, who was seeking to develop
a scientific basis for understanding politics, Harris became a
teacher and a scholar who over four decades wrote many books
on politics and elections. He refined and championed the
process of permanent voter registration, and it was largely
through his efforts that permanent registration replaced the
earlier system of recurring reregistration. In the
nine-teen-thirties, drawn to Washington by the New Deal, he
served on committees advising President Roosevelt on
economic-security and administrative management issues.
Early in his career, Harris saw for himself that the
politicians in big cities stole votes easily. Touring voting
places during a Chicago election in the nineteen-twenties, he
spotted a shotgun at one precinct and also noted "a good deal
of corruption that you could see." In a 1934 book,
"Election Administration," he recounted the details of proved
ballot-stuffing, repeat votes cast by paid drunks (sometimes
fifteen or twenty times), and shameless miscounting in
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, and he quoted Boss
Tweed's testimony before the Board of Aldermen in New York
City that he had routinely instructed his Tammany Hall men to
"count the ballots in bulk, or without counting them announce
the result in bulk, or change from one to the other, as the
case may have been," and Tweed's further statements that
"the ballots made no result; the counters made the
result," and "I don't think there was ever a fair or
honest election in the City of New York." During several
summers in the nineteen-twenties, Harris supervised the
installation of lever voting machines made by the Automatic
Voting Machine Company, of Jamestown, New York (he gave up the
job with A.V.M. because he felt that it tainted him somehow).
He was struck by the machines' complexity, weight, and cost,
but he also realized that the lever machines represented a big
step forward in a long process. People had voted with kernels
of corn or black and white beans in Massachusetts in the
sixteen-forties, viva voce or by a show of hands in
pre-Revolutionary times, and on paper ballots that they wrote
out for themselves or had written out for them, then on
printed ones, then on the secret and official printed
"Australian" ballots that were adopted generally in the second
half of the nineteenth century. When a voter using the
mechanical machine presses down a lever beside a printed
choice, the return of the lever to its original position
causes a tenth of a turn on a tens counter, which is connected
to a hundreds counter. A.V.M. was the first large firm in the
field. Samuel R. Shoup, the grandfather of the president of
the present R. F. Shoup Company, organized the principal rival
to A.V.M., the Shoup Voting Machine Corporation (S.V.M.), in
1905.
By 1928, a lever machine was used by about one of
every six American voters. In the early thirties, while he was
a professor of political science at the University of
Washington, Harris began to have constructed in the
university's engineering shops a gizmo that he thought of as
the application of the principle of the player piano to the
mechanical voting machine. ("The computer was beyond my
dreams," he said later.) One voted on Harris's device by
depressing keys that made perforations in a paper roll, and in
due course the machine would automatically count the
perforations and print the results. A Seattle businessman went
halves on it with Harris, and in 1934, after much
difficulty, the moonlighting professor won a patent, but by
then he understood that financially the project was far beyond
him and his friends. He invited "the I.B.M.," as he called the
International Business Machines Corporation, to develop and
market his device, but, in 1937, the company turned him
down. On the eve of the Second World War, he was still
tinkering with the machine-considering entering votes on the
paper roll as lead marks that could be read electrically, or
even, as he wrote to I.B.M.'s director for market research in
1939, "on a punch card."
For Harris, as for nearly everyone, the war
intervened, and he taught management and administration at a
school for military officers. One day in the early
nineteen-sixties, though, when he was teaching at the
University of California at Berkeley, a former student asked
him if he had ever thought of using a standard I.B.M. computer
punch card for vote-recording. "I hadn't, but I did," Harris
wrote later; he had forgotten his own idea of 1939.
Soon after he had been asked about the I.B.M. card, the
election chief of Alameda County, California, complained to
him that the lever voting machines could barely handle the
current ballots, which kept growing longer. "Joe," he said,
"what we need is some kind of a simple mechanical device that
can be related some way to a computer." In that context, the
election official talked about the I.B.M. Port-a-Punch, a
hand-held device for punching out the rectangles on the I.B.M.
card. "I started to think," Harris said later. After a
cataract operation in 1962, as he lay bedridden for two weeks
with pads taped over his eyes, he had a eureka experience: he
suddenly visualized "a computer card in an inexpensive holder
with a permanent election `book' pre-marked with candidates
and issues."
The founding president of C.E.S., Robert P.
Varni, told me what happened next. We were in his apartment in
San Francisco, a twenty-third-floor Nob Hill penthouse looking
out across the great sweep of the bay, the islands, and the
bridges. "I was working for I.B.M.," he said. "One of my
accounts was U.C. Berkeley. I got a call from Joe Harris. He
asked about the I.B.M. Port-a-Punch. `I have an idea, and I'd
like to borrow it for a while,' he said. He didn't want to buy
it. It was an eight-dollar item. He wanted to borrow it, along
with about a dollar and a half's worth of punch cards."
Assisted by William S. Rouverol, a retired
professor, who was an engineer, Harris cobbled together his
ingenious new device for computerized vote counting. "After a
while," Varni went on, "he called and said, `I've done
something interesting with that Port-a-Punch you lent me.' I
went to his office and he showed me the first prototype of the
Votomatic." Harris said later that he had derived the name of
his invention from the Shine-O-Matic, a shoeshine machine he
had read about in the Sunday paper.
Varni is now the trim, prosperous chairman of
a firm that computerizes police and fire departments. As he
recalled those early days, he often broke into a warm smile.
Harris didn't know anything about computers and needed someone
who did, so, in 1963, Varni sent him to Kenneth Hazlett, an
athletic young man who was the foreman of the university's
computer room. Hazlett had had only two years of higher
education, at Oakland City College, but he had been introduced
to tabulating machines during a two-year spell in the Navy,
and after taking an I.B.M. course in programming he had begun
teaching the skill to some of his staff at Berkeley.
"Joe Harris walked into my office with a
handful of these Port-a-Punch cards and wanted to know if
they'd go through a computer," Hazlett recalled. "I walked him
outside my office to a small I.B.M. computer, and from the
console I keyed in about a three instruction loop that would
simply flush these cards through the card reader. And they
went sailing through. Joe Harris just lit up!" Harris realized
that he could use the cards themselves as ballots. He showed
Hazlett a mockup of the prototype, and, Hazlett said, "I
agreed to do him a real program." To produce and sell his
invention, Harris then formed Harris Votomatic, Inc., with a
quarter of a million dollars he raised from about two dozen of
his colleagues at the university, including Hazlett, and from
Varni. Having retired from teaching, he then began driving
around the West trying to sell his invention.
Devising the early programs for what became
the C.E.S. systems, Hazlett gave next to no attention to
security against the kinds of fraud that could be concealed in
the computerized system itself. "There are two problems," he
told me last spring in his sunlit apartment in Corvallis,
Oregon. "One is getting the system to work the way you want it
to, and the other problem is avoiding fraud. We concentrated
mainly on the first. Then, beyond that, we worked with county
and state governments, cooperated in developing procedures for
logic-and-accuracy-testing programs -which is running ballot
cards having known votes through and verifying the totals that
are produced, and even the counting by hand or machine of
selected precincts post-election to look for fraud or error.
And that's about all we can do."
Does Hazlett have confidence now in the security of
computerized elections against fraud?
"Not a hundred per cent," he said. However,
he added, he knew of no elections that had been stolen by
computer.
Is a logic-and-accuracy test actually a
test of a system's accuracy?
"Obviously it isn't as far as you could go in testing the
program," Hazlett said. "It's a very simple test. If a programmer had the necessary programming
tools, he or she could get around that kind of test-of course.
Knowing that the deck is fifty-five cards, you could trigger
some function to come into service after fifty-five cards. Use
your imagination-there are any number of things you could do.
It's not an easy problem."
According to Donald G.
Baumer, an engineer who worked with Hazlett, both of them
realized that the Votomatic counting system could be
manipulated-for instance, through the toggle switches that
were on the front of a Data General Nova computer -but it was
assumed that nobody would do this, because anybody who tried
it could be seen. In the workshop at his small
election-equipment company, near San Francisco, Baumer
explained, "The concept was to devise a program that no one
could ever get to - you would have to be a knowledgeable
person, you would have to have the source code, and you would
be very visible, standing in front of a computer throwing
switches."
As Harris got older, he realized that he
could not wheel around the country selling Votomatics forever.
Managers who were looking for new products had taken over
Varni's unit at I.B.M., and in 1965-Varni having disclosed his
investment-I.B.M. bought the assets and patents of the Harris
Votomatic and became for four years the nation's principal
computerized-election-equipment company. Harris served I.B.M.
as a paid consultant throughout the period.
"Glitches"-the term that company people seem
to prefer for errors and accidents in computer elections-began
to emerge in those earliest years. For example, in May, 1968,
in Klamath County, Oregon, candidates' positions on the
ballots were rotated in the precincts to avoid giving any
candidate the unfair advantage of the top position everywhere,
but the ballots got mixed up, and voters in more than a fourth
of the precincts punched out rectangles for candidates they
did not mean to vote for. Harris said later that as the new
system became controversial, I.B.M. responded in some
communities "by instructing its staff to describe the machine
as the Harris Votomatic," not I.B.M.'s.
In Los Angeles County in the June, 1968,
Presidential primary, deputy sheriffs were to carry voted
punch cards from the precincts to two regional counting
centers-one on Third Street, and the other at the I.B.M.
Service Bureau Corporation, on Wilshire Boulevard, next door
to the Ambassador Hotel. However, after Senator Robert F.
Kennedy was shot that night at the Ambassador, police cordoned
off a four-block area around the scene, and the tapes
containing the totals from the Third Street center could not
be brought into the I.B.M. building. The counting was not
completed until nine o'clock the next morning. Reporters were
irritated by the delay, and officials at I.B.M. began to
wonder seriously about the risks of the election business,
which, comparatively speaking, was providing only a small
profit.
That November, in Missoula County, Montana,
in the national contest between Hubert Humphrey and Richard
Nixon, another difficulty arose. Joseph H. Chowning, who was
an I.B.M. salesman then, told me not long ago, "Through a
programming error in a few precincts, ballots cast for Nixon
were counted for Humphrey or vice versa." In traditional
Republican strongholds, Nixon was defeated, while Democratic
redoubts went for him. In a precinct where both paper and
punchcard ballots were used, Nixon swept the paper ballots,
but the computer voted for Humphrey by a landslide. The error
was caught immediately, Chowning said, but he and an I.B.M.
publicrelations man had to fly to Missoula to dispel the
unease.
One other event, a singular one, came to
Chowning's attention about this time. "Just before or after
the 1968 election, there was an article or editorial in a
small suburban Chicago newspaper that came out and said that
the reason I.B.M. was in the business was to make Thomas
Watson President of the United States," he recalled, referring
to the chairman of I.B.M. "I'm guessing, but I'm sure it went
right straight to Mr. Watson's desk." Ken Hazlett, too, has a
vague memory of this. "I wondered at the time if T. J. Watson
was interested in running for President," he told me.
Chowning went on, "Here I.B.M. had a product
that guaranteed two or three per cent of its gross income and
eighty to ninety per cent of its publicity, not all of it
favorable." I.B.M. got out of the vote-counting business. By
1969, it had licensed five voting equipment companies to sell
the Votomatic: two in Illinois, one in New York, one in Tulsa,
and C.E.S., which was founded by Varni and three other I.B.M.
men-Chowning, Jack Gerbel, and Ken Hazlett (whom I.B.M. had
hired to write programs for the Votomatic)-and which therefore
had the great advantage of its executives' association with
I.B.M.'s reputation.
Varni and his team at C.E.S. had a good run.
By 1976, nearly seventeen million voters-more than a fifth of
all those voting for President that year-entrusted their
election decisions to C.E.S. counting systems.
The C.E.S. Votomatic punch-card system "has
probably had more effect on the country than almost any other
product," Varni said to me. Although today it is generally
regarded as an outmoded technology, it is by far the most
widely used method of counting votes by computer. The
Votomatic is based on the assignment of a tiny, numbered
pre-perforated rectangle on a standard eighty-column,
twelve-row I.B.M. punch card to each candidate and the
assignment of other rectangles to the "yes" and "no" positions
on each question to be voted on. This punch card, covered with
numbers but displaying no names of candidates and none of the
propositions to be voted on, is the ballot. The vote
recorder, which is the Votomatic, is a spined booklet listing
the choices of the day in writing and mounted over a plastic
mask that is designed to prevent voters from punching out any
holes but the ones they are supposed to be able to punch. The
voter slides the punch card underneath the booklet and then
fits two holes near the top of the card onto two posts that
are intended to keep the card properly aligned under the
booklet. Alongside the choices printed on each page, arrows
point to holes that match numbered rectangles on the
underlying card. The voter turns the pages and, using a simple
stylus attached to the device by a chain, punches out the
rectangles that, as holes in the punch card, express his or
her choices.
After the polls close, stacks of the voted
punch cards are fed into card readers, in each precinct or in
one central counting place, depending on the preference of the
officials of the jurisdiction. A blower in each reader creates
an air-stream and fluffs up some of the cards at the bottom of
the stack; a pump creates a vacuum; and a spinning cylinder
attached to the pump seizes a ballot and flings it past a
light whose beam flicks through each punched-out hole, the
cards whizzing through the reader at a rate of up to a
thousand a minute. If the spinning cylinder doesn't grab two
ballots at a time, if the minute punched-out rectangles of
cardboard have separated properly from the cards, and if the
computer underneath and connected to the card reader has been
programmed correctly, the computer then quickly and accurately
tabulates the votes; that is, it counts according to its
location each pinpoint of light that twinkles through a card
for a millisecond.
The punched-out scraps, which have come to be
called "chad," are supposed to be forced between two vertical
rubber strips underneath the ballot and into a chad box.
Sometimes, however, a chad does not break completely free from
the card and becomes a "hanging chad," and sometimes
voting-hole rectangles are merely indented by the voter's
stylus. "Hanging chad has been with us since the invention of
the Votomatic," Hazlett told me. C. A. Rundell, of Cronus,
informed me during an interview in his office in Dallas last
fall that because of the chad problem, and also because of
wear and tear on the ballots, vote totals may not change the
first time ballots are run through the card reader, and
probably won't the second time, but the third or fourth time
they may change, "and then you've lost your audit trail." The
inexact science of divining what the voter intended in the
case of a mere indentation or whether the card reader counted
a hole that was partly or wholly blocked by a hanging chad has
been called "chadology."
Presumably, most of the elections counted by
the C.E.S. systems went smoothly ("People don't want to read
about a good election," Jack Gerbel told me in September), but
the company did have problems. In the 1970 primary in Los
Angeles, voters in some precincts voted for the wrong
candidates because of incorrect rotations; in other precincts
ballot pages were missing. A computer program did not
record totals on a hundred of its counters. Ballot cards
jammed in the card readers and had to be duplicated by
election workers-clerks were seen poking holes in punch cards
with pencils. The central computer stopped or was stopped six
times during the counting; and it was discovered only after
the counting that more than five hundred precincts had been
overlooked.
In 1970, the election commissioners in St.
Louis, who were considering buying the Votomatic system, asked
the accounting firm Price Waterhouse to evaluate it, with
devastating results. Security controls on the Votomatic
would be "more easily subject to abuse" than those on the
mechanical machines in place, the firm said. Candidates' names could be misaligned with the
rectangles on the ballot "by manipulation of the ballot book
pages' printing or positioning, by manipulating the
positioning of the punched card used to record the vote, or by
manipulation of the program used to tabulate the
vote," the report continued. "It is possible to write a program in such a way
that no test can be made to assure that the program works the
way it is supposed to work.... It is possible to set card
readers to misread the information punched into the cards. It
is possible to have instructions in computer memory to call in
special procedures from core, tape, or disk files to create
results other than those anticipated. . . . There is no
practical way to assure accuracy of the proposed computer
tabulation short of complete duplicate processing on third
party computers with reproduced ballot card decks and third
party control programs."
Gerbel, who was taking over the C.E.S. sales
effort in major jurisdictions, responded with a long
recitation of the customary tests and safeguards, and also
emphasized the system's acceptance in fifteen states,
discounted "information supplied by competitors," and
concluded, "For six years, the personnel of C.E.S. have
answered the comments made in this report by conducting
successful Votomatic elections."
IN 1977,
C.E.S. was bought out by Hale Brothers Associates, a San
Francisco investment company controlled by Prentis Cobb Hale,
Jr.When his family acquired C.E.S., through a
"friendly cash offer," for twelve million dollars, Prentis Hale, an influential Republican who was
given to partridge-hunting with General Franco in
Spain, was best known as the Hale in Carter Hawley
Hale (C.H.H.) -the nation's seventh-ranking chain of
department stores and the largest chain in the West. The year
Hale bought the election company, C.H.H. earned fifty million
dollars on sales of a billion and a half dollars.
A couple of years later, C.E.S. survived an
investigation by the antitrust division of the justice
Department. "We became the target of a criminal grand jury,"
David L. Dunbar, the company's president at that time, told me
recently. The investigation lasted more than a year, and the
company turned over a whole file cabinet of records to the
justice Department. The investigation
was dropped very early in 1981-in January or February, Dunbar
recalled, adding, "I used to kid people we had to get Ronald
Reagan elected to get this thing killed."
As the eighties opened, C.E.S. was the unchallenged leader
in the business of computerized vote-counting equipment. In
1980, C.E.S. systems were in place where about
thirty-five million Americans were registered to vote, and
they counted about three out of ten of the votes that were
cast in the United States. Two years later, C.E.S. equipment
tallied thirty-six per cent of the votes in the country. As of
November 6, 1984, nine out of twenty votes, 44.2
per cent-were counted on C.E.S. equipment in a thousand
and nineteen jurisdictions in forty states. To put this a different way, the electronic
technology made and marketed by one small company housed in an
industrial building near San Francisco Bay counted the votes
that were cast in more than sixty-four thousand precincts
where almost forty-seven million Americans were registered to
vote.
The period 1977 through 1986,
when C.E.S. for the most part dominated the
computerized-election business, was a time of technical
mishaps and rising suspicion. A precursor of the serious
breakdowns that lay ahead had occurred in a legislative race
in Los Angeles in 1976. The outcome was reversed
twice-once by a machine recount, the second time by holding
every one of the hundred thousand ballots up to a light and
counting the holes one by one. "Hanging chad" and "bulging
chad," as the indented tabs were sometimes called, were blamed
for shifts of tens of votes in both directions.
In 1978, a candidate for comptroller
of the State of Illinois refused to believe he had lost
Madison County by a large margin, and it turned out, according
to Michael Hamblett, a member of the Chicago Board of
Elections, that the totals had "flipped-here was a computer
flip-flop."
That same year, in a statewide recount for
secretary of state of Ohio (which Mark Braden, the present
general counsel of the Republican National Committee, helped
to conduct), only sixteen votes changed out of about three
million. But overvoting on punch-card ballots was beginning to
trouble Ohioans. Anthony Celebrezze, Ohio's secretary of
state, estimating that about fifty-five thousand voters had
had their votes invalidated in this way, asked, "Are they
being partially disenfranchised by some peculiarity of the
equipment itself"
In El Paso, Texas, the winner of a
1978 school-board race, Marvin Gamza, was deprived of
his victory when the computer failed to count votes cast for
him in three precincts, because ballot layouts from an earlier
election had been used in them. Suspicions were voiced that
the mistake had been deliberately left uncorrected, and
the federal judge who heard the case, John H. Wood, was
angered when he learned, from the television news one night,
that some of the relevant ballots had been burned. He
concluded that "a willful effort" had been involved in the
error, rejected the claim of the putative winner, and
installed Gamza on the school board.But Judge Wood was
overruled on appeal, because Gamza had filed his protest too
late. "The winner lost," said Malcolm McGregor, Gamza's
lawyer, but McGregor doubted whether the mixing up of the
layouts was premeditated, because, he said, "a baboon would
not have tried to steal the election that way."
In 1980, computerized vote-counting faltered
seriously in a number of jurisdictions across the country. A
study by the city clerk of Detroit concluded that in a primary
conducted on the C.E.S. punch-card system, which the city had
just installed, votes on one out of every nine ballots cast
had been invalidated-fifteen thousand in all because people
had tried to vote in two parties' primaries.
In that same year, when a mark-sense system
sold by Martel Systems, of Costa Mesa, California, was used
for the first time in Orange County, California, a Republican
stronghold, there was a four-day delay in the count. On
Primary Night, more than fifty precinct-level memory
cartridges had broken down, and-because of programming errors,
it was explained-the computers had given about fifteen
thousand Democratic-primary votes meant for delegates for
Jimmy Carter or Edward Kennedy to delegates for Lyndon
LaRouche and Jerry Brown.
Montana law permits voters to demand paper
ballots, and in Missoula (where votes for Humphrey and Nixon
had been interchanged in 1968) as many as thirty per cent of
the voters chose to vote this old-fashioned way. Still in this
same year, 1980, card readers broke down in jurisdictions in
Michigan, Arkansas, Indiana, and Utah. In Salt Lake City, a
central card reader started "putting out jumbled numbers on
about three out of every hundred ballot choices," according to
a news report. In a township in Ohio, two tax proposals were
switched; the voters would have taxed themselves five times as
much as they wanted to if the error hadn't been discovered
after the voting. In Custer County, Nebraska, the county
clerk said that a count on a C.E.S. system concerning a
school-closing issue showed more people voting than were
registered. The computer had also refused to read some
ballots and had read only parts of others. In Bradenton, on
the Florida Gulf Coast, a seventh of the county's precincts
had to be counted twice, because "soggy, warped, and mangled
ballots" occasionally jammed the computers. Directly across
the panhandle, at Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic, new
computerized machines counted Democratic ballots well enough
but refused to accept Republican ones. "It was awfully
strange," the supervisor of elections, James Brooks, was
quoted as saying. "Those damn machines must have been built by
the Democrats."
In San Antonio, Texas, in perhaps the most
consequential breakdown in 1980, it was discovered that
the C.E.S. program that counted votes in the Presidential
election in Bexar County could not tally more than nine
thousand votes for any race, so the computers had not counted
many of the votes cast for Ronald Reagan and two other
Republican candidates. The official post-election canvass
found that sixteen-hundredths of a per cent fewer total votes
were cast than had been reported on Election Night, whereupon
the San Antonio Express noted, "As San Antonio moves
into the computer age, the slogan of the universal suffrage
movement becomes, `One man, 0.9984 vote.' " The recount
dragged on for several weeks, with local politicians pointing
fingers at each other. Mike Greenberg, a columnist for the
Express, learned that election officials had taken
unmarked ballots home overnight. "Even already marked ballots
could be tampered with," he went on to say, continuing,
"Anybody with a straightened-out paper clip could punch out a
few more holes to either spoil a ballot with the `wrong' votes
or cast `right' votes in races ignored by the legitimate
voter." In due course, Bexar County returned to lever
machines.
A candidate for the school board in Carroll County,
Maryland, in 1984, T. Edward Lippy, finished third,
with about six thousand votes. When, in obedience to state
law, the voted C.E.S.-system ballots were taken to an
adjoining county to be recounted on a different computer
system, about twelve thousand five hundred uncounted votes
were found, and it was learned that in fact about nineteen
thousand citizens had voted for Lippy. He was proclaimed
the winner. The error was explained as a slip-up by a local
data-processing official. ("It was my mistake," he said.) He
had inadvertently replaced the correct C.E.S. provided program
with a test program that would not count two votes if they
were punched in one column on the ballot, and most of the
voters who favored Lippy had also voted on a home-rule
proposition in the same column with the numbered rectangle
assigned to votes for Lippy. The wrong program had also cost
President Reagan more than two thousand votes in the first
count. A standard pre-election test had not caught the
official's mistake; in a state without the requirement to
double-check the count, it could have been missed.
In 1985, in Moline, Illinois, a
candidate for alderman served for three months before a
recount removed him from office. This mistake was laid to a
slipping timing belt that had caused the card reader to fail
to count a number of straight-party votes for the real winner.
The apparently defeated candidate, it turned out, had actually
won handily.
IN the fall of 1980, Michael Shamos, a
computer scientist, law student, and businessman who was
teaching at Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, and
running a software company, saw an announcement on a computer
bulletin board that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was
looking for examiners for computerized-voting systems. He knew
nothing about such systems, but the job sounded interesting,
so he signed up and went to Harrisburg to examine the C.E.S.
Votomatic system. "What I saw that day," he told me not long
ago, "was hairraising and mind-boggling: antique, obsolete,
unreliable technology packed with a systems approach that was
even more unreliable."
We were talking in the upstairs study of
Shamos's home in Pittsburgh. On the wall above his desk was a
large Princeton University pennant. He has degrees in physics
from Princeton and Vassar; an M.S. from American University in
the technology of management; three degrees in computer
science, including a doctorate, from Yale; and a law degree
from Duquesne. Shamos continued, with feeling, concerning the
Votomatic system, "Counting paper ballots is no picnic. I
really thought hard about this. Am I being picky? I came to
the conclusion that it's far worse than a paper ballot. After
all, what is the rush? I for the life of me couldn't figure
out why anybody would use this."
That November, Shamos presented to
Pennsylvania's Bureau of Elections his evaluation of the
C.E.S. election system. Punch-card technology was obsolete,
his report stated. The C.E.S. system had not been modernized
and was "a security nightmare, open to tampering in a
multitude of ways," Shamos continued. "It is apparent that
security was not taken seriously as an issue during the design
of the Votomatic." The report went on to note that the ballot
pages in the Votomatic booklet could easily be shuffled or
replaced; blank punch-card ballots were easy to obtain; and
the plastic seals on the boxes used to transport voted ballots
for central counting were easily duplicated. Moreover, the
system could not be verified without examination of its source
code, yet C.E.S. had refused to produce that code; no effort
had been made to restrict access to the control panels or the
toggle switches on the computer, with which "any person can
enter arbitrary numbers into the machine's counters;" and the
counting program, loaded through a deck of punched cards,
could be altered to change the counting "by inserting or
deleting a single one of the cards or by transposing two of
them."
Shamos now warned, "The following
scenario is thus fully possible. A would-be election fixer
enters a voting booth with a card concealed on his person
that, when read by the tabulating computer, will reset its
counters to values desired by the fixer. On leaving the booth,
he presents this card, conveniently wrapped in its secrecy
envelope, to an election official who, not being permitted to
examine it, drops the `ballot' into a box. After the election,
the card makes its way to the central counting facility where
it is read by the computer. Instead of being counted as a vote
or rejected by the system, the effect of this card is to
change the current vote total for any candidate
desired."
In a carefully worded paragraph headed
"Concentration of Control at C.E.S.," Shamos noted, "All software used in the Votomatic machines
is obtained in the form of secret card decks supplied by
C.E.S. Without casting doubt on the integrity of C.E.S. in
any way, nonetheless, the possibility exists that an
unauthorized person may gain access to the central point from
which these programs are distributed and alter them. The
implications are frightening when it is remembered that
one-quarter of all votes cast in the U.S. are counted by these
programs."
Throughout the evaluation, Shamos wrote,
C.E.S. "took the attitude that the Votomatic system has been
in use for seventeen years, has been evaluated by more than
thirty states, and has never been denied certification. In
response to virtually every question regarding a deficiency,
the vender responded by stating that the problem had been
considered by a number of other jurisdictions and was found
not to be serious.... The Votomatic system must be denied
certification."
Pennsylvania assigns three examiners to
inspect each voting system submitted for certification, but
the decision about it is made not by them but by the secretary
of the Commonwealth. One of the other examiners found the
system acceptable. The third, C. Kamila Robertson, of the
computer-science faculty at Carnegie-Mellon (who said that the
voting booklet had come apart in her hands, and that "it would
be easy to sabotage the computer in this system ... the
switches are there for the switching"), agreed with Shamos.
The secretary of the Commonwealth certified the system, but
Shamos's report soon became one of the basic documents in the
controversy over computerized vote-tallying.
THE precinct-level corruption that Joe Harris
had witnessed in Chicago in the twenties was visible again in
the 1982 election there, but now instead of repeat
voters the precinct captains had repeat votes, as counted on
the C.E.S. system. According to the report of a grand jury
that investigated the 1982 election, and whose
indictments led to fifty-eight convictions, ward committeemen
appointed city employees as precinct captains, and these
factotums either produced for the political machine on
Election Day or lost favor with their patrons. The grand
jurors reported, "One precinct captain and
his son disregarded the actual ballots cast by voters and
instead held their own fraudulent election after the polls
closed by running two ballots through the voting machine. One
ballot was a straight Democratic `punch 10.' That ballot was
counted by the machine a total of one hundred and ninety-eight
times. To make the results less suspect, they also counted a
ballot containing some Republican votes a total of six times.
Consequently, all but two of the voters in that precinct were
disenfranchised."
The grand jurors said that in many Chicago
precincts in 1982 faked punch-card votes were cast in
the names of transients, the ill, the incapacitated, and
people who had moved away, had died, or had not voted. Runners
worked the boarding houses and hotels to find out who was not
coming to the polls. "The ballots either were punched on the
voting machines by people posing as the voter, or were punched
with ball-point pens or other similar objects in a private
place outside the polling area," according to the grand jury's
report. In one named precinct in the Thirty-ninth Ward, the
captain gave lists of non-voters to one of the election
judges, and she slipped them into her shoe. During the day,
she would draw out a list when no one was looking and forge
names from it on blank ballot applications. "The precinct
captain and others apparently retreated to the privacy of the
men's washroom to punch some of the ballots," the grand jurors
said.
THE legal conflict that perhaps best embodies
the doubts about computerized democracy, and
demonstrates-whether the plaintiffs or the defendants were
right in this particular case-many of the difficulties of
proving charges of stealing elections by computer, started in
Charleston, West Virginia, in 1980 and ended, for all
practical purposes except for the plaintiffs' liabilities, in
a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, in 1986.
In 1971, Jack Gerbel, of
C.E.S., and an area C.E.S. representative had presented the
Votomatic for approval in West Virginia, but the state's two
examiners rejected it. They cited its permitting of
overvoting, and they stated, "The computer program ... can
possibly be modified by an experienced data-processing person,
causing the computer to miscount votes cast for a particular
race." However, the West Virginia secretary of state, Jay
Rockefeller (who is now United States senator from West
Virginia), seeing, as he wrote at the time, that the report of
the examiners was negative, designated two new examiners, and
they approved the system.
At about 7 P.M. on November 4, 1980, as
Ronald Reagan was being elected President, Walter J. Price
III, a plump-cheeked, energetic young man in a blue blazer and
khakis and his "Election Day" tie-blue with diagonal gold and
red stripes-drove down to the voter registrar's office in
Charleston. A freshman Republican legislator in a county that
Daniel Boone had once represented in the Virginia Assembly,
Price was going downtown to see himself reelected, as he
thought, and to watch the operation of the new system the
county had bought the year before from C.E.S. He was not
worried about vote fraud, he told me later, because the first
clerk of Kanawha County the Republicans had had since 1932,
Margaret (Peggy) Miller, would be running the count.
Over the vehement objections of the voter
registrar, Carolyn Critchfield, Price threaded his way among
desks and people toward what the election workers called the
computer cage. This was a small room with windows on all sides
that began about four and a half feet above the floor and a
Dutch door that had a window in its top half. The two
vote-counting computers of the BT-76 (Ballot Tab) system in
Charleston, one of them designated the "master" and one the
"slave," had been set up on the floor inside, with punchcard
readers on top of them and printers beside them. On the
computers, down near the floor, were sets of toggle switches.
Price has testified under oath, and repeated in greater detail
during lengthy interviews with me, that, as he walked around
the outside of this room looking in during the next hour and a
half, he saw four kinds of actions, which, four and a half
years later, dominated the only known court trial so far of
charges that an election was stolen by computer. The people
who Price said took these actions have all vigorously denied
doing so, also under oath.
Traditionally on Election Night in Kanawha
County, the vote totals were announced and posted in the
precincts. This year, none were. Instead, the uncounted voted
punch cards were all carried from the precincts to the
registrar's office and run through one central system, which
Walter Price was looking at. Only these cumulative centralized
counts, which included no record of precinct-by-precinct
totals, were coming out of the whining, clacking printers;
then they were ripped loose and fed to the local reporters and
to the citizens who had gathered on the other side of the
chest-high reception counter.
Price said that at least four times while he
was looking into the computer room that night he saw Peggy
Miller, the county clerk, drop down into what he called a coal
miner's squat-"not on her knees but bent down with her knees
coming up toward her chest"-in front of the sixteen toggle
switches on the master computer, consult notes she had on a
pad or clipboard, put the notes down, turn a key, flip some of
the switches, and turn the key again. Such an action was not
called for in the counting of the votes. After Peggy Miller
finished flipping the switches, Price said, she reclaimed her
notes and stood up. On more than one of these occasions, she
walked over to the nearby "dasher," a slow printer, "and she
would type some things and then the printer would run," he
said.
The incumbent congressman for that district,
running again, was a Democrat, John Hutchinson. He had been
elected the mayor of Charleston three times in the seventies,
and in 1976, during his service at City Hall, he had run for
governor, but had lost. Although he and Jay Rockefeller, who
in 1980 was the Democratic governor, were not friendly,
Hutchinson was regarded by Walter Price as one of the five
most influential Democrats in the state. Mick Staten,
Hutchinson's Republican opponent, was a close friend of Peggy
Miller's husband, Steven, a lawyer, who was the general
counsel for the Republican executive committee of that
congressional district, and Staton's largest campaign
contributor. Hutchinson had trounced Staton in a special
election the preceding June, and two polls conducted by the
Charleston Gazette had predicted that Hutchinson would
win again, in the counting that Price was watching, by a
spread of between fourteen and sixteen percentage points; that
is, by around twenty-five thousand of the votes that were
being counted. Hutchinson's wife, Berry, said that a poll by
the Democratic National Committee, too, had shown that her
husband would win by a wide margin. Staton himself, however,
had predicted that he would win, by five points.
Price said that during the counting his
fellow-Republican Steve Miller entered the computer cage, drew
out of the inside pocket of his suit coat a pack of cards
between a quarter of an inch and an inch thick and the same
size as the ballot and control punch cards, patted the cards
to even them up, and handed them to his wife. According to
Price, they were talking, but, being behind the glass, he
could not hear what they said. Price testified that Peggy
Miller ran the cards through the card reader, retrieved them,
and gave them back to her husband, and that he returned them
to his breast pocket and left the room.
Seated at a table lodged between elements of
the C.E.S. system was a man Price had never seen before.
Clearly, the person he was referring to was Carl Clough, the
Northeast sales manager of C.E.S., who had been with the
company for ten years. Price said he saw this man busily using
a telephone and what seemed to be a calculator. Open in front
of him on the table was a large case resembling a briefcase.
Three or four times, Price said, the man grasped the phone as
one might the handle of a suitcase, and, he told me, he
"places it, he very carefully places it" in the
case; he "pushed it down ... it was just a very deliberate
pushing in" of the phone. After a time, he said, the man put
both hands to the case, seemed to hold it down with one hand
"like he was steadying, like there was some resistance to,"
the phone's "coming out," and, with the other, pulled the
phone out "with some force." This resembles a description of a
man using a modem, a device that permits computers separated
by hundreds or thousands of miles to communicate with each
other over telephone lines.
The operator of the master computer that
night was Darlene Dotson; the secondary, slave computer was
the responsibility of Vicky Lynn Young, just two years out of
high school. Vicky Young needed to keep her job, because she
was taking care of some of her close relatives. Nevertheless,
later, on the witness stand, she swore that on one occasion
during the counting in the cage Clough "told me to go over and
stand beside Darlene and help her with her computer so that
nobody could see."
Had this happened? Clough was asked during
the trial. "Absolutely not," he replied. Furthermore, he said,
he had had a briefcase in the computer cage, but there had
been neither a modem nor any other electronic equipment in it.
He thought that he had used a phone in the cage, but that it
could have been moored in an adjacent room. Young testified
that Clough had tools but had not used a modem; he denied that
he had any tools. Dotson averred twice before the trial that
there had been a phone in the room and that Clough had used it
"more than once;" at the trial she said there had been a phone
jack in the room, but no phone.
Peggy Miller said on the stand that she had not gone into
the computer cage at all on Election Night, thereby denying
Price's testimony. (Mrs. Miller, who has resumed her former
career as a schoolteacher, and is a candidate for the state
legislature on November 8th, later said to me of Price, "He
lied in court," and she also said, "He'll testify against his
mother if it'll get him something.") Steve Miller, asked by
the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, John Mitchell, "Did you
enter the computer room and take several computer-sized cards
out of your pocket and lay them down?" answered, "Absolutely,
positively no." Clough said the Millers had not been in there
while he was, although he had "stepped out a few times." A
county commissioner said that he had seen Peggy Miller in the
room. Dotson said that the Millers were not there and that
Peggy Miller "may have come in, but not all the time." Young
"didn't remember" Peggy Miller there, and said that she did
not see Steve Miller come in "that I remember."
In a document having to do with an appeal,
the defendants described Price's testimony as uncorroborated
and "soundly contradicted by every other witness called by
plaintiffs who was in a position to observe the occurrences in
the computer room." They characterized Young's testimony as a
denial that Peggy Miller had manipulated the toggle switches;
they stressed that Price had not known the identity of the man
he had seen with the briefcase.
On the night in question, Price, following
the returns, perceived that he was losing his position in the
House of Delegates, and after saying so to a friend of his he
exclaimed loudly, pointing to the computer cage, "The only
election I lost was in that room!" Hutchinson, too, lost that
night, and by nearly ten thousand votes-the five percentage
points by which his opponent, Mick Staton, earlier that fall
had predicted his own victory.
Leonard Underwood, a Baptist minister, who
had been defeated for the legislature by seven votes,
challenged the Charleston results in a lawsuit, but Peggy
Miller said that sixty-two days after the election-just two
beyond the earliest legal moment in the absence of a contested
election-she had had the punch-card ballots destroyed, not
realizing that Underwood's challenge was still pending.
"Anytime an election is completed ... those materials are
cleaned out," she said. "Otherwise we would have a continuous
buildup of materials."
T. David Higgins, a Union Carbide computer
specialist who was also the chairman of the Kanawha County
Republican Party, testified during the trial that in
Charleston in the summer of 1981, at a political affair for
Representative Staton, he had spoken at length with Steve
Miller:
He was very unhappy with the
fact that I was working with the joint House-Senate
subcommittee here at the Capitol which was looking into the
whole question of electronic voting in the state of West
Virginia. And he also said something to the effect of how it
worked out that my working with them, collaborating with them,
somehow in his mind cast aspersions of.... He suggested that I
thought there was something irregular in the election of
November, 1980, here specifically in Kanawha
County.
I said to him
at that point that I did not think they had done anything
wrong in the election of 1980. I said to him, "I do not think
that you understand enough about this computer to rig it to
fix an election." And Steve looked me in the eye,
grinned like a shark ...
and said to me, "You underrated us."
(In a recent interview, Steve Miller denied
that he had said "You underrated us" to Higgins at the Staton
affair. "He told me about reports he had heard from Democrats
that `you guys had stolen the election,' and that he had told
them we weren't smart enough to do that," Miller said. "And
he's right, I grinned like a shark. In fact, I laughed out
loud. I told him, `Thank God, neither are you, David,' and
turned on my heel and walked off." Miller went on to describe
Higgins as "a conceited, arrogant fop" and "a shallow idiot."
On the subject of Walter Price's testimony, Miller said, "He's
a liar. I've never been in that computer room in my life." As
for Price himself, he said, "If I had a choice between sitting
down with him and a polecat, I'd pick the polecat.")
C.E.S. officials in Berkeley, upon learning
of the rising public alarm in Charleston, sent out one of
their programming consultants, C. Stephen Carr, who had
probably written or revised as many of the codes for
votecounting machines as anyone else in America. Testifying at
hearings on electronic voting that had been called by the West
Virginia secretary of state, in Charleston, Carr declared,
"While any computer system can be penetrated, the time and
effort to penetrate this one is so extreme as to render it
effectively impenetrable."
Representative Staton was defeated for
reelection in 1982. The West Virginia legislature passed a law
that year requiring that after each election "at least five
per cent of the precincts shall be chosen at random and the
ballot cards cast therein counted manually." A special grand
jury that was convened to investigate the November, 1980,
election indicted Peggy Miller on six felony and nine
misdemeanor charges of election-law violations, none of them
directly related to the computers, and she was tried and
acquitted on all counts.
THREE of the Democrats who had lost in
1980-Hutchinson, Underwood, and Bill Reese, a candidate for
county commissioner-continued to be troubled by the outcome
even after Miller's acquittal. Underwood wanted the three of
them to sue for damages.
John Hutchinson told him,
"Why, you're crazy as a bedbug, they beat me by ten thousand
votes."
Underwood replied, "If
you're gonna steal it, you can put in ten thousand as easily
as ten."
Dozens of times, driving past the
Hutchinsons' home, which is near his own in Charleston, Walter
Price recalled, he thought that he should go in and tell
Hutchinson what he had seen in the computer cage. "It occurred
to me that that poor man ought to know what really screwed him
out of Congress," Price said to me. "Why I didn't do it I
don't know."
In mid-1982, though, he said, he happened to
take a seat in front of the Hutchinsons at a public meeting in
the state capitol, and Berry Hutchinson, a shrewd and
ebullient woman, who is a member of an old-money Charleston
family, leaned forward and asked him, "Were you by any chance
present when the ballots were being processed in 1980?"
"Well, yes, I was," he replied.
She told him she and her husband would buy
him lunch in the basement cafeteria if he would tell them what
he had seen.
"For about thirty-five seconds," Price told
me, he flinched mentally at "having truck with Democrats" and
at having everybody see him walk through the capitol with John
Hutchinson, but then-"It was a flash of lightning"-this
response was erased by the thought Well, hell, you've got to
do what's right. Price thereupon said he would go. Over lunch,
he said, he described to the Hutchinsons what he had seen, and
during a visit to the computer cage after lunch he showed
Berry Hutchinson the toggle switches on the front panel.
Outside the registrar's office, she said later, she asked him
whether he would testify if they filed a lawsuit, and he said
yes.
Early the next year, John Hutchinson,
Underwood, and Reese, their evidence dramatically fortified by
Walter Price, sued the Millers, the registrar of voters, the
county commissioners, C.E.S. and four of its employees, and
others for about nine million dollars in damages, alleging (in
their third amended complaint) that various of the defendants
had "tampered, directly and/or indirectly, with the computer
programming of the election computer" and "rigged the counting
computers by the manipulation of control toggle switches and
the use of predetermined material or both in such a way that
the computer did not reflect an actual count of ballots cast."
The plaintiffs contended that by these and other means they
had been deprived of "their constitutional right to vote or
receive votes [and] their right to hold public office," and of
income, reputation, time, and money.
Needing a computer expert, the plaintiffs
turned to Wayne G. Nunn, a slender, soft-spoken man of
thirty-six who was a project scientist for Union Carbide, one
of the major chemical companies in West Virginia's Chemical
Valley. Nunn had supervised the design and installation of
computer networks, some costing several million dollars, for
the firm's laboratories and pilot plants. He had shared an
office there for three years with David Higgins, who was the
chief of Union Carbide's computerized
technology-intelligence-information network. Nunn also ran a
small custom-software venture that wrote programs, did
consulting, and sold operating systems. He had programmed
computers in many different computer languages and in the
field of artificial intelligence.
Having no confessions from any of the
defendants, John Mitchell determined to rely on circumstantial
evidence in trying to prove a conspiracy. Three weeks before
the 1984 Presidential election, Nunn conducted a nine hour
examination of the C.E.S. system, with Carr, who had
programmed it, Kemp, the C.E.S. president, and a dozen or so
other people watching. Because of a clerical slip-up in the
listing of what Nunn wanted to see, C.E.S. was not required to
show him the source code, the diagrams for the circuit boards,
and the operators' manuals. Nevertheless, feeling his way
along in the microcosmic darkness of the program's space,
Nunn, with one punch card, added ten thousand votes to the
total of one of the candidates in a mock race for
President.
During a deposition he gave subsequently,
under extensive cross-examination by an attorney for the
Millers, Nunn said that he had perceived seven ways in which
the C.E.S. system in use in Charleston could be caused to
miscount the votes: by manipulating the toggle switches on the
face of the Data General Nova computer to change vote totals
and the figure for total votes processed; by altering the
program deck of cards during the counting; by running "summary
cards" through the computer to add votes for candidates; by
changing vote totals using the keyboard at the slow printer
that was part of the system, using another computer located
nearby and connected by a cable, or using a computer thousands
of miles away, by means of modems; or by
planting a "Trojan horse" (hacker jargon for secret,
undetectable commands that can be hidden in a computer
program) in the code that controls the vote-counting,
requiring it to switch, say, one out of every four votes from
one candidate to another or give a candidate a false victory
by a certain percentage.
The plaintiffs were determined to make a
second effort to break the source code, and C.E.S. was
determined to prevent Nunn from studying it. C.E.S. asked
Judge Charles H. Haden II, of the United States District
Court, whose wife had been the chairperson of Reagan's
reelection campaign in West Virginia, not to let Nunn even see
the code, because it was "a `trade secret' . . . highly
confidential." Alternatively, the company said, if the Judge
forced them to let Nunn inspect the code Nunn should have to
do it at C.E.S. headquarters in Berkeley and should not be
permitted to copy it or leave with any notes.
Hutchinson and his fellow-plaintiffs assailed
the C.E.S. insistence on secrecy from a broad perspective.
"There should be full disclosure of matters involving public
elections," they contended. "[The] demand for `secrecy' by
C.E.S. only insures that the potential for fraud will be
perpetrated. This involves a matter of strong public policy."
(Perhaps the plaintiffs meant "perpetuated," but their
motion said "perpetrated.")
Judge Haden ordered C.E.S. to make the source code
available to Nunn in Charleston, but he ratified the company's
practice and requirement of secrecy, and he decreed, "Dr. Nunn
will not reveal any information to anyone.... No records shall
be made of information obtained." (During the trial, the Judge
stated from the bench, "They are entitled to protection of the
secrets.") But the litigants had extracted their minimum
requirement: Nunn had the code, and he examined it to his
satisfaction in a closed office at the local C.E.S. attorneys'
firm for parts of two days.
What he had was a printout of "the assembler
third pass listing" for the BT-76 program-a stack of computer
paper still joined together at the folds which was four or
five inches high. He was allowed to make notes but was not
provided with the computer he needed in order to test the code
systematically; all he could do was look at the highly
technical lines of the listing. This was grueling mental work,
and after three or four hours he was very tired. During the
second day, he decided there was nothing more he could learn
from just looking, sealed his notes, gave them to the C.E.S.
lawyers, and left.
Carr and Kemp flew to Charleston to crowd
into the computer cage again and watch Nunn's second
examination of the system. As the day wore on, the number of
people watching varied between ten and twenty-five, and
sometimes Nunn could hardly move around. Mustachioed, skinny,
and dapper in a blue suit, he examined the inside of the
computer with a long black flashlight, tested again how it
worked, and printed out results of a mock election. He
announced that with the toggle switches he had been able to
manipulate the figure printed out on a cumulative report for
total ballots counted.
Several hours later, after further
examining the machine, Nunn cast and counted one punch-card
ballot, with just one vote on it, printed a cumulative report
that showed one cast and counted, stopped the computer, used
the toggle switches to change the vote for Position No. 1,
re-started the computer, printed out, and, showing the
printout, announced, "The next report is a cumulative report,
again showing one precinct processed, one ballot processed.
But Position No. 1 now has ten thousand and thirteen votes."
Then, again with one ballot, he produced five votes. Then
seven. "No punch cards were necessary," he told me later. "I
could have produced the result of ten thousand or any number
we wished without counting a single ballot."
THE 1985 Charleston trial was conducted
between April 9th and May 2nd in a federal courtroom within a
few blocks of the registrar's office, where the votes had been
counted that November night in 1980.
Midway through the trial, Walter Price gave
his account of what he had seen in the computer cage. After
some gambits that Price parried easily, John F. Wood, Jr., the
attorney for the Millers, pounced on two facts: that in
handwritten notes Price had made on what he had seen he had
not mentioned seeing Steve Miller give his wife the cards, and
that in his deposition he had once called the cards "sheets of
paper" and had not said that Steve Miller had taken them out
of his coat pocket. Wood suggested to the jurors that the
witness was making things up, and one of his closing questions
was "That's your story today, isn't it, Mr. Price?"
"I would not characterize my testimony here
as a story," Price retorted. While Nunn was on the stand, the
defense lawyers raised at least a hundred objections, and
Judge Haden sustained about half of them. Mitchell had planned
to have Nunn repeat for the jury, on Charleston's C.E.S.
system, his demonstration of how to steal an election, but the
attorney abandoned that because of positions the Judge was
taking on the admissibility of testimony. "There will be no
evidence presented in this case of a Trojan horse," Haden
informed the jurors. "None will appear." Nunn was prepared to testify that a
"debugger" in the BT-76 program, while enabling a programmer
to make repairs in the program, was also a Trojan horse; Haden
excluded such testimony. Nor would the Judge let Nunn testify
that when he had examined the system he had found
discrepancies in the locations of memory addresses for the
storage of information.
The fact that the C.E.S. system had been
officially approved for use in West Virginia had a perverse
effect during Nunn's testimony. Fifty-nine standards for
computerized vote-counting had been proposed in 1975 by Roy
Saltman, a specialist on the security of computer-tabulated
elections, in the then definitive National Bureau of Standards
study on the subject. Nunn had concluded that the C.E.S.
system sold to Kanawha County in 1979 violated thirty-nine of
these standards, but Haden refused to let him say so, on the
ground that the state's approval of the system rendered the
Bureau of Standards report "immaterial."
Nunn managed to tell the jurors (sometimes
only to have Haden order them to disregard the information)
that vote totals could be directly changed by means of the
toggle switches on the computer's front panel without leaving
a trace on an audit trail, and that summary cards, which in
the C.E.S. systems are the same size as the punch-card
ballots, could be used to add votes to candidates' running
totals. Nunn also testified that he had concluded that the
program had been changed during the counting.
To alter a candidate's votes with punch
cards, Nunn told the jurors, one does not need to know the
candidate's location in the computer's memory; all one needs
is the number of the candidate's ballot position (a number
that anyone voting in the election can know). With that and
one punch card, Nunn testified, "you can set his vote total
in the cumulative counters or in the precinct counters to
zero," and then, with a second card, "you give him, you know,
ten million votes if you want."
When the plaintiffs rested, the defendants
asked Judge Haden to render a directed verdict for their side
and send the jurors home. The legal situation was clear.
Before entering a directed verdict in a conspiracy trial, as
defense lawyers observed in statements to the Judge, he was
obliged to give the plaintiffs "the benefit of every
reasonable inference," to read their evidence "in a light more
favorable to them "to give it "favored treatment."
"I find," Judge Haden ruled, "that the only
evidence that the 1980 election was rigged is purely
speculative in nature; it was mere suspicion; and it does not
form the basis for the Court ... to infer that a conspiracy
may be present.... The plaintiffs have never proven the
existence of a conspiracy or these defendants' membership in a
conspiracy." The ruling continued, "Consequently, all we have
in this case are a series of unrelated acts that have been
proven, most of which have a reasonable and an innocent
appearance as easily as they would have a culpable appearance,
none of which ... are attributable to more than one individual
or to more than one entity.... And there are certain things
that have been attributable to the defendants," but "the proof
of individual overt acts, however compelling some few of them
may appear to be to plaintiffs' counsel, does not suffice for
the absence of proof of the conspiracy." Haden entered
directed verdicts for the defendants and dismissed the jurors
after their three weeks' service.
A year ago, judge Haden entered a finding
that the plaintiffs would have to pay the legal costs of the
defendants, including C.E.S., which Mitchell estimated would
total about six hundred thousand dollars. Just two of the
C.E.S. lawyers had billed the election equipment company for
twenty-seven hundred hours' work on the case about fifteen
working months-and Haden re-billed this to the plaintiffs, on
his judgment that, despite the fact that an earlier judge had
ruled the case not frivolous, it was "meritless." According to
John Mitchell, almost everything that the three plaintiffs own
is tied up by liens pending Haden's entry of his final order
on costs and the resolution of the three defeated candidates'
certain appeal from it. [ is this why
no one sues!!!]
"C.E.S. wasted a lot of money defending a case totally
without merit," Stephen Carr, the chief programmer for C.E.S.,
declared during an interview I had with him. We spoke in his
office at Information Processing Corporation, his company,
which does engineering work on computer products and consults
on computer programming, in Palo Alto, California. "Three
politicians who couldn't believe that the electorate hadn't
voted for them felt that they were surely gypped by the
system. They got a local Ph.D. consultant who worked at Union
Carbide. He was not dumb, but he had essentially, you know,
taken money to be their expert witness, and they tried to show
how the program could be manipulated. The case was so bad that
after they presented their side the judge threw it out of
court-the whole thing just died."
What was Carr's view of the ten thousand-odd
votes that Nunn produced with one summary card during the
first demonstration?
"With summary cards, you put in totals and multiple
counts," Carr agreed. "But they also, at least in our design,
would leave a very noticeable mark on the tape. Anyone who was
at all knowledgeable couldn't miss it: a record left that
these votes had come in from a special control card, not from
ballots. So I wasn't impressed."
Carr laughed and smiled, then continued,
"This is funny. Nunn also spent a bunch of time trying to show
how you would work from the front panel of the Data General
computer called the Nova. It was front-panel switches that
computers of that era had. And if you know enough and the
people will let you, in half an hour or maybe twenty minutes
you might manipulate what's inside the computer and change
things."
Walking me back to a room that was almost
filled with computers, Carr went to a Data General Nova there
and gave me a demonstration of how to raise a storage location
for data-sometimes called a memory address-into the lights and
change the figures stored in it. "But the chance of doing this
unnoticed is just nil," he said. "And doing it in a way that
doesn't cause the whole program to stop is terribly tricky.
You can always argue the theory that there's some superhuman
who's smart enough, but it's so hard to do that that somebody
that good probably doesn't use his talent to mess around with
one vote-counting machine. I mean, it's not citizens in West
Virginia; it's, you know, somebody that's the Godfather! It
just doesn't play in my mind that someone that was that up to
speed would care about the race in West Virginia. And,
you know, they had all kinds of theories that we out in
California cared about that race. What we wanted was to run an
honest election and get paid. Not even to run an election-to
provide the equipment that the local people could run an
election on. And I will say, as an outsider, I never saw in my
contact with C.E.S. people any evidence of any kind of
impropriety, or even caring. The people I saw at C.E.S. were
interested in making honest money."
Turning to charges about Trojan horses, Carr
said, "There have been some people who say that the way to
phony up these programs is to make them count correctly when
the counts are small"-as in a pre-election test with, say, a
hundred ballots-"and then cause a fudge factor to come in when
the counts are large; you then bring in your bias."
Carr granted that someone
could "put a special thing in the code that when it saw some
special pattern it did some special stuff."
How could that be detected?
"You could certainly find
that by examining the source code," Carr replied. "It would
take a while."
I asked Carr about audit trails. He
mentioned, as an example, "a printer that leaves a hard-copy
record of what things happened in time."
Could such a printer be turned off? "You
could imagine someone cutting a wire-you can imagine anything.
If the election officials and the clerks were used to running
the computer and the printer stopped, you'd pick it up right
away, because the printer makes a loud sound. And, of course,
typically these Election Nights there are representatives, or
monitors, from all parties watching."
I also asked Carr about the possibility of fixing national
elections.
One reason it would be very difficult for a
single programmer at a major election company to fix a
national election, he said, is that although the central
source code is general, local election officials have to
prepare instruction cards dealing with each local election's
different candidates and their different positions on the
different local ballots, "so that in one precinct Party One
may be the Democrats, but in another precinct Party Two may be
the Democrats, and the program then follows instructions to
put all the votes for Democrats together. So it would be very
tricky to, in this general program- If you set out to help one
party in one state, you might totally screw yourself in
another, it's just that tricky for the programmer back at
C.E.S."
In a close Presidential election that
would be decided in a few large jurisdictions "it wouldn't be
impossible," Carr added.
I then asked him how, hypothetically, he
himself might go about such an undertaking.
In response, Carr adverted to his basic
position: "I just don't know how you'd do it. I really don't.
Because, even with the computer doing the counting, there are
so many people involved. It would take a major conspiracy.
You'd have to have a lot of people-twenty, thirty, a hundred
people-on your side. It wouldn't be one man. It certainly
wouldn't be anyone who did the program." Even if a corrupt
official is running the counting in a big city, "he still has
to depend on a lot of staff," Carr said. "It would take at
least one person from each of the disciplines-programming, the
management-to really get a start on it, and then there'd be
tremendous risks you'd be found out. I don't think it's
doable."
WHAT had Wayne Nunn actually seen when he
looked at the C.E.S. source-code listing in the lawyers'
offices? What were the "secrets" he had learned? Bound by
Judge Haden's protective order, could he talk about them? On a
Saturday night last December, I drove from Charleston to
Nunn's home, a ranch-style house in the town of Poca, ten
miles away. We talked in the den, where he had an Apple
Macintosh Plus on his desk.
Could he say whether he had found a Trojan horse, or more
than one? "The only thing that I'm restricted from doing is
telling you exactly the code that's in the program," he said.
"It had lots of fascinating little nooks and crannies hidden
around in it that no one has ever let me talk about. There are at least a half-dozen places, maybe a
few less, where you could lay in a Trojan horse in that source
code-lay in routines to do whatever you wanted to in an
election-because there's code in that system that shouldn't be
there, is not being used, is worthless to the operation of the
system. It can be replaced with anything you want it to
be."
Had Nunn found a
trapdoor; that is, a place in a program where one can break
down its security system and emerge undetected deep inside the
program?
"Yes. There is
one."
And had he found "wait loops" in the
program which conceivably could control outcomes, or
"Christmas trees"-Nunn's term for surprise packages in a
program?
"They're all there.
There are wait loops there. There are routines that are not
documented in the manual and, from every way I can determine,
do not work."
As we talked, Nunn got up from the couch,
where he had been sitting, walked to his desk, and sat down at
the Macintosh. "You continue to ask questions," he said. "I
want to look for something here. I've come up with an idea."
After about ten minutes, during which
he went on answering questions, he called me over to the
keyboard and invited me to add on the computer any numbers
that came into my head. I added eight and thirteen, then two
multi-digit figures; the sums printed on the screen were
correct. "Now," he said from the couch, to which he had
returned, "add two and two." On the off-the-shelf program of
this standard brand computer two and two added up to five. In
ten minutes, before my eyes, Nunn had made a Trojan horse for
me. He printed the five-step program out and gave it to me. I
still have it:
10 input x
20 input y
30 if x = 2 then x = 3
40 print "The sum of x + y is", x+y
50 go to
10
Line 30 is the Trojan horse inserted into the
program that makes two and two five. "I've told it every time
it sees the number two, replace it with a three," Nunn
said.
I asked him if signs of
these various ways to interfere with the C.E.S. system could
be kept out of its audit trails.
"All of them can defeat
the audit trail, some of them better than others," he replied,
with some feeling. "Because, you see, built into that system
is the ability to turn the audit trail off. Every one of them
you can turn off."
What about the test decks that are run
through the C.E.S. systems before and after elections?
"That is the biggest joke in the world," Nunn
said. "Anyone who knows how to run the
C.E.S. BT-76 system can be trained to steal an election on it
in twenty minutes. A summary card, anybody can do." Of the
switches he said, "As long as they are out there on the front
of the machine and they're turned on, someone has the ability
to stop the machine and fool with the panel switches.... You
have no control over what's done to the memory of the
machine.
"But it's even more serious than that. I
write this program. I go through it. I'm absolutely sure that
I know exactly what it's doing. I compile it and punch a deck
of cards and hand it to you. We meet a couple of days later
down here at the courthouse and you run what you say is my
program. There is no way on earth that I can stand there and
watch that computer run and swear in a court of law that that
is my program running. Now, it may have the same input and
output, but as far as swearing that it's my program, I can't.
I can't even look at the punch deck. Now, there may be a few
people in the world who can look at the punch deck for the
executable image"-that is, the program deck in object
code-"and read the punch cards and recognize the instructions,
but I can't do it. Damn few could. From that point of view,
there is no security."
That night, Nunn told me, step by step, how
to steal an election with the toggle switches that stick out
of the front of the Data General Nova computers in some C.E.S.
systems. "Briefly, using the toggle switches, what you do is
you halt the computer," he said. "You examine the memory
address at which the computer's halted-you make a note of it.
You go to the memory location that holds the counter of the
candidate that you want. You load the memory address for the
candidate you want to fix into it, and you say, `Load
address.' Then you load the number of votes to give him and
then you say `Deposit.' That's wiped out his real count and
given him a fraudulent count right then. If you want to go
someplace else and do it-some other memory location-you do as
many as you want. You just do this until you're finished. Then
you load the address where the computer stopped. O.K.? And
then you hit the button for it to continue. The program
continues on exactly the way it was. There's nothing in the
computer that- The computer never knows it's been halted."
There is no printout on any audit tape, Nunn
told me. If a time-and-date record was maintained and someone
noticed that the clock was running late, that would be the
only clue.
NO matter how deeply public officials may
dedicate themselves to it, the task of tightening up the
security on Election Night computers will remain a daunting
one-and, if complete security is the standard, impossible.
The computer scientist Roy Saltman, at the National Bureau
of Standards, who is the leading authority in the federal
government on the subject, stresses in his new report,
"Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized
Vote-Tallying," published in August, that no manipulation of
election computer programs has been proved, but he also
warns of "the possibilities that unknown persons may
perpetrate undiscoverable frauds," by, for example, altering
the computer program or the control punch cards that
manipulate it, planting a time bomb, manually removing an
honest counting program and replacing it with a fraudulent
one, counting faked ballots, altering the vote recorder that
the voter uses at the polls, or changing either the logic that
controls precinct-located vote-counting devices or the voting
summaries in these units' removable data-storage units. The
problem in this segment of the computer business, as in the
field at large, is not only invisibility but also information
as electricity. Secret instructions can be so well hidden in
software, especially if the language is the lower-level
assembly, that testers cannot be sure of finding them. Testing
all the possible paths that a computer program (and therefore
a hidden code) could follow through a punchcard ballot
apparently could not be done comprehensively short of
assigning the job to a second computer, and even then one runs
up against what Robert Naegele has called "the polynomial
problem"-the vastness of the programming possibilities in the
inner space of a program. Mathematicians at Natre Dame,
working with Deloris Davisson, a computer specialist, have
calculated that the number of possible programming pathways
for a program executed through a standard punchcard ballot
would be two to the nine-hundred-and-sixtieth power-a one
followed by two hundred and eightyeight zeros. "It's a number
that my computer can't hold," Davisson said. At the merely
mechanical level, computer experts in a large jurisdiction
cannot test punch-card systems for every voting
possibility. "It's an infinity as far as our work is
concerned," said Rick Fulle, assistant director of voting
systems and standards for the Illinois Board of Elections.
"For our purposes, it just can't be done." When a state
examination of the C.E.S. system in Chicago was suddenly
scheduled, Fulle said, the chairman of the state board
demanded that all possible ballotpunch configurations be
tested, but Fulle figured out arithmetically that running
through the sixty-seven million-odd test ballots necessary
would occupy twenty staff members full time for four hundred
and seventy-seven years.
IF one regarded the
manifold issues of computerized democracy in a reductionist
way, perhaps the principal concern would be whether, in a
close election, the Presidency can be stolen by means of
computer vote fraud in several major
jurisdictions.
Carr offered reassurance that although
theoretically such a calamity could occur, it would be
extremely difficult technically and would require too many
confederates to be feasible.
Michael Shamos, the
voting-systems examiner for Pennsylvania, does not believe
that a large number of people would have to be involved. "This
is false," Shamos replied when I asked. "One. One person. The
point is that, the way things are going, a national mechanism
exists that could be manipulated by anybody, from a single
individual to a nationwide conspiracy. It's not whether it
exists or not, it's the fact that the mechanism is there to
make it easy."
The leading candidates for the Presidency are
seldom separated by more than ten points, so "here's what we do," Shamos said. "Working in
a company headquarters, I'm writing some election software,
which will be sent by Federal Express to jurisdictions in
executable object code. I'm going to program this thing so
that if there are more than eight hundred people voting in a
precinct I'm simply going to trade some votes, take them from
other parties and dump them into the party that T want to win.
So all the totals are going to be exactly right. I'm going to
change ten per cent of the votes, or five per cent-some small
number. And that software is going out to pivotal
jurisdictions in the country. And that is going to shift the
national election. It's easy for a programmer. And his
superiors will never find it. There's no way to find it unless
they do an exhaustive code audit themselves. And this is a
solo effort-one guy who happens to be well placed. Of course,
many others are involved, but they don't know."
If some jurisdiction that had been tested
for more than eight hundred votes discovered that the program
didn't count correctly, and returned it to the factory, the
programmer would simply say there had been a glitch on the
tape, or a bad ROM-a unit embodying "read-only memory"-"or
some other technical mumbo-jumbo," Shamos went on. "And we
have an election, and the wrong guy gets elected." If recounts
discovered errors in some localities they, too, would be
attributed to programming errors, he said.
Shamos believes it "not unlikely for some guy
to realize one day, he's sitting there in the room in the
midst of all those coding forms-he says, `My God! I can
control this whole thing!' " After all, Shamos said, "we have
enough tales of hackers who when they found they could do
something went and did it, maybe even not with malicious
intent, just to show that they could do it."
He then pointed out a second possibility:
"Of course, you can imagine that the venders of the system
are in with certain politicians. The politicians agree, `Yes,
I'll buy this system, if you fix the election my way next
time,' and they actually give orders to their subordinates to
do it. That's always seemed somewhat less likely to me,
because of the possibility of a whistle-blower. Then, the
third possibility is tampering by someone not in the employ of
the company, by a break-in at the vending company."
Summing up, Shamos said, "What does it mean
that one company is controlling a large fraction of the voting
in the United States? If you provide the software, you are
controlling, even if you are not manipulating. Computerized
vote-counting doesn't occur in the light of day, it occurs
inside silicon in a little black box. That box is completely
under the control of the vender, and if anything wrong happens
we might never find out."
During an interview in a hotel lounge in San
Francisco, Roy Saltman said, "If I broke into B.R.C.'s master
computer program and changed the code, how about the nine
hundred and ninety-nine other versions that are already out
there? It's not a massive, central thing-all the computers are
not connected to B.R.C. or to any single vender. There isn't
any kind of central control that controls everything. I don't
think that's a reasonable supposition. If you do the recount
of the ballots, the whole thing falls apart."
Robert Naegele believes that no one person
could steal an election by computer and, like Saltman, he does
not regard computerized theft of a national election as at all
plausible. In a large jurisdiction like Los Angeles County,
Naegele told me, five or six people would have to be involved,
and hardly any jurisdiction is so centralized that one person
could do it there. "My private opinion," he said, "is that
there has never been any successful fraud in a computerized
election. As I understand it, it's really not feasible. To do
this, you require a hell of a lot of very sophisticated
code.... I am not concerned about fraud on the national level.
I don't think that's happened, and I don't think it's going to
happen."
Like Carr, Peter Vogel, a computer lawyer in
Dallas who was recently appointed an examiner of computerized
voting systems by the Texas secretary of state, is skeptical
that any conspiracy among large numbers of people would work,
but, like Shamos, he thinks that the
Presidency can be stolen by computer-"because of the electoral
college."
Vogel said to me in his office, "If you have a majority in the right states, it
doesn't matter who has the majority of the votes in the
country. If you program the right states for the right
elections, I think you could control the Presidential
results."
Howard Strauss, of Princeton, gave me written
answers to a series of questions about the possible rigging of
United States elections by tampering with computer-tabulated
election systems. He said that "there are many, many ways to
do this," but all of them "can be largely eliminated" by
rigorously followed procedures.
"If one
software vender dominates the electronic-election market,
subverting that vender may be the easiest way to alter
national elections, he wrote. One individual,
working alone, would be able to effect changes in the code
more quickly and securely than a group, he believes.
What categories of people
might fix computers in elections? I asked. Strauss replied,
"In order of ease of subversion, some of the most likely
groups or individuals include election-system venders and
their programmers and consultants, election-system operators,
the Federal Election Commission, technical mavens of all
kinds, and election officials and workers. It is possible that
foreign agents, candidates and their staffs, and voters with
special interests could subvert any of the above individuals
or have sufficient expertise to subvert the process
themselves."
Peter Neumann, of S.R.L, declared, "If
somebody is a skilled user of a conventional computer system,
he has the ability to do almost anything he wants and leave no
trace, because most of the computer systems today do not have
adequate protection or auditing facilities. Personal computers
are non-secure, for the most part. Now, in the election systems the vulnerabilities
are enormous. You effectively have to trust the entire staff
of the corporation that is producing your software. Every
single member has to be trusted. It would take one person to
rig the system, typically, because of the way the thing is set
up. There are very few internal controls."
Speaking in his office at S.R.L, amid papers
stacked and scattered about on his desk and the floor and a
chair nearby, Neumann went on,"Even if
you can look at the source code, you can't guarantee that
there's not a Trojan horse embedded somewhere in the code. Any
self-respecting system programmer can hack the innards of the
system to defeat encryption techniques or any password
protection, or anything like that. All this stuff is trivial
to break, for the most part. In most computer systems out
there, it is child's play. Given the fact that the underlying
systems are so penetrable, it is relatively easy to fudge
data-for example, to start out with three thousand votes for
one guy and zero for the other before the counting even
starts, even though the counter shows zero. Essentially a
Trojan horse in the coding. I can do it in the operating
system. I can do it in the application program. Or I can do it
in the compiler. I can rig it so that all test decks work
perfectly well. I program it so that, after the test is run,
at, say, six-fifty-five in the evening, it simply adds
thousands of votes. It would never show up. He
added that having a computer count a set portion of one
candidate's votes as if they had been cast for his or her
opponent would be "utterly trivial to do."
As for stealing a
Presidential election, Neumann said, "I would put in a whole
variety of techniques. I wouldn't just rely on one. You might
use a different technique in each state, for example. You
could trigger it so that you didn't do anything wrong if
everything was going well, and if your candidate was losing
you simply add votes-and you have to subtract, too. You have
to make all the consistency checks satisfy. That's relatively
easy to do."
Neumann exclaimed, "The possibilities are
endless!" He seemed to be enjoying them, but then drew
bac. "I think the possibilities for
rigging elections with computers are enormous. I'm not going
to say it's ever been done. The point here is it's in the
hands of one very skilled programmer or somebody who
understands the system."
IN the face of such contradictory expert
testimony, it is all but impossible for laymen to ascertain
the precise degree of risk entailed by the use of computerized
voting machines. Nevertheless, given the crucial role of
public confidence in the integrity of the ballot, common sense
suggests that the question should be resolved definitively, by
the press and, perhaps, by Congress. The press has begun to
grapple with the issue, thanks in part to a series of
articles by David Burnham in the Times a few years ago,
and press coverage of contested computerized election contests
has contributed to several reform efforts in the field.
With lever machines, the risk of
vote-stealing has always been relatively easy to reduce. In
one of the rules that Joseph Harris laid down in a model
election-administration system, published by the National
Municipal League in 1930, no lever voting machine could be
used until it had been examined by "a competent mechanic." It
is also necessary in lever-machine precincts that on Election
Day candidates and representatives of parties be present at
least twice-when the voting starts, to make sure that the
counters are set at zero, and after the polls close, when the
backs of the machines are opened, to read the totals. These
are the moments of maximum opportunity for a vote-stealer: if
he is not observed, he can simply turn the counters to obtain
a desired result.
In the opinion of many specialists, there is
only one comparably simple and effective way to deter fraud on
Election Day in most computerized jurisdictions: an immediate
hand recount of the ballots cast in a random group of
precincts selected after the vote-counting by various parties
to the election. Such a recount would be the greatest fear of
anyone implicated in stealing an election.
When Harris reflected on the fact that
computerized punch-card elections could be manipulated, he
advocated, as a remedy, that every county and city using the
Votomatic "set aside a number of precincts to count by hand
and to compare the results from a hand count to the machine
count." Who chooses the precincts? And when- before or after
the election-does anyone know which ones they will be? Harris,
in his model system, provided that "the candidates should be
permitted to designate the precincts which they wish to have
recounted and to amend and add to the list from time to time."
"A manual recount of at least one per cent of the ballots of
each contest is recommended," Roy Saltman wrote in his new
report, and he added, "Responsibility for selection of some of
the precincts to be recounted should be granted to candidates
or parties." Michael Harty, now the Maricopa County elections
director, in Phoenix, and the computer
scientist Frederick Weingarten, of the congressional Office of
Technology Assessment, suggest that voters who doubt the
integrity of a computerized tabulation should, one way or
another, at
once secure the tabulating software as primary
evidence.
Saltman also offered a set of recommendations
that are not so easily carried out: all vote-tallying software
should be obtained from an accountable source of stock offered
publicly by reputable venders and should be scrutinized for
"hidden code;" access to all stages of vote-tallying should be
controlled; the ballots themselves should be carefully
monitored administratively; every vote not cast by a voter in
a race should be registered by voting machines as not cast;
the use of pre-perforated punch cards should be ended, and
perforations should be made unnecessary by the use of
spring-loaded styluses. (The last change would require
modification of the Voto-matics. ) More broadly, Saltman
recommended that the professional science of internal controls
which is used in business be adopted in vote-counting.
Naegele proposed to the F.E.C. that
vote-counting codes should be written in higher-level computer
languages, because they are "quite a bit easier" to analyze
for error or, for that matter, fraud. He told me, in
California, that "the venders objected to this strongly,"
saying the vote-counting goes much faster in assembly
(lower-level) language. A recent draft of the F.E.C. standards
would make the use of high level languages "discretionary
only." "What I wish," Naegele said, "is that some state would
adopt a requirement for higher-level language, so the others
would follow."
Ken Hazlett, the programmer who pioneered in
the business with assembly language, expressed to me in
Corvallis an opinion even more emphatic than Naegele's about
the use of assembly language for computerized vote-counting:
"Insane! It should all be in high level language, so
there's a chance it'll be readable code twenty years later.
There's no room for assembly except in some small isolated
process."
The concepts of putting source codes in
escrow and providing for their examination by independent test
agencies seemed well established in the recent F.E.C. draft.
Michael Shamos argued during my interview with him that
escrow is not a workable concept for protecting election
software (among other things, he wanted to know to whom
private custodians of the code would be accountable), but
the proposal is popular.
A number of other remedies, in addition to
those in the studies by Saltman and the F.E.C's Clearinghouse,
have been suggested by individuals in the election
community.
Terry Elkins, whose inquiries and accusations
concerning the 1985 mayoral race in Dallas led to the
enactment of reform legislation in Texas, maintains that
election officials should be made more accountable at law for
their performances. Michael Harty, who suggested that
programmers of election computers should be licensed,
emphasizes the little-known fact that most state election laws
are not mandatory but "directory," and levy few or no
penalties against officials who do not obey them. Paul Goldy,
the president of the International Technology Group, of
Woodbury, New Jersey, a smaller firm in the computerized
election market, advocates user groups for local election
officials, organized around specific products, like the groups
that many computer buffs belong to. Shamos has proposed that
persons who have criminal records for acts of "moral
turpitude" should be barred from the vote-counting-equipment
business.
R. J. Boram, the chief programmer of the R.
F. Shoup Company, and Shamos advocate a high-prestige national
election commission to test and certify vote-counting systems,
including the software for them; Howard Strauss and a
Princeton colleague have prepared for Election Watch, a small
group that is working for change in this area, a specific
proposal for a national testing authority. At a conference in
Dallas sponsored by Election Watch, Strauss said that
representatives of the venders and anyone else who could
change the counting program should be barred from computer
rooms on Election Night.
Some citizens believe that vote counting
software should be in the public domain, available to all
parties and candidates, for whatever checks they wish to make
on it. "I'm not for a public process being handled by private
companies that won't let us see what's going on," says Susan
Kesim, a young executive of a computer-security firm in
Indiana. "Public-domain software -it's open. I want to see
that it added one to the total, because that's the process of
voting."
"Maybe a private foundation should do it,"
Frederick Weingarten has suggested. "Maybe if there was a
consensus among the states, the federal government could write
its own software and certify it through the National Bureau of
Standards or the F.E.C.say, `This we guarantee is accurate and
untamperable.' "
Penelope Bonsall, the director of the F.E.C.
Clearinghouse, said of the public-software concept, "It's a
public policy question; it's too broad for us to consider. It
would have to compete with private interests. I don't know who
would fund it. I just don't see how you would eliminate
private efforts in this area."
By 1984, the year before Joseph Harris, the
exemplar of the entrepreneurial approach to computerized
vote-counting, died, a subtle change had come over him. By
then, lawsuits and accusations were bedeviling his baby,
Computer Election Services, Inc. In a newspaper interview,
Harris predicted that Americans would probably vote on TV
monitors in voting booths, and computers would announce the
winners minutes after the polls closed. But then he struck a
note new for him, adding that these changes would not come for
about twenty years, because such completely computerized
voting would require "extremely careful management and
planning to prevent error and fraud."
The new direct-recording electronic (D.R.E.)
vote-counting machines, which New York City is preparing to
buy on behalf of its three million registered voters, may
become the realization of Harris's vision of futuristic
electronic voting. When citizens vote on one of the D.R.E.
systems, they address themselves to a printed ballot affixed
to the face of the machine or displayed on a TV-like console
and, with a finger or an electronic pointer, press on a box
with an "X" in it beside their choice. The four surviving
bidders in New York City are Cronus, Shoup, Sequoia Pacific,
and, the one firm offering a TV-like system, the Nixdorf
Computer Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of
Nixdorf Computer, A.G., of West Germany. The bidders had to
provide the technological capability to retain a record of
"randomized" (that is, outof-sequence) electronic images of
each voter's set of choices, but the city reserved the right
to buy this capability or not.
Saltman's recent report indicated that the
D.R.E. systems have one characteristic that from a security
point of view may be even more important than the
unavailability of real recounts if a voter's choices are not
retained electronically. Since those
choices are converted onto the counters inside the machines,
there is no way to check from the outside whether they are
recorded correctly. If the machine retained voters' choices on
magnetic tape, the tapes would not necessarily be correct.
Saltman wrote, "The fact that the voter can see his or her
choices on a display, or even receives a printout of the
choices made, does not prove that those were the choices
actually recorded in the machine."
"There is no security
in using a computer to count ballots," Wayne Nunn told me the
evening he made me a Trojan horse. "I don't believe that
computers should be used to count votes. I believe that what
you should use for counting votes is a system that any voter
can appreciate-in which he can fully understand all steps of
the process. There shouldn't be any magic involved, because a
computer system to the general populace appears to be magic.
You put something in one end and, voila -something else comes
out the other. A computer is such a flexible thing that what
happens between the time when you put it in and the time when
it comes out can be what any clever individual
wants."
-RONNIE DUGGER
Computerized
Systems for Voting Seen as Vulnerable to Tampering By
DAVID BURNHAM, The New York Times, July 29, 1985
The
Real Scandal Is the Voting Machines Themselves
Perspective
on election processes
Computer-Related
Elections
Electronic
Voting - Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D.
VOTE
SCAM ARCHIVE
Emphasis and links from Alllie
(alllie@newsgarden.org)
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