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Hack the Vote
By Paul
Krugman
The New York Times
Tuesday 02 December 2003
Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, "I am
committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next
year." No surprise there. But Walden O'Dell — who says that he wasn't talking
about his business operations — happens to be the chief executive of Diebold
Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use
across the United States.
For example, Georgia — where Republicans scored spectacular upset
victories in the 2002 midterm elections — relies exclusively on Diebold
machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there
is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that
the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no paper
trail.
Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill
requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their
software be available for public inspection, is occasionally told that systems
lacking these safeguards haven't caused problems. "How do you know?" he
asks.
What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The
details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at
the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to
cover up product defects.
Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting
machines, found Diebold software — which the company refuses to make available
for public inspection, on the grounds that it's proprietary — on an unprotected
server, where anyone could download it. (The software was in a folder titled
"rob-Georgia.zip.") The server was used by employees of Diebold Election Systems
to update software on its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of
security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines both the
information and the opportunity to do so.
An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins
and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A later
report commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently reached similar
conclusions. (It's hard to be sure because the state released only a heavily
redacted version.)
Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate
officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have
revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the authenticity of these
documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to prevent their
dissemination.
Why isn't this front-page news? In October, a British newspaper,
The Independent, ran a hair-raising investigative report on U.S. touch-screen
voting. But while the mainstream press has reported the basics, the Diebold
affair has been treated as a technology or business story — not as a potential
political scandal.
This diffidence recalls the treatment of other voting issues,
like the Florida "felon purge" that inappropriately prevented many citizens from
voting in the 2000 presidential election. The attitude seems to be that
questions about the integrity of vote counts are divisive at best, paranoid at
worst. Even reform advocates like Mr. Holt make a point of dissociating
themselves from "conspiracy theories." Instead, they focus on legislation to
prevent future abuses.
But there's nothing paranoid about suggesting that political
operatives, given the opportunity, might engage in dirty tricks. Indeed, given
the intensity of partisanship these days, one suspects that small dirty tricks
are common. For example, Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, recently announced that one of his aides had improperly accessed
sensitive Democratic computer files that were leaked to the press.
This admission — contradicting an earlier declaration by Senator
Hatch that his staff had been cleared of culpability — came on the same day that
the Senate police announced that they were hiring a counterespionage expert to
investigate the theft. Republican members of the committee have demanded that
the expert investigate only how those specific documents were leaked, not
whether any other breaches took place. I wonder why.
The point is that you don't have to believe in a central
conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure,
unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results. Why expose them to
temptation?
I'll discuss what to do in a future column. But let's be clear:
the credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake.
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Jump to TO Features for Wednesday 03 December
2003
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