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The Money Pit: Diebold vs. America    [

    Will the Major Media Finally Cover the Electronic Election Fraud Issue?
    By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
    The Free Press

    Monday 15 May 2006

    That the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen has become an article of faith for millions of mainstream Americans. But there has been barely a whiff of coverage in the major media about any problems with the electronic voting machines that made those thefts possible - until now.

    A recent OpEdNews/Zogby People's poll of Pennsylvania residents, found that "39% said that the 2004 election was stolen. 54% said it was legitimate. But let's look at the demographics on this question. Of the people who watch Fox news as their primary source of TV news, one half of one percent believe it was stolen and 99% believe it was legitimate. Among people who watched ANY other news source but FOX, more felt the election was stolen than legitimate. The numbers varied dramatically."

    Here, from that poll, are the stations listed as first choice by respondents and the percentage of respondents who thought the election was stolen: CNN 70%; MSNBC 65%; CBS 64%; ABC 56%; Other 56%; NBC 49%; FOX 0.5%.

    With 99% of Fox viewers believing that the election was "legitimate," only the constant propaganda of Rupert Murdoch's disinformation campaign stands in the way of a majority of Americans coming to grips with the reality of two consecutive stolen elections.

    That the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post finally ran coverage of problems with electronic voting machines this week is itself big news. It says the scandals surrounding computer fraud and financial illegalities at Diebold and other electronic voting machine companies have become simply too big and blatant for even the bought, docile mainstream media (MSM) to ignore.

    The gaping holes in the security of electronic voting machines are pretty old news. Bev Harris's blackboxvoting.com has been issuing definitive research since Florida 2000. Freepress.org warned of the impending electronic theft of Ohio 2004 with Diebold machines eight months before it happened.

    After that election, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) issued a report confirming that security flaws could allow a single hacker with a wi-fi to shift the vote counts at entire precincts just by driving by. Then the Government Accountability Office reported that security flaws were vast and unacceptable throughout the national network of electronic machines.

    Despite overwhelming evidence that George W. Bush has occupied the White House due to the fraudulent manipulations of the GOP Secretaries of State in Florida and Ohio, none of this has seeped into "journals of record" like the Times and Post.

    Until this week. The Times was sparked out of its stupor on May 11, after officials in California and Pennsylvania warned that Diebold touch-screen machines, slated to be used in upcoming primaries, were hopelessly compromised. Michael Shamos, a professor of computer science and Pittsburgh's high-tech Carnegie-Mellon University, called it "the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system."

    Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa, says "this is a barn door being wide open, while people were arguing over the lock on the front door."

    The Times refers to the uproar as "the latest concern about touch-screen machines" while having completely ignored dozens of complaints in Ohio 2004 that voters who selected John Kerry's name saw George W. Bush's light up, or saw the light on Kerry's repeatedly go out before they could complete the voting process.

    The Wall Street Journal ran the following kicker: "Some former backers of technology seek return to paper ballots, citing glitches, fraud fears."

    The WSJ could have ran that story last year after the bipartisan commission on federal election reform co-chaired by President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker noted in no uncertain terms that: "Software can be modified maliciously before being installed into individual voting machines. There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries."

    Indeed. There's every reason because of the unprecedented power and money involved in U.S. politics to trust them less than anybody else.

    In its March 2006 primary, it took a week to tally Chicago's votes because of technical problems in Sequoia Voting Systems equipment. In Maryland, electronic voting scandals prompted a unanimous vote by the State House of Delegate demanding that touch-screen machines be scrapped. The Maryland Senate effectively killed that bill, which is certain to come back.

    Citizen law suits are being filed in Arizona, California, New York and New Mexico by the nonprofit Voter Action organization.

    The new concerns about Diebold's equipment were discovered by Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer expert who was working at the request of Black Box Voting Inc. The new report forced Diebold to warn of a "theoretical security vulnerability" that "could potentially allow unauthorized software to be loaded onto the system."

    In other words, one of the prime manufacturers of the machines on which America casts its votes has admitted those machines can be hacked.

    But as the Times has finally reported, the company, in one of the new century's most truly laughable letters, has claimed that "the probability for exploiting this vulnerability to install unauthorized software that could affect an election is considered low."

    A company spokesman has admitted the flaw was actually built into the system to allow election officials to upgrade their software. But Diebold is apparently confident that those officials would never, ever cheat. "For there to be a problem here, you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software," says Diebold's David Bear. "I don't believe these evil elections people exist."

    The Times has thus far chosen not to report on the staggering history that frames such statements. As freepress.org reported in 2003, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell promised in a GOP fundraising letter to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George W. Bush." The election chief in Florida 2000 was Katherine Harris. In Ohio 2004 it was J. Kenneth Blackwell. Both controlled access to their state's electronic voting machines, and are widely believed to have exploited their now obvious flaws. Both served simultaneously as Secretary of State and as state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. As of today, the electronic access cards for Ohio's electronic voting machines have been ordered into Blackwell's personal office, despite the fact that he is the GOP nominee for governor in the upcoming November election.

    Recently passed House Bill 3 in Ohio does not mandate post-election audits of electronic voting machines, nor does the Help American Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. The rush to electronic voting machines was fueled by the passing of the HAVA Act, which authorized more than $3 billion in federal funds to purchase new voting equipment. HAVA's principal architect was Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH), whose financial ties to Diebold, through disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, have yet to be fully exposed.

    Blackwell personally negotiated a no-bid contract for Diebold touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic machines (DREs) while holding stock in the company. Under HB3 Blackwell will decide whether the machine will be audited or not in an election where he is running for governor.

    "We're prepared for those types of problems," said Deborah Hench, the registrar of voters in San Joaquin County, California, according to The Times. "There are always activists that are anti-electronic voting, and they're constantly trying to put pressure on us to change our system."

    Aviel Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, did the first in-depth analysis of the security flaws in the source code for Diebold touch-screen machines in 2003. After studying the latest problem, The Times reported Rubin said: "I almost had a heart attack. The implications of this are pretty astounding."

    More coverage from the mainstream corporate media may surface as the machines malfunction in the 22 primary elections scheduled in May and June. The next major e-vote meltdown should occur during the May 16 primaries in Kentucky, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

    There's still time to move to hand-counted paper ballots for the November 2006 election. And if current trends continue, some of the mainstream media may actually start reporting on the issue.

    --------

    Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis are co-authors of How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, available at www.freepress.org. They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of What Happened in Ohio? forthcoming from The New Press.

    Note: second paragraph altered 5/15/06.

    Go to Original

    The Money Pit: Diebold vs. America
    By Denis Wright
    The Free Press

    Monday 15 May 2006

    Georgia was the first state in the nation to go 100 percent with electronic voting, thanks to Secretary of State Cathy Cox. This was a mantle she carried, and continues to carry, proudly. In fact, she's using it to bolster her run for governor in 2006, and indeed she is currently the Democratic front-runner.

    But when you look at the facts Cathy Cox should be ashamed. She has failed the voters of Georgia. She has ensured that our elections are subject to fraud; she has knowingly allowed software that violates certification standards to be used in elections. She has wasted huge amounts of taxpayer funds on an election system that is proven to be ineffective at best, a downright scam at worst. And she has hidden or lied about these problems, not only to the voters of Georgia, but also to the state legislature.

    A Trail of Amendments

    In May of 2002 the state signed a contract with Diebold to provide DRE (Direct Record Electronic) voting machines for the entire state at a cost of $54 million. In July of the same year the first amendment to that contract was signed. It stated that:

• Diebold is to redesign the pre-election training for Georgia officials.
  
• Diebold is to create and prepare all election ballots for every county in Georgia.
  
• Diebold is to deliver and install the election database and memory card in every county on or before October 25, 2002.

    Immediately, we can see that elections in Georgia have been entirely turned over to a private corporation, one with strong ties to the Republican Party. But it really gets interesting when we turn to later amendments. Contract amendments that were signed by Cathy Cox without any legislative oversight.

    Despite this written contract, during the November elections there was massive failure of the voting machines which was later documented - and admitted to, quietly - by Cathy Cox herself. This information came to light in internal documents obtained through FOIA requests. To the press, Ms. Cox consistently praised Diebold and admitted nothing. She even appeared in a promotional video and sales brochures for Diebold.

    The second amendment in December 2002 granted Diebold authority to test the GEMS software with Wyle Labs, certification due in January 2003. Wyle Labs is another privately owned enterprise. Diebold pays Wyle to conduct the tests and the results are made available only to their customer - Diebold. The cost to Georgia voters: $10,029,167.

    Third Amendment: Certification has still not been accomplished. Paragraph three states that Federal Certification has not been received but a $1 million dollar payment is demanded, and paid.

    August 25, 2003, Amendment Four: The state of Georgia requests three more GEMS servers at a cost of $51,459, which have still not been certified and an additional $23,700 for Kennesaw State testing labs.

    Amendment Five: is for a "Security Adjustment" for software glitches, to be obtained by April 29, 2005. Installation of the "security patch" is not to be completed until after the November 2004 election.

    Amendment Six: The state bought an additional 955 AccuVote machines from Diebold costing $2.6 million dollars. They also extended their warranty with Diebold through December 2005 at a cost of $1.5 million.

    No one in the Georgia legislature knew about any of these amendments. They were not "in the loop." There was no legislative oversight whatsoever.

    A Trail of Money

    Georgia has been told by Diebold that its three-year old machines cannot be upgraded to produce a voter verified paper ballot. They recommend that Georgia "toss and buy new" machines if paper ballots are required (Verbal testimony by Senator Stephens at SLOGO hearing). At a huge additional cost, of course. Additionally, the state's "pilot program" to have paper ballots in 2006 has dropped from three counties to merely three precincts, and even those will have only one machine with a printer. So this provides only three machines statewide that can produce a paper ballot in a state that had a 14 percent undervote in the 2004 Democratic Primary and Diebold is making the state rent these machines at astronomical costs.

    Georgians have already spent over $100 million on a voting system that has been proven over and over to be faulty, yet they want taxpayers to spent more. The $54 million dollar figure cited by Cathy Cox's office is a lie. Given the costs of programming, ballot creation and new purchases, the cost to Georgia voters exceeds $116 million dollars. And there is NO legislative oversight. Any public forums are shut down as soon as the questions start.

    Dr. Brit Williams is the chief consultant from Kennesaw State University who performed the certification test on the Diebold touchscreen machines used for the state of Georgia. At the March 9, 2005, meeting of The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Technical Guidelines Development Committee, Williams said, "Right now the primary use of wireless technology in a voting system is to program voting stations. Because if I have got 3,000 voting stations and I have to load those with pc cards, then I have got to sit down and manufacture 3,000 pc cards, and keep them separated by precinct. Whereas if I could sit in my warehouse and load those ballot images wirelessly, there is a tremendous advantage."

    Our vote is sacred - the centrality of honest, transparent vote tallying to the necessary level of trust that underlies the basic contract between the people and their government. Who does Cathy Cox work for? The citizens of Georgia or the shareholders of Diebold? I personally think the answer is quite obvious.