When the little-known U.S. Election Assistance Commission held
its first public hearing on electronic voting in early May, most of
the talk was about technology: Are the ATM-like touch-screen voting
machines currently being used or considered by many states
reliable, vulnerable to hackers, more or less accurate than the
punch cards and other paper ballots that were at the center of the
Florida vote-count fiasco in 2000?
As Michael Grebb reports for the online Wired News (May
6, 2004), representatives of voting-machine manufacturers such as
Diebold and Sequoia Voting Systems clashed with skeptics, including
Johns Hopkins University computer scientist Avi Rubin, co-author of
a July 2003 report pointing to numerous security ‘holes’ in
Diebold’s system that could allow intruders to rig or steal an
election. Rubin called for printed receipts and other elements of a
paper trail to guard against electronic fraud. The industry reps
replied with claims that their systems had performed well in
elections such as the California recall of October 2003, and that
the pool of potential hackers is actually smaller than the number
of people who might intervene to spoil or alter paper ballots.
For other observers, however, the problems with electronic
voting run much deeper. In an article for The Humanist
(Jan./Feb. 2004), Michael I. Niman puts it succinctly: ‘The problem
the United States faces is bigger than one of machines and
technology. It involves a crisis of confidence brought on by a
crisis of conflicts of interest.’ According to Niman, Walden
‘Wally’ O’Dell, the chairman and CEO of Ohio-based Diebold, is a
member of George W. Bush’s ‘Pioneers’ fund-raising group and once
declared in a letter that he was ‘committed to helping Ohio deliver
its electoral votes to the president’ in 2004. An even more
important player in the industry is Election Systems and Software
(ES&S), whose corporate predecessor, American Information
Systems (AIS), was chaired in the early ’90s by Omaha investment
banker Chuck Hagel. Slightly less than eight months after stepping
down from his AIS post, Hagel ran as a Republican for the Senate in
Nebraska. AIS held the contract to count over 80 percent of
Nebraska’s votes. Underdog Hagel triumphed in both the primary and
the general elections, winning a majority in every demographic
group in the state, including African Americans, who hadn’t voted
Republican in modern times. When Hagel posted another landslide
victory in 2002, his opponent called for a recount.
It didn’t happen. The state’s contract with what was now
ES&S didn’t allow outsiders to examine the software used in the
machines. Such software has been judged in court to be the private
property of the voting-machine companies — ruling out all vetting
of it by governmental or party bodies suspecting fraud.
A groundswell of alarm about the voting-machine situation has
been spreading from state to state, with California going so far as
the ban the use of many Diebold machines in the fall election
because of security concerns. But the potential threat to the
democratic process may get worse before it gets better. ‘Many of
the new elections contracts give the responsibility for counting
the votes not to election officials but to the companies [that]
built and maintain the machines,’ Niman writes. ‘In other words,
the most sacred and tenuous process in U.S. democracy, counting the
votes, has been outsourced.’
Related Links:
