POLITICS

TWO DECADES OF VOTE COUNT NEGLIGENCE

IN THE 1980s, two journalists - David Burnham of the NY Times and Ronnie
Dugger writing in the New Yorker - laid out the fundamentals of the
problems the nation would face with computerized voting. Although
politicians, election officials and media treat this as a new crisis,
Burnham in 1985 and Dugger in 1985 gave them more than adequate warning.
Why were these serious warnings so universally ignored?

The full articles are on the web. Here are just a few excerpts:
DAVID BURNHAM, NY TIMES, JULY 29, 1985 The computer program that was
used to count more than one-third of the votes cast in the Presidential
election last year is very vulnerable to manipulation and fraud,
according to expert witnesses in court actions challenging local and
Congressional elections in three states. . .
"There is a massive potential for problems," said Gary L. Greenhalgh,
director of the International Center on Election Law and Administration,
a consulting group in Washington. He added that the problem with
computer-assisted voting systems was that they "centralized the
opportunity for fraud.". . .
John H. Kemp, president of Computer Election Systems, said in a
telephone interview that he absolutely denied the company was involved
in fraudulent schemes. County officials involved in the cases have also
categorically denied participation in fraud. But Mr. Kemp also said that
any computer system could be tampered with. "It is totally economically
unfeasible to have a fraud-proof system," he said. Such a system, he
suggested, might cost $1 billion.
Mr. Kemp said that while there were some differences in the programs
used by various jurisdictions, the company's fraud-prevention controls
had remained "essentially unchanged" in recent years. He added that the
company's six or seven programmers "always are looking for ways to
prevent fraud.". . .

Eva Waskell, a Reston, Va., writer on computer and scientific matters
who was among the first to become aware of the court cases pending
against the company, said she was astonished because it appeared that
"even when local officials learned of the problems, little apparent
effort was made to correct them." . . .
The allegations that the Computer Election system was open to
manipulation were supported by two other experienced computer
consultants who independently examined material obtained in the pending
court cases for The New York Times.
http://www.newsgarden.org/columns/burnham1.shtml

RONNIE DUGGER, NEW YORKER 1988 - 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.". . .

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.

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.
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. . .

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 Corporation 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.". . .

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. . .

http://www.newsgarden.org/columns/dugger.shtml

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BRITISH MPs TO USE INSTANT RUNOFF TO RATE OPTIONS FOR LORDS

INDEPENDENT, UK - Eighty per cent of the members of a new-style House of
Lords could be elected under a plan backed by the Cabinet to break the
logjam over reform of the second chamber. In an unprecedented move, when
MPs vote on the Lords shake-up in the new year, they will rate the
different options in order of preference so that one proposal eventually
enjoys majority support after second preferences have been
redistributed.

The method, similar to the alternative vote system used in elections in
Australia, will ensure that the Commons reaches a clear view on how the
second chamber should be modernized. Three years ago, hopes of reform
were sunk when all the options were rejected by MPs. . .

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2026810.ece

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