A Bonanza for Errors

By DER SPIEGEL

Published: January 5, 2004

America's Electronic Voting Machines Are Susceptible to Manipulation

Walden O'Dell is entitled to call himself a "Pioneer." The business leader from North Canton, Ohio, has qualified for the honorific because he collected 600,000 dollars for George W. Bush's election campaign. He accompanied this with a pledge to do everything possible to help Ohio "deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004.

But with this statement O'Dell has caused more of a stir than he could have wished. For the "Pioneer" is also chief executive of Diebold Inc., a company that among other things manufactures voting machines. About 40,000 of these are installed in 37 states and are supposed to record and count votes on November 2. Diebold is in second place, right behind the market leader, Election Systems and Software which achieved its top ranking under Chuck Hagel before he, a Republican, was elected senator from Nebraska.

Recently the states have left decisions about the technological side of voting procedures to private companies. It is shocking enough that the giants of the trade are vying to get close to the government. But in addition, O'Dell has inadvertently called attention to how susceptible the machines are to manipulation.

In principle, voting machines work like ATMs: The voter touches the name of his candidate on the screen. But instead of receiving some sort of receipt at the end of the transaction as he does from a money machine, he gets no receipt at all for the vote he has cast. Thus there is no way to check whether the machine has really recorded what it was supposed to have recorded.

And discrepancies are not rare, as was revealed a year and a half ago during spot checks performed in Dallas and Georgia: in thousands of cases the computerized voting machines had either allocated votes to the wrong candidate or not counted them at all. The lame excuse was that the screen had wrongly calibrated itself because of frequent use.

In the meantime, legions of computer freaks have tackled both the computers' software and hardware, discovering plenty of sources for errors. Since the exact time of the transaction is not recorded as it is with ATMs, some sinister forces could arrange ex post facto for a desired result without attracting attention during the customarily low voter turnout. Diebold even admitted that the database had not been encoded before the counting of the votes - a windfall for hackers.

Ironically, the electronic voting machines are supposed to prevent a repetition of the embarrassments that occurred in Florida in 2000, and which tinged the election of Bush with suspicion. Antiquated equipment was unable to read voting cards that had not been properly punched - and consequently they were not counted.

The U.S. Congress is spending just under four billion dollars on modernization of the voting process. A changeover to the digital era will be complete by 2006. By November 2nd this year, new computer screens should be operational at about 20 percent of all polling places.

Now Diebold is thrashing about with all sorts of inadequate explanations for the defective software. Yet the company could learn a lesson from its small, keen competitor. The Avante company combines digital high tech with old-fashioned paper statements. In this way each voter can make sure that the computer has really done what the voter wanted it to do - and manipulation is, at least for the most part, made more difficult.

[translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo]