Rose: Worries about vote fraud

By John David Rose
Carolina Morning News

Think About It

In defense of electronic voting, Tom Hatfield, Beaufort County chairman of the Election Commission, pooh-poohed the potential for fraud.

Let's hope he hasn't bought those machines yet.

Last November a special election for House District 91 in Broward County, Fla., used the new electronic voting machines. When all the votes were counted, only 12 votes separated the winner from the loser.

But the machines "lost" 134 votes that were never recorded.

In one polling place, 20 more people registered to vote than the total count from those machines.

It was a one-race election. It's beyond belief that 134 people made a special effort to go to the polls, signed the register, then failed to vote.

Where did their votes go? Nobody knows, because there was no printed verification.

With the old punch card system election officials would know that people had voted, or at least tried to vote.

With these electronic voting machines, votes may disappear into cyberspace.

Most disturbing, there is no way election officials can determine whether the machines have been "fixed" to skew the results of an election, or simply suffered an electronic failure.

Testing ordered by various states has revealed numerous security problems. In an election setting, testers took less than 10 seconds to pick a machine's lock. They changed the wiring to produce an opposite result to the actual vote in less than a minute.

Off-site hackers needed less than 60 seconds to gain access through the modem to computers compiling vote counts and totally fictitious numbers into the tabulations.

Mr. Hatfield assured us that fraud would require "collusion on a statewide basis."

Actually, all it takes is a software "patch" installed by unwitting service people.

Days before Georgia's 2002 election, Diebold had its field techs install company-supplied patches to "fix" a problem with their machines.

Georgia election officials had not given permission for the software replacement. It hadn't been certified by testing authorities. One election official shrugged: "We have no idea what Diebold or anybody else does when they go in their warehouse and shut the door."

Did Saxby Chambliss really get more votes than the highly popular war-hero/amputee Max Cleland in Georgia's 2002 senate race? Did long-shot candidate Sonny Perdue really defeat a highly popular, 10 percent-ahead-in-the-polls Gov. Roy Barnes?

We'll never know for sure. In hindsight, it looks very fishy.

If one of Mr. Hatfield's Republicans loses a close race this coming November, will he call for a recount? Without a paper ballot, what will he count?

A hundred or more congressmen from both parties have signed on to Rep. Rush Holt's, D-N.J., bill requiring printed verification of all electronic votes.

The legislation allows a voter to verify his/her ions on a hard copy printout. After submitting the vote on the machine, the paper ballot is deposited in a locked ballot box, just like always. The paper ballot is the vote of record and available for a recount.

Call or write Mr. Hatfield (Beaufort County Election Commission, P.O. Drawer 1228, Beaufort, SC). Let him know that an election without a verifiable paper ballot is simply not acceptable in a democracy.

John David Rose is a long-time Hilton Head Islander and political observer.