?Will Your Vote Count?

By Rick Dawson and Loni Smith McKown
I-Team 8

Election returns used to be tallied late into the night. Today, we want instant results. But at what cost??

I-Team 8's investigation reveals serious concerns about accuracy, reliability and security of modern voting technology. It leads to a question at the very heart of democracy: Will our votes count?

?Those of us who work with computing are perhaps most aware of the potential failures and the manipulations of the systems,? said Eugene Spafford, Purdue computer expert.

The first time Marion County's optical-scan machines were used in a general election, but it still took eight weeks to find out who won. ?They're far more accurate because you don't have human beings making tallies,? said Doris Anne Sadler, Marion County clerk.

Are they really more accurate? I-Team 8 conducted our own test, with Sadler's cooperation. We marked 50 ballots from the last general election, chose five machines at random and had them tally ten ballots apiece. Each optical-scan machine counted votes correctly.

?So we take the individual results from each card and accumulate them into one place so we can give you an overall total for each race,? said Wendy Orange, ES&S project manager.

We compared results. Something happened when totaling the results from the five machines. One computer counted incorrectly, leading to a disparity of ten votes for one candidate. ?It could be that I just didn't copy a file correctly to the hard drive,? said Orange.

Had this been a real election, we're told there would have been more quality control. ?We run that test several times, prior to the election so that we're assured everything would accumulate correctly,? said Orange.

System Glitches

Incidents like this are referred to as glitches.? Human error or machine malfunction, they're still mistakes that could affect the count.

Purdue University's Eugene Spafford is one of the nation's leading computer security experts.? ?With the voting machines, it's no single instance that is, by itself, great cause for concern, but it's the number of them that continue and the possibility for more,? he said.

In Texas, touch-screens either failed to respond to the touch or appeared to register a vote for the opposing candidate. In Florida, both optical-scan and touch-screen voting machines failed to read or record all votes cast.

Even in Boone County, Indiana, initial results on push-button voting machines showed 144,000 votes cast in a county with 19,000 registered voters.

What's the Excuse?

Glitches are reported in practically every U.S. state. What's the excuse?

?There might be what you might call a ?glitch? but that may just be something in terms of procedure,? said Ken Carbullido, ES&S.

?Instead of saying we have a technological difficulty, people point directly towards fraud, or they say there's something going on,? said Steve Shamo, MicroVote.

?It's a double-edged sword. As long as humans are involved, as long as we have humans are involved, it's unreasonable to expect a perfect system,? said Todd Rokita, Indiana secretary of state.

But it's not unreasonable to expect a secure system. ?If an organization wanted to influence an election, one of the places to start would be either bribe or blackmail employees of a voting firm to very carefully crafted backdoors into the software that would allow them somehow to manipulate the vote,? said Spafford.

?With the human interaction in the process, it's going to be very difficult for some programmer theoretically to engineer the circuitry on a machine to do something that that voter didn't want them to do, with all the human checks along the way,? said Rokita.

Then how could electronic voting machines be rigged?? We asked Spafford to show us how an election could be rigged. ?We put together a very simplistic example of how a computer system can be manipulated,? he said.

Election Rigged in Half an Hour

Spafford said one of his undergraduates put together a rigged system in about half an hour. The student rigged a system where every third vote for one candidate actually goes to the other candidate. ?Were you to ask us to design a program to do this and hide the code that changed the results, we could do that given about three days? time,? said Spafford.

Hidden code, like a game buried in a spreadsheet program, could be planted in a voting machine and stay invisible, altering the count only on Election Day.? ?And the numbers can't be re-counted. All you can do is re-read them. The whole notion of a recount goes away - which is a very good way to hide if you are actually attempting to alter an election,? said Spafford.

Voting equipment and programs have to pass tests before being used.? ?With the certification levels that we have, with the process that we have, I think it will be very difficult if not impossible to change the turnout of an election,? said Rokita.

But computer experts tell the I-Team federal testing standards are not tough enough. ?The independent testing associations do not include detailed testing at a level that would find code that is intended to be hidden,? said Spafford.

Certification

Our investigation reveals there's no testing at the state level. To become certified, companies just apply.

Sometimes uncertified equipment gets delivered. That was the case with this machine Marion County bought to count absentee ballots. It was not used in November and couldn't be used in the eight-week-long recount.

Rokita told I-Team he didn?t know of any uncertified system being used in Indiana. But two weeks after that interview, the Indiana Election Commission discovered three counties had used voting machines with uncertified programming.

?It's not possible to build a system that's a hundred percent secure against all threats. It is possible to build a system where any attempt to subvert it is likely to be caught and its effects are likely to be constrained to a small area,? said Spafford.

Indiana's primary is just months away. The stakes are even larger in the November general election: Indiana governor and President of the United States.

Rokita says we?re better off now than in 2000. But Spafford leaves this warning: ?If the election is close, if it's controversial, the use of the electronic technology is only going to make the debate and perhaps the accusations that much stronger and longer lasting. And that's not something we really need in this country right now.?