Security concerns raised about vote-count software

By Keith Ervin
Seattle Times staff reporter  23 September 2004

King County and five other Washington counties will count votes in the November presidential election using software that has not been reviewed or approved by the federal government's independent testing laboratories.

The modified software, provisionally certified by the state Secretary of State's Office, was first used in last week's primary election. Three voting-equipment companies made what are described as minor changes to their software to comply with Washington's new primary.

State and county officials said there were no problems with the software in the primary, but critics of electronic-voting systems said the changes make the presidential election more vulnerable to fraud.

Critics also said they saw other security problems at King County election headquarters during the count of votes last week. Those observers said they were concerned about a "crash" of the central tabulating computer, transmission of poll results by modem and failure to guard floppy disks that were ed into the central vote-tabulating computer.

Election officials said that those fears are unfounded, that manual recounts in three precincts have validated results and that further steps are being taken to verify the vote count.

Official reassurances have done little to satisfy activists such as Bev Harris, executive director of Renton-based Black Box Voting, a group that has raised questions about the reliability of electronic voting, and Port Ludlow resident Ellen Theisen, executive director of VotersUnite.

Theisen said the use of provisionally certified software for the presidential election provides "a perfect opportunity" for election fraud by a programmer working for one of the voting-equipment vendors.

Paul Miller, elections-information specialist for the Secretary of State's Office, said it would be riskier to switch back to the old, fully certified software for the Nov. 2 election.

"We believe that it is far wiser to use the same system than to try to pull it out, install a new system and do the testing that should be done to ensure that it has been installed correctly," Miller said.

He said the modified software was tested extensively by state and local election officials. 
 
King County elections director Dean Logan said he agreed with the state's decision that counties would stick with the revised software in the presidential election. King County will begin using the software Saturday to build Nov. 2 ballots.

Logan said the accuracy of the primary vote was verified in manual recounts last week of three precincts chosen by representatives of the Democratic, Libertarian and Republican parties. King County has 2,616 precincts.

Logan said many states don't require federal certification of voting equipment. Six counties — Chelan, King, Kitsap, Klickitat, Pierce and Snohomish — used software in the primary that hasn't been certified by the federal Election Assistance Commission. Those counties used a "consolidated" primary ballot instead of separate ballots for each political party.

Consolidated-ballot software written for Yakima County by a different manufacturer has been federally certified.

Counties using four separate ballots — one for each of three political parties and one for nonpartisan voters — did not need to have their software modified.

Three suppliers of election equipment weren't able to rewrite software for consolidated ballots in time for federal certification before the primary. Those ballots differ from ballots in other states because Washington's new primary law doesn't allow partisan votes to be counted unless voters declare a party preference.

Black Box Voting has alleged that King County's central computer "crashed" on election night. Logan described the problem as a "momentary" glitch in which the election-management program shut down unexpectedly but the computer did not have to be rebooted. He said no votes were lost.

Andy Stephenson, associate director of Black Box Voting and an election-night observer, said two other "glaring security breaches" left King County's vote count vulnerable to tampering:

• Election results from around the county were sent electronically to the central computer. Modem transmissions for two precincts took about an hour each, an occurrence that has not yet been explained, Stephenson said.

• Floppy disks were carried back and forth during the night between the central computer room to a nearby room where election results were posted on the Web. The disks, which were periodically ed into the central computer, could have been replaced by an observer with disks containing malicious code, Stephenson said.

"Bev [Harris] and I could have owned that election if we had wanted to," Stephenson said.

Harris and Stephenson were in Washington, D.C., yesterday holding news conferences to support their claim that vote counts on Diebold Election Systems computers such as those used in King County can be altered using Microsoft Visual Basic code through modems or floppy disks.

Diebold's marketing director, Mark Radke, called Black Box Voting's accusations "ludicrous" and "ridiculous," noting that election-night tallies are unofficial numbers that later are subjected to rigorous auditing.

Logan rejected Stephenson's claim that observers were left in the computer room on election night without any county election staff members present, and he challenged the claim that the election could have been rigged by an observer.

In the unlikely event there were any tampering with election results, Logan said, the fraud would be detected when precinct votes were compared to the central computer's report of precinct votes during canvassing.

Representatives of the King County Republican and Democratic parties said their observers in the computer room reported no breaches and said they have found Logan responsive to suggestions for change.