Critics of computer voting sound alarm on tampering

By JULIA MALONE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/22/04

WASHINGTON — The computer systems that will count roughly half the ballots cast on Election Day are so vulnerable to hackers that almost anyone could rig the results, critics said Wednesday.

The group BlackBoxVoting.org illustrated its charge with a video showing "Baxter the Chimp" hamming it up as he punched a couple of computer keys that wiped out the totals on a vote-tabulating program.

Bev Harris, executive director of the citizens action group and a computer voting critic who has written a book on the subject, said the program was the same used throughout Georgia, which two years ago became the first state to adopt paperless touch-screen voting statewide.

At the demonstration, Harris asked former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from DeKalb County, to follow instructions and demonstrate the ease of hacking into the program made by Diebold Elections Systems Inc., the nation's biggest provider of electronic voting equipment.

McKinney moved the mouse and punched a few buttons, and the computer file vanished.

"This is incredible," said McKinney, who is running in the Nov. 2 election to regain her old seat.

She said she came to the event "not only as a concerned voter but as a candidate" who could be affected by malfunctioning or fraudulently operated voting machinery. In the July primary, which she won handily despite a crowded field, she said her poll watchers observed problems such as a loss of power, overheated machines and machines that had not been properly set at zero at the start of the day.

"Those problems pale in comparison to what is being demonstrated here today," McKinney said.

BlackBoxVoting and a number of other activist groups, both conservative and liberal, have been sounding alarms about the increasing reliance on computers to count ballots, especially when there are no paper ballots for a recount.

As a temporary fix, Harris urged a return to old-fashioned paper ballots for Nov. 2.

Defenders and manufacturers of the electronic voting systems dismissed the Wednesday demonstrations as fantasy and called the concerns raised by critics baseless.

"What was presented was analogous to a magic show," said David Bear, spokesman for Diebold. "In a real election environment, people don't have unfettered access to the system."

Kara Sinkule, spokeswoman for Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox, ridiculed the display.

"If you allowed a monkey access to the cockpit of an airplane — without any physical security whatsoever — he could possibly cause it to crash," Sinkule said. She said Georgia has "multiple, overlapping security" elements to safeguard its system.

Cox has repeatedly said that Georgia has a series of exhaustive checks and balances before, during and after an election to catch any tampering with the machines.

Nevertheless, voter concerns about electronic voting have grown in recent months, as many localities install the machinery through federal grants under the Help America Vote Act. The chief worry is that if a vote is very close and hotly contested, there will be no paper ballots for a recount.

Recently, Nevada responded by installing the first statewide touch-screen voting system that also prints out a paper ballot. The system was used in a primary earlier this month for the first time without incident.

Other states, including Georgia, have stopped short of requiring paper ballots.

Joan Krawitz, co-founder of the National Ballot Integrity Project, said her group wants Congress to pass legislation requiring paper ballots for the presidential and congressional elections this year. But with the election just weeks away, she acknowledged that her group has yet to find a lawmaker willing to be the chief sponsor.