Critics say vote computer count can be easily hacked

By Julia Malone
Cox News Service
Thursday, September 23, 2004

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, punctuated its charge with a video showing "Baxter the Chimp" hamming it up as he punched a couple of computer keys that wiped out the votes on a computer vote tabulating program.

Bev Harris, executive director of the citizens action group, said the program was the same used throughout Georgia, which two years ago became the first state to adopt paper-less touch-screen voting statewide.

At the demonstration here, Harris asked a Georgian, former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, to follow the instructions and demonstrate the ease of "hacking" into the program, which was made by Diebold Elections Systems, Inc., the nation's biggest provider of electronic voting equipment.

McKinney moved the mouse and punched a few buttons as the computer file vanished. "This is incredible," said the Democrat, who is running Nov. 2 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 fraudulent voting machinery. In her own recent primary, she said that she had a corps of poll watchers who noted 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, which is based in McKinney, Texas.

"In a real election environment, people don't have unfettered access to the system," Bear said.

In a written statement, Diebold said that "no validated security breach has ever been recorded" in their company's vote counting system and denied that the program can be easily accessed without security pass codes.

Harris N. Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, the trade association for tech companies, also cited the past two decades of success in electronic voting.

The BlackBoxVoting group's criticism "undermines public confidence in the election system, makes lower voter turnouts more likely, and increases the odds that jurisdictions will keep older voting systems like punch cards in place, regardless of their inadequate performance," Miller said.

And Kara Sinkule, spokeswoman for the Secretary of State Cathy Cox in Georgia, ridiculed the opponents' 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 that Georgia has "multiple, overlapping security" elements to safeguard its system.

Nevertheless, voter concerns about electronic voting have persisted in recent months, as many localities install high tech machinery through federal grants under the Help America Vote Act, which was passed to avert a repeat of the 2000 vote count controversy. 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 for a primary earlier this month for the first time without incident.

Other states have stopped short of requiring paper ballots for the Nov. 2 election.

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 Election Day just weeks away, she acknowledged that her group has yet to find a lawmaker willing to be the chief sponsor.