November election results vulnerable to tampering
California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson and investigators may have lots to do to ensure voting integrity.
By Tom Elias   The Daily Breeze   29 September 2005

Skeptics began warning that vote counting might not be reliable in some parts of California this fall almost as soon as it became clear that plenty of counties will be using electronic voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems in the November special election.

Never mind that no one has ever proved a single electronic vote was ever stolen or hacked anywhere in America.

Because many machines in use this fall lack voter-verified paper trails and have not been certified by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson for use in next year's primary election, citizen groups like the California Election Protection Coalition warn any results this fall will be unreliable, no matter what county officials may say.

That would be especially true if there were any repeats of what happened in July in San Diego, where poll workers took home optical scan voting machines with removable memory cards for several days prior to that city's mayoral primary election. Whatever is on those memory cards at the end of Election Day gets loaded into a county's central vote-counting computer. It could have been a case of garbage in, garbage out.

"Any unscrupulous person could have loaded whatever data they wanted into a memory card," said voting accuracy activist David Bayer of Davis via a mass e-mailing.

The potential plainly exists for tampering elsewhere, too. Since reliable vote counting is the basic fundament of any democracy, the basis for acceptance of the outcome by citizens who voted for an election "loser" can easily be lost when questions arise.

And now there is solid reason for voters on apparent losing sides to remain skeptical even after paper trails become mandatory next year. For a report by the nonpartisan voting rights group Black Box Voting has demonstrated that the most common counting machines used with Diebold systems are vulnerable to several forms of tampering.

The study, based on performance during a recent election in Tucson, Ariz., concluded that "This design is ... akin to a house with an unlockable revolving door." What's more, the hardware architecture that leaves the vote-counting machines open to tampering is present even in the newest model of the machines.

"Based solely on publicly available documents, new ... versions seem to pave the road for outside attacks in addition to attacks (with) some level of help from an insider."

The problems involve optical scanners, which read paper ballots and feed the results onto memory cards. There is a paper trail in case anyone demands a recount. But recounts are rare and often expensive.

With Diebold optical scan systems, voters use black felt pens to mark ovals next to the names of their favored candidates. Ballots are scanned and counted at each precinct. Later the totals are transmitted to central computers.

The Black Box report says some of the misdeeds possible under this system include:

? Pre-loading information onto memory cards and then removing all evidence that they have been preloaded.

? Setting up a single memory card to mimic votes from many precincts at once when transmitting votes to the central tabulator.

? Production of false paper trails to match fake results.

In short, the group contends that Diebold voting machinery, the most popular of today's brands, can be fixed to provide whatever outcome the fixers desire, right up to the point of falsifying paper trails designed specifically to keep vote-counting honest.

Plainly, with California backing Democrat John Kerry, no one falsified the presidential outcome here last year. But that doesn't mean this year's results and next year's could not be manipulated. All of which should give McPherson and any investigators he hires to ensure voting integrity plenty to do this fall and next spring.