All-mail voting may cut fraud

By Keith Ervin   Seattle Times    31 December 2005

King County Executive Ron Sims' proposal for all-mail voting could reduce the possibility of fraud by election workers, a leading critic of electronic voting says.

Bev Harris, founder and executive director of Renton-based Black Box Voting, said voting by mail would eliminate more than 500 tamper-prone voting machines. It also would allow the county to buy more secure high-speed counting equipment, she said.

Sims last week proposed to simplify elections in 2006 or 2007 by ending poll voting at all but a handful of regional centers. He cited voters' trend toward mail voting, with 70 percent of county voters casting absentee ballots in November's general election.

Sims has asked Elections Director Dean Logan to submit a plan for mail voting by Jan. 31. The switch would require approval by the County Council.

Harris, the nation's best-known promoter of improved safeguards against election rigging on computerized voting equipment, will meet with Sims Wednesday to discuss ways of improving election security in King County.

Logan and Harris have disagreed often on election-security issues, but they agree on one thing: The county should acquire high-volume, digital-scan counting machines if it becomes the largest vote-by-mail county in the nation.

"There's no question that for a county the size of King County we would need a higher-speed tabulation system than we have now. She's right. That's the next iteration," Logan said.

Harris likes the new digital technology because the counting machines would record an electronic image of every ballot cast ? images she said citizens could review to verify the vote counts reported by the county.

"This is the best example in voting of how you can actually use technology to make it more transparent and also, I think, make it more efficient. It's wonderful," Harris said.

The state Republican Party has opposed all-mail voting in King County, saying signature-verification procedures now in use are inadequate to confirm a voter's identity.

  
  
Harris said all-mail balloting would eliminate the county's "most serious vulnerability" to a rigged election: the 500-plus polling-place inspectors who take voting machines home for up to a week before each election. Inspectors are responsible for delivering voting machines, ballots and other supplies to polling places on Election Day.

The security of those voting machines, manufactured by Diebold Election Systems, became a national issue this month when a computer-security expert used a credit-card-sized memory card to reverse the outcome of a simulated election in Leon County, Fla.

The mock election was arranged by Black Box Voting.

Diebold and King County officials say the Florida test ignored a number of safeguards that are designed to prevent and detect vote tampering.

There is no evidence that memory cards have been maliciously reprogrammed in a real election. Cards can't be removed from voting machines without breaking a numbered plastic seal.

But Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho said the mock election was disturbing because neither the Diebold voting machine nor the Diebold central tabulator showed any evidence of tampering.

"Quite frankly, this is a hole I could drive a Mack truck through," Sancho said. "I could rig elections, leave no fingerprints, and how would the voters ever know?"

Sancho said Leon County is switching from Diebold to rival vendor Election Systems & Software, and plans to discontinue sending voting machines home with poll workers.

In the mock election, Finnish security expert Harri Hursti reprogrammed a memory card in a Diebold AccuVote machine so that it reported election results that differed from the ballots that were put into the machine.

Harris said, after observing King County's ion of memory cards into AccuVote machines before the Nov. 8 election, that controls were inadequate to prevent election workers from secretly replacing some legitimate cards with tampered cards.

Diebold spokesman David Bear said results were altered in the Leon County mock election only because officials there violated standard election practices by giving the testing team "complete and unfettered access" to a counting machine.

Although some people "are going to believe conspiracy theories," Bear said, "we have to believe what history tells us. The systems are safe, they're secure, they're accurate. They've been validated by voters, by election officials, by institutes of higher learning, by the market."

King County Elections Assistant Director Sherril Huff Menees said it is "a pretty far-fetched supposition" to suggest that anyone could throw an election without getting caught.

Paper ballots are used for manual recounts of three precincts chosen by the major parties after every election, and recounts of all affected precincts are also required by law in close races.

Diebold has been a target of electronic-voting critics since 2003, when Harris discovered computer source code for the company's voting equipment on the Internet. She said some other manufacturers' voting equipment also may have serious security problems.

Wally O'Dell resigned this month as president and CEO of Diebold Inc., parent company of Diebold Election Systems, after stock prices fell.