Voting machine decision for Athens County is coming down to the wire

By John Lasker

Athens NEWS Contributor

With less than 11 months until the presidential election, the Athens County Board of Elections is set to make a critical vote on the future of the county's voting technology.

On Jan. 14, the four-member Board of Elections is slated to vote on the voting-machine vendor that will replace most of the county's antiquated "punch card" machines with state-of-the-art voting "kiosks."

For every 200 registered voters in Athens County, one machine will be purchased, according to officials. The current punch-card system has been in use since 1978.

Purchasing voting machines probably appeared cut-and-dried not too long ago. But after the Florida voting fiasco in 2000, the decision to go with a certain voting machine is anything but incidental. And now that most of America has become aware of recent concerns over voting machines, the local vote has become even more critical.

State law stipulates that every Ohio county must have four board of election members, two Democrats and two Republicans. The two Democrats for Athens County are local attorney Susan Gwinn, and Bruce Mitchell, publisher of this paper. Gwinn also chairs the county Democratic Party. The GOP is represented by Howard Stevens, a veteran and former employee of American Electric Power, and Rich Mottl, who once worked for the Ohio Lottery.

"This vote is extremely significant, especially if we don't make the right choice," said Gwinn. "There's a lot of money invested here."

The choice for Athens County has been narrowed to two vendors, said Gwinn Diebold Inc. of Canton, Ohio, and ES&S (Elections Systems and Software), of Nebraska. Both companies are leading manufacturers of touch-screen and optical-scan voting machines.

Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's office, the lead office for all of Ohio's 88 boards of elections, is handling most of the specifics related to the statewide modernization. The rest of Ohio's counties are also voting for a vendor before a Jan. 15 deadline. (Diebold issued a news release on Monday, announcing that 16 Ohio counties, including nearby Morgan and Perry, already had preliminarily ed Diebold for their electronic voting machines.)

"The process is really being dictated by the secretary of state," said Athens County Elections Director Kathy Kyle, a registered Republican.

Blackwell's office will broker each of Ohio's 88 county deals with the vendor that wins each county's vote. Blackwell's office is also handling all of the specifics of each deal: The type of machine a vendor offers, cost, and the number of machines a county will receive, to name a few, said Gwinn and Kyle.

"They pretty much say what we get, when we get it," Gwinn said. Blackwell, a Republican, even decided on the Jan. 14 statewide vote for choosing a system, said Gwinn. "We're required by J. Kenneth Blackwell to vote whether we like it or not."

The Secretary of State's office admits they're handling much of the responsibility behind the statewide upgrade, but considering the complexity of purchasing such expensive and consequential machines, it's in the best interest of Ohio's 88 counties to allow a state office to offer an assist.

"Initially, we were negotiating with 10 different voting system vendors from all over the country," said Carlo LoParo, press secretary for the Secretary of State's office. "We've narrowed it down to four it's been an extensive vendor ion process."

Athens County has been allowed to narrow those four to two.

At the start of negotiations, many of the vendors were asking roughly $5,000 for each of their machines. The secretary of state's office has whittled that number to $3,000 per machine, said LaParo, plus they've garnered service, maintenance and warranty agreements.

RECENT SIGNS FROM Blackwell's office, however, suggest the vote has one significant hitch.

The vote won't ensure when the machines will be implemented, even though a nationwide deadline to upgrade had been set for a month before the 2004 presidential vote. In early December, Blackwell's office decided that Ohio needs more time to research all security questions, and now the machines may not be implemented until 2006.

LoParo confirmed that the secretary of state's office has identified 57 security risks among the voting systems being offered by the state's four remaining vendors.

Blackwell's decision to delay implementation of the voting machines was also influenced by the mounting criticism of Diebold, acknowledged LoParo. Some critics coming from as disparate sources as a research team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a The New York Times columnist, and a whistleblower claim Diebold has been careless and even indifferent toward its voting machines' security measures. They cite evidence suggesting that Diebold machines are open to attack from computer hacking and vote rigging.

Offering more ammunition for conspiracy theorists was what Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell reportedly told guests attending a recent $10,000-a-plate fundraiser for President Bush at his Columbus home. According to a New York Times column by Paul Krugman, O'Dell pledged to help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to Bush next November.

In response, O'Dell in a recent Cleveland Plain Dealer interview maintained that his company has integrity and is devoted to making their voting machines as secure as possible.

Some advocacy groups, including the League of Women Voters of the United States, have downplayed the election fraud concerns relating to electronic voting. An article in the Dec. 24 Providence (R.I.) Phoenix quoted the LWV as saying, "It must be remembered that DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machines are not an election system unto themselves; they are simply an instrument within a complex election system. They key is to design an overall system that builds in multiple checks, making it improbable that the system will be tampered with."

ES&S also has come under fire. Its former executive is now Nebraska's Republican senator. Local Board of Elections member Susan Gwinn acknowledged that ES&S machines have similar security concerns as those raised about Diebold. However, ES&S has more experience than Diebold, which also manufactures ATMs, she said.

"ES&S has been making voting machines for 100 years," she said. "Diebold started making machines just a few years ago."

SO FAR, NONE OF THE FOUR ELECTION board members has revealed his or her choice, added Gwinn. If the vote is tied, the Secretary of State will make a county's decision.

The statewide modernization effort is being pushed along by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2001, which is allocating federal money to upgrade the nation's voting systems.

Early last summer, a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University issued a study, "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System," that was critical of Direct Recording Electronic voting machines made by Diebold Inc.

The researchers three from Johns Hopkins' Information Security Institute and one a Rice University professor found that Diebold machines could easily be compromised by computer hackers. The night before an election day, they said, a machine's code could be altered to count, for example, every vote cast for the Libertarian Party twice

Soon after the Johns Hopkins researchers released their report, an apparent hacker accessed some of Diebold's most sensitive computer files. Armed with an employee password, the whistleblower began leaking hundreds of documents to Bev Harris, an investigative journalist and voting-rights activist from Maryland.

Harris said the whistle-blower wasn't a true hacker or an employee, just someone with a "patriotic" conscience. "They knew it was important," said Harris, who's set to release a related book, "Black Box Voting."

Harris claims that so far a "staggering amount of incidents" have occurred where electronic voting machines such as Diebold's appeared to have miscounted, failed, or simply not counted a number of votes.

Harris said she discovered last summer an unsecured Diebold Web site used mainly by employees. The site was loaded with proprietary information concerning Diebold machines, said Harris, including designs on how to access a machine's programming code.

Asked what was on the site, Harris replied, "Just about everything a hacker needed to break in a Diebold machine six ways from Sunday."

Diebold has energetically denied the accusations of critics, including those included in the Johns Hopkins study. For the most part, the company says, that study is based on an obsolete computer code that's no longer used, and doesn't give the company credit for improving on its earlier models.

The Johns Hopkins study cited the main problem with DRE machines "is that the entire election hinges on the correctness, robustness and security of the software within the voting terminal.

"Should that code have security-relevant flaws, they might be exploitable either by unscrupulous voters or by malevolent insiders..."

Diebold, however, responded to this criticism, stating, "The software is only one part of a voting process. The totality of the software, hardware and the electoral process and procedures, which include certification and testing by election officials, is what safeguards the integrity of the election results."

The company suggested that the predictions of insider or voter sabotage of the system are outlandish. "To be true, this claim would require a conspiracy of unscrupulous voters or malevolent insiders, or a combination of the two," Diebold said in its response to the Johns Hopkins study. "The electoral process is designed in such a way that no single individual, or even a small group of individuals, can tamper with the election results."

The Johns Hopkins study recommends introducing a "voter-verifiable audit trail," where a printer spews out a record of the person's vote, essentially leaving a paper trial. Requiring some such "receipt" after voting is becoming a rallying cry of voters, politicians and public-interest groups concerned about electronic voting machines.

Last Wednesday, Ohio Sen. Teresa Fedor, D-Toledo, unveiled legislation to increase security measures surrounding the upcoming ion of voter-machine vendors. The measure mainly would require a permanent paper trail for each voting vendor used in all of Ohio's 88 counties.

In Diebold's response to calls for a permanent paper trial, the company pointed out that paper ballots have their own set of problems, which is the main reason for the call for electronic balloting. "This system essentially reduces an electronic system to a paper system, which has risks of its own," the company said.