Scary Voting Facts
I just saw a clip of a show from last December that scares the pants off of me.
This show was a CNBC show, called "Topic A with Tina Brown", and on it, Howard Dean was guest hosting, and the guest for the day was Bev Harris from a group called Black Box Voting ( www.blackboxvoting.org, which I haven't yet checked out).
Anyway, this woman showed Howard Dean in 90 seconds how to hack an election in a totally untraceable way. And in states that have voting machines which leave no paper trail, there's no way to recount the vote.
Basically, it involved having access to one central computer to which the various districts external voting machines reported. An un-encrypted database on a Windows machine holds the results, and opening that database using MS Excel or MS Access, it is absolutely trivial (according to this clip) to change all of the numbers around, then save the database.
Now if you go into the main voting administrators window, the votes have been changed, and since you didn't at any point open the database USING the official tools (except to check it at the end), there is no trail that anything was changed. There is just a new reality.
This holds really scary possibilities, both in terms of this past election and future ones.
Now, there is a bill before the Senate Judiciary Committee to require all voting ballots to be one of three types: Hand counted paper ballots, optical scan machines reading "SAT" style paper ballots, or electronic machines which produced a paper backup, which voters would confirm, and which would provide a paper trail.
This bill apparently has enough signatories (co-sponsors) right now to pass, and yet the Senate leadership are not allowing it out of committee or onto the floor for a vote.
The conspiracy theorists on the Left Wing side of the aisle note that Diebold (maker of many voting machines) CEO Walden O'Dell told Ohio Republicans in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
They further posit that the reason Bill Frist will not allow this to come to a vote is that he knows that this is an ace in the Republican pocket.
I'm not sure where I stand. On the one hand, that's pretty seriously into the conspiracy theory side of things. And yet, politicians on both sides have done sleazier things, and if it's THAT easy to change the results of an election, untraced, can we really believe that someone won't do it?
What reason could there possibly be, in a nation that prides itself as being the model of democracy, and regularly criticizes other elections for irregularities, to block reform designed to prevent exactly those sorts of irregularities? What motive could Bill Frist possibly have in preventing this from coming to a vote, when it already has enough sponsoring Senators to pass, even if no non-sponsoring Senator votes for it?
That’s the insidious thing about the Ohio vote this year. At least in 2000 in Florida, there were paper ballots to recount. They probably still exist somewhere, if someone wants to go and re-count them themselves (several groups have already done so). In Ohio, there’s nothing but Diebold’s word that the election counts we were given are representative, even though (as has been widely reported), exit polls were off from official tallies in unprecedented amounts.
I’m not trying to say President Bush didn’t win the election. I’m saying that shouldn’t we have a system where if someone wants to claim that, there’s some evidence to the contrary, besides some electronic voting machines that, based on this interview by Howard Dean, could be hacked, untraceably, by anyone given two minutes alone with the machine?
Copyright © July 6, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net
posted by Liam at 7/06/2005 02:58:00 PM
3 Comments:
Liam, computer voting scares the hell out of me. On the one hand I love the convenience but on the other, the ability of hackers, sneaks, and crooks to use them to manipulate the outcome of any contest scares me. I think MUCH needs to be done before we depend totally on the computer system;but on the other hand, many states do it already with solid, satisfactory outcomes. Change is scary!
Wednesday, July 06, 2005 10:07:00 PM
My concern is can we really be certain that the results are "solid and satisfactory" without a paper trail?
And just because it's been done correctly a few times doesn't mean that, as easy as it apparently is to change things completely undetected, it won't be misused in the future.
The fact is, it doesn't need to be huge. Take a state like Ohio, could have gone either way. Swing state, really made the difference in this election, you don't have to go in and make it a landslide for one candidate or the other, just shift 3 or 4% of votes one way or the other could spell the difference. A large enough margin to be decisive, small enough to be within (or close to) the margin of error of the exit polls.
The concern is that the company that is MAKING these machines is run by a man who publically said he was committed to delivering a state's electoral votes to one candidate, and one party. It would be hard, I admit, to find a completely apolitical company to manufacture the machines, but there's biased and then there's making a statement which, without too much imagination, can be read to be saying he's willing to fudge the vote if it'll get his guy elected.
In the age of close votes (I can't remember the last time we had a President elected by a significant majority of the country, or even a significant majority of those who voted), it doesn't take widespread tampering to change the results of the election. It just takes a few tens of thousands of votes in a key state or two. I'm sure there are lots of ways these can be accomplished, but the idea that it can be done from one computer, in 90 seconds, with no trace or way of proving that it ever happened, as long as there is no paper trail, we will not ever be sure that the election results are legitimate.
Now, on the other side of the issue, I recognize that when the country is split nearly 50/50 between the candidates, in the grand scheme of things, a slight tip in one way or the other isn't a huge tragedy, certainly it isn't a thwarting of the clear will of the masses. But still, if the country is split nearly 50/50, then by rights that ought to be reflected in the election results over time. Tipping any one election might not significantly alter the will of the masses, but tipping ten or fifteen senatorial races changes the whole balance of power in the senate. Tipping several Presidential elections in a row prevents the natural (and I would say essential) checks and balances that a back-and-forth of the power pendulum affords us. Normally, one party has power for 10-20 years then it switches, and the other party spends a batch of time pulling us in the other direction, and as a result we always stay within a certain distance from the middle which is where a roughly 50/50 split of society says we ought to be.
But I'm going on and on again. Of course, it is my blog, so I suppose that's to be expected, but it's late, so I should stop now.
Liam.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005 10:22:00 PM
OK, just for interest, I looked up the voting percentages (popular vote, not electoral college) for the last 60 years or so and the last time the margin of victory was more than 10% of cast votes was Reagan's second term, when he won 58.8% to 40.5%.
Since then, Bush Sr. won by 7.8%. Clinton won by 5.6% and 8.5%, and Bush won by -0.5% and 2.4%.
The 2.4% is the smallest margin of victory for an incumbent President in the history of our nation. (Of course, that discounts incumbents who lost. Mathematically, a "margin of victory" of -5.6%, when his father lost his second bid for the office, is lower than 2.4%).
2004 was also the first time in 16 years that the winner in a Presidential race took in over 50% of the votes cast, although that's due in large part to strong showings by Perot in '92 and '96 and a weak but measurable 2.7% for Nader (and a popular vote loss for the winner) in 2000.
My point, though, was that we do live in the era of close races, with a "clear majority" being a few percentage points, and the results in Ohio (widely considered the deciding state) hinged on less than 120,000 out of about 5.6 million cast. It would not have required wholesale or even implausible changes by someone with access to the voting machines to have changed these results.
I still find it odd that for the first time since exit polling has been widespread, the exit polls were off by well beyond the margin of error (exit polling indicated a 3% margin of victory for Kerry, final counts gave a 2.4% or 2.5% (depending on how you round) margin of victory to Bush).
I'm not going to be a conspiracy theorist and say that the election was stolen, but my issue with the lack of paper trail is that there's no way we could ever know. There's no way someone can file a freedom of information act request and count the ballots themselves.
That's the problem with paper-trail-less voting systems. Sure, there are other ways to commit voter fraud, and sure they've been done before, but we don't have to make it EASY.
The old fashioned way, if you wanted to steal an election, you had to sign up lots of dead people on the roles, hire homeless people to pose as those dead people and vote your way, etc. You had to WORK for it.
The way it is now, all I'd need is a moment or two's access to the main tallying computer for a state (I could even hack in, if they were stupid enough to leave it networked to the internet) and change the course of history.
Truly a scary proposition.
Liam.
Thursday, July 07, 2005 10:06:00 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home