Hightower Lowdown

W elcome to WallyWorld.
Like some combination of
Oz, Alice’s Wonderland,
and the Brothers Grimm,
it’s a fabulistic realm ripe
with political symbolism
and significance. In the futuristic Land of
Wally, elections take place in cyberspace, and
the voting process has been privatized.
Indeed, voting machines themselves are
owned and tightly controlled by a small group
of for-profit corporations. These corporate
machines “count” the votes and issue a cybertally
to declare the winner. The inner workings
of the machinery are a corporate secret--public
election officials are barred from examining
the computer code to see if any
flaws (or fraud) have been programmed
into the system. Even in cases where recounts are
ordered, only the corporate
owners get to peek inside the
computer’s innards.
In other words, in this magical
land, the keys to the kingdom have
been turned over to private electioneering
firms. Mere voters are simply
expected to “trust” the system . . .
and to moo contentedly as they
move through the corporate polling
booths.

But WallyWorld is no fable. It’s all
too real, and the place where it’s all
happening is right here in the U.S.
of A., where 30 states have already
turned over the people’s balloting to
a handful of these proprietary, profit-
seeking interests that reek with
conflicts of interest.
Meet Wally O’Dell. He is CEO of Diebold Inc., an
ATM-maker that has moved aggressively into what is
now known as the electronic-voting industry. Diebold
has rapidly become the second-largest purveyor of
“touch-screen” voting machines. Already, over
33,000 of Wally’s computers have been installed in
polling places across the country. This is interesting
for two big reasons: 1) Diebold keeps having “incidents”
with its machinery, leading to a growing concern
that the company is losing, or even stealing,
large numbers of our votes; and 2) Wally himself is
a rabidly partisan Republican.
How partisan is O’Dell? In August, he was a guest
at George W.’s ranchette down in Crawford, Texas,
where he and several other of Bush’s fund-raising
“Rangers” had a private tête-à-tête with the prez to
discuss how each of them would raise $200,000 or
more to keep their boy in the White House.
So excited was Wally to be part of Bush’s team
that he went home to Ohio and
promptly sent out letters to his
wealthy associates declaring that
he is “committed to helping Ohio
deliver its electoral votes to the
president next year.” He then
invited them to attend a
$10,000-a-plate Bush fund-raiser
at Cotswold Manor, his mansion
in a swank suburb of Columbus.
One day after this solicitation
hit the mail, Ohio’s Republican
Secretary of State moved to
qualify Wally’s Diebold to sell its
electronic-voting machines to the
state’s county officials.
You don’t need Karl Malden’s
nose to smell this stinker. What
we have here is a politically
biased corporation raising big
bucks for the guy whose votes
the corporation will be counting.
As Mark Twain said, “The difference
between fact and fiction is
that fiction must be believable.”
Unbelievably, the fact is that our
country is rushing pell-mell to the
corporatization of our most basic
democratic exercise: voting.

The fix

What wrong turn did our leaders
take from America’s straight
and true democratic path to lead
us into this fine fix? Initially, it
looked like a well-intentioned
turn. After the hanging-chad
debacle of the 2000 presidential
election in Florida, spooked
national, state, and local officials
were scrambling for a way to
reform the voting system.
Out of the darkness stepped
the most unlikely of caped crusaders:
corporations. Whispering
the magic word “computers,” corporate
lobbyists swarmed Capitol
Hill with promises that high-tech
was the path to true reform,
since electronic voting has no
chads to hang and, in fact, no
paper of any sort to “clog” the
machinery of democracy.
Thus was born HAVA--the Help
America Vote Act. It requires
states to replace mechanical voting
machines with touch-screen
systems, and Congress has allocated
nearly $4 billion for the
technology, systems, and future
upgrades that will soon have all
of us balloting in cyberspace.
That’s a serious chunk of
change to divvy up among the
privatizers. Besides Wally, here
are some of the big players who
are cashing in on this government-
fed boondoggle:
Election Systems and
Software. The largest seller of
computerized voting systems in
the country, ES&S counts
Nebraska’s Republican Senator
Chuck Hagel as its former top
exec. ES&S is a subsidiary of the
McCarthy Group Inc., a merchantbanking
company based in
Omaha. It’s headed by Michael
McCarthy, who (coincidentally)
serves as Hagel’s campaign treasurer.
The senator continues to
hold some $5 million worth of
stock in the McCarthy Group--yes,
the company that counts Chuck’s
votes in each of his elections! Just
to add a family touch, McCarthy’s
son works in Hagel’s press office.
Science Applications
International Corporation. A
major Pentagon contractor, SAIC
is now drawing big bucks as a
technology consultant to the corporations
and governments
behind the electronic-voting gold
rush. This corporation is a haven
for former military and CIA brass:
Its vice chairman and former
president is Admiral Bill Owens,
who had previously been a top
assistant to Dick Cheney; and its
board members have included
ex-CIA directors Bobby Ray
Inman, John Deutch, and Robert
Gates (currently the head of the
George H.W. Bush School of
Government and Public Service at
Texas A&M), as well as former
Pentagon chief William Perry.
SAIC has had numerous legal
problems with its performance on
various government jobs, including
being charged with fabricating
tests, civil fraud, and making
false claims--not exactly the reputation
you’d want for an entity
now messing in America’s election
process.
. Speaking of Pentagon contractors,
Lockheed Martin and
Northrup Grumman are also in
the game and lobbied forcefully
for HAVA, as did computer giant
EDS and the offshore financial
schemer Accenture (the spawn of
disgraced accounting giant Arthur
Andersen, of Enron infamy).
Accenture, which boasts that it
is not a U.S. firm but a world corporation
headquartered in
Bermuda, is one of two foreign
outfits that have already gained a
piece of America’s electronic-voting
pie. The other is Sequoia,
owned by England’s DeLaRue corporation
and now the thirdlargest
provider of computerized
voting systems in the U.S.
These new election barons proclaim
that computer technology is
secure, accurate, and certified by
the authorities, so don’t go worrying
your little heads about stuff
that’s none of your business anyway.
We’re experts . . . trust us.
Do we look like we just fell off a
turnip truck? First, computers
inevitably and routinely are filled
with programming errors and
flaws; they crash about as often
as they run smoothly; and they
are frequently attacked by hackers,
bugs, viruses, worms, and
other malevolent forces.
To quote Verifiedvoting.org, an
organization of concerned computer
engineers and programmers:
“With these paperless
machines, there is nothing that
can stop a determined group
from achieving large-scale election
theft. We see no reason why
major problems will not occur,
including obviously messed-up
elections [and] election of incorrect
candidates.”
Second, it is simply a lie that
the corporate systems are subject
to rigorous oversight by state
or county election officials.
Authorities are not allowed to
look at the secret source code,
much less examine it line by line
to find little glitches or switches
that could upend a vote. A number
of credible technology labs
quit certifying voting machines
because outfits like Diebold and
ES&S would not let them make a
detailed examination of the code.

Bev starts to dig

Bev Harris of Renton,
Washington, is the electronic-voting
industry’s worst nightmare: a
smart, feisty woman who is onto
their dirty little secrets and won’t
be shut up--even when the
industry gets ugly with her.
Bev got interested in the issue
when she read an article that
questioned the corporate ownership
of these voting machines. A
former investigative researcher,
she wanted to know more and
began digging. In January, she
stumbled onto a mother lode of
information--an open Diebold
website that contained 40,000
files of source code and user
manuals for its machines.
A Diebold vice president later
said that posting this sensitive
material on a publicly accessible
site was “a huge mistake.” Yes, it
was, for Bev’s discovery led to an
expert analysis of Diebold’s system
by four computer scientists
at Rice University and the
Information Security Institute at
Johns Hopkins University.
Their study revealed stunning
flaws in the company’s system:
. An individual with a minimum
of computer knowledge could
gain access to a machine on election
day, see the ongoing tally,
and terminate further voting on
that machine.
. With a homemade smart card,
one could cast multiple votes.
. With a regular phone line, one
could tap into the machine and
view the results.
The academic researchers were
not alone in their criticism. In a
separate study, SAIC, the industry’s
own top consulting firm,
found 328 security weaknesses--
26 of them critical--in Diebold
machines being sold to the State
of Maryland. SAIC reported that
the system was “at high risk of
compromise” due to software
flaws, leaving the voting system
open to hackers and fraud.
Flaws and fraud are not merely
theoretical concerns. Though it
has received precious little massmedia
coverage, these machines
have been producing all sorts of
“incidents,” including these:
Georgia. In 2002, the Peach
State had six big upsets of
Democrats by Republicans,
including in the U.S. Senate race,
where incumbent Max Cleland
had a big lead in the polls but
surprisingly was upended by the
GOP’s Saxby Chambliss.
The statewide vote was cast on
22,000 Diebold machines. Just
before the election, Diebold
reportedly applied software
“patches” to all of these machines,
purportedly to fix a problem with
the computers crashing. The
patches were said to have been
“certified” by election officials by
phone--with no examination of
what the patches actually did.
Diebold honchos later said that
they had investigated themselves
and--surprise!--found they had
done nothing to mess with the
system . . . pay no attention to
the man behind the curtain!
Bev, however--ever the digger--
later discovered that Diebold
has disposed of all the memory
cards from these touch-screen
machines. “You keep paper ballots
for 22 months,” she notes,
“and they’re an awful lot bulkier
than those credit-card-size memory
cards, but for some reason
they felt compelled to get rid of
them all.”
Janet Reno. Running for the
Democratic gubernatorial nomination
last year, Reno noted some
unusual outcomes on election
day. In South Florida precincts,
where she was strong, the ES&S
voting machines were inexplicably
recording no votes in the governor’s
race. In some polling places
where there were over 1,000
votes cast in other races, there
were no votes for governor.
ES&S later sent “data extraction”
technicians, who “found”
some votes. Was this the actual
count? Officials don’t know; it
was ES&S that certified the count.
Reno lost by less than 5,000
votes out of 1.3 million cast.
The San Luis Obispo
“Oops.” It is illegal for anyone to
count, or even see, vote totals
before the polls close. But on
March 5 last year, at 3:31 p.m.
on election day in this California
city, Diebold’s machines in 57
precincts simultaneously “called
home” to corporate headquarters
and reported the mid-afternoon
tally, which then went up on a
Diebold website--in plenty of time
for interested partisans to mobilize
their voters.
Problems are routine: In a
Washington, Florida, city runoff
election, the winner beat the
opponent by only four votes, but
78 electronic ballots were blank.
Election officials refused to blame
the machines, asserting that
these 78 voters came apparently
to the polls and then chose not to
vote in the only race on the ballot.
In Middlesex County, New
Jersey, a Sequoia machine was
taken out of service after 65
votes had been cast without reg-
istering a choice for either of the
candidates. Yet Sequoia blamed
the voters, again maintaining that
people were coming to the polls
but not voting. In Canal County,
Texas, three Republican candidates
experienced an astonishing
coincidence when the electronic
machines declared them victors
in their respective races by the
exact same margin of 18,181
votes. Then there’s our boy
Chuck Hagel, who first won a
U.S. Senate seat in 1996 in a big
upset, including his winning in
majority black precincts that had
never voted Republican--all
recorded on machines owned by
ES&S, the company he headed
before running for Senate.

Attack the messenger

When Bev uncovered Hagel’s
ties to ES&S, she tipped off The
Hill, a newspaper that covers
Congress, which in turn prompted
a Senate ethics inquiry into
Chuck’s voting-industry connections
(much of which he had
failed to disclose).
Ever the sporting types, Chuck
and his ES&S colleagues
unleashed their legal dogs on
Bev, threatening her with lawsuits
for “defamation.”
Then came Diebold. Ticked off
that Bev had published their
internal memos on the Internet,
they had their lawyers send a
cease-and-desist letter which,
ironically, authenticated the
memos and laid corporate claim
to them, asserting that they were
copyrighted documents. Using the
draconian powers of the abusive
Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
Diebold then tried to shut her up
by forcing her Internet providers
to pull down her website.
She’s not about to back down.
Her website is back up, and she
recently revealed a most interesting
secret meeting of a panicked
electronic-voting industry. It was
an insider teleconference that
Bev’s colleague, David Allen,
learned about and boldly dialed
into without being questioned.
The invitees included officials of
Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, and
other voting-machine companies.
Ironically, the meeting was led
by Doug Lewis, head of the
Election Center, a private firm
that also doubles as the quasiregulator
of the industry, supposedly
overseeing the integrity of
the machines, while also coordinating
affairs between the vendors
and state election officials.
Lewis is the perfect embodiment
of George W.’s philosophy of “voluntary
regulation.”
The purpose of the phone
meeting was to create a PR front
to counter the rising public outcry
against voting privatization.
Allen reports that Lewis asked
the members to cough up
$200,000 to fund a PR and congressional-
lobbying campaign to
refute any and all who question
electronic voting. Allen’s notes
(see www.blackboxvoting.com)
include Lewis saying, “Of course,
we’ll have to put some distance
between the Election Center and
this lobbying once it gets going.”

What to do?

Amazingly, there’s a simple
solution to all of this: Require a
voter-verifiable paper trail of
every vote in every election.
This is hardly techno-wizardry.
Just as your ATM prints out a
receipt of your withdrawal, which
you can later compare with your
monthly bank statement to verify
that the bank’s computers played
no games with your money, so
can voting machines give us an
auditable paper trail of our votes.
Here are the steps: You vote on
a touch-screen system; the
machine prints a paper ballot of
how you voted; you verify on the
touch screen that the ballot is
correct; you then turn in your
print-out to election officials; they
put it directly in a lock-box, which
they must hold for at least a year.
Thus the actual votes are there
so the election can be physically
reconstituted in case there is a
recount or charges of fraud.
One more thing: The computer
code cannot be held as a corporate
secret. This is not code for
some video game, for godssake,
but for our nation’s democratic
electoral process! A copy of the
code used for each machine in
each election must be given to
public election officials for their
independent analysis before, during,
and after every election.
The good news is that there is a
bill that embodies all of the
above: H.R. 2239, the Voter
Confidence Act, sponsored by
Rep. Rush Holt and some 40
other members of Congress. Also,
the technology already exists to
provide voter-verifiable audit
trails, so there’s no reason this
can’t be done quickly.
All that’s needed is you and me
to light a prairie fire so bright and
hot that Congress feels the heat
and passes H.R. 2239 now.
Martin Luther King III and
author Greg Palast have launched
an on-line petition drive to deluge
Congress with demands that voting
machines leave a paper trail,
as provided in Rep. Holt’s bill (see
“Do Something!”). Sign up and
zap it to others--and let’s yank
our public elections out of the