<nettime> Against computerised democracy

[McKenzie Wark <mw35@is6.nyu.edu>]

from the New York Press http://www.nypress.com

Votescam 2000: The Real Scandal Is the Voting Machines Themselves

Jonathan Vankin

The ongoing electoral insanity has confirmed something that I and a small
number of people who have occasionally thought about these things have
known for a while: Over the past three-and-a-half decades we in the United
States have sold out our election processwhich, unless Im very much
mistaken, is the foundation of our democracy (such as it is)to a small but
lucrative cadre of for-profit businesses and their wildly defective
products. Which they manufactured, in some cases, many years ago, but
which are still used to tally votes today. The real scandal of this
election is that most of the problems in the voting and vote-counting
systems have been well-known for years, and no one has done a damn thing
about them.More than 11 years ago, I wrote a detailed article titled "Vote
of No Confidence" for the Silicon Valley weekly, Metro. In the article, I
discussed how "The next president of the United States may not be chosen
by the voters. Instead, he may be the choice of whoever controls or
manipulates the computer systems that tally the votes." The now famous
"hanging chad" was but one small aspect of this story. (Until last month,
I was one of the few citizens of the United States who had actually heard,
much less uttered, the words "hanging chad.")

A deeper problem lay in the security and integrity of the software used to
run the vote count. The software for most of the machines, I learned, was
incomprehensiblewhat computer scientists described as "spaghetti code" and
"a bucket of worms," prone to error and vulnerable to deliberate
manipulation in a way that would be, for all purposes, undetectable. An
ethically challenged software engineer could write a little program to
make the count come out however he wanted it to, and no one would ever
know. Even if a fraudulent program were detectable, someone would have to
look at it first to detect it. And that was impossible, because the
private companies that owned the software considered the code a protected
trade secret.

In fact, there are today two companies that dominate the industry.
Election Systems & Software, whose machines count about 60 percent of the
votes nationwide, and Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment of Jamestown, NY.
In 1993, Sequoia Pacific won a $60 million contract from New York City to
take the city into the electronic voting ageonly to have the contract
ditched this year.

No one is saying that those companies, or any of their much smaller
would-be competitors, dont try their bestand certainly not that theyre
dishonest. The flaws are inherent to computerized voting systems. I found,
11 years ago, that there was no particular reason to trust the outcome of
any election in the United States anymore. At least not those counted by
computer, which is most of them.

Since 1989 there has been no reason to update that opinion. Despite having
authored that retroactively prescient article, filled with startling facts
about the iffy nature of American elections, I have not, over the past
decade, spent an undue amount of time waiting by the mailbox for my
Pulitzer Prize. Why not? Because I was hardly the first person to make
note of these facts. No less a source than The New York Times ran a series
about the vulnerability of elections in 1985, by reporter David Burnham,
who also wrote the book The Rise of the Computer State.

As early as 1974, the U.S. General Accounting Office commissioned a study
that found significant accuracy and security problems in the methods used
to count votes by computer. In 1986, the California Attorney Generals
office released a report criticizing computerized vote-counting systems
for "lacking a reliable audit trail and having a program structure that is
very difficult even for computer professionals to understand." In 1988,
the National Institute of Standards and Technology (then called the
National Bureau of Standards) released a study by computer scientist Roy.
G. Saltman that concluded, in the typically understated language of
government documents, that "it has been clearly shown that audit trails
that document election results, as well as general practices to assure
accuracy, integrity and security, can be considerably improved."

Somewhat more bluntly, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
followed up on Saltmans report in their fall 1988 newsletter, declaring:
"Americas fundamental democratic institution is ripe for abuse... It is
ridiculous for our country to run such a haphazard, easily violated
election system. If we are to retain confidence in our election results,
we must institute adequate security procedures in computerized vote
tallying, and return election control to the citizenry."

Also in 1988 (something of a watershed year for computer-voting exposes),
the journalist Ronnie Dugger, founder of The Texas Observer, authored a
staggeringly long and meticulously researched essay for The New Yorker
(when The New Yorker was still publishing staggeringly long and
meticulously researched essays) in which he singled out the "Vote-o-Matic"
system in particularstill a popular computer voting system, and the very
one used in those disputed Florida countiesas possibly "disenfranchising
hundreds of thousands of voters."

Dugger explained how computer systems that tabulate elections are shot
through with error and wide open to what, more recently, James Baker might
call "mischief." I talked to Dugger back in 1989, when I was writing my
own article. Freed from the genteel strictures of New Yorker house style,
he told me, "The whole damn thing is mind-boggling. They could steal the
presidency."

                 o

Computerized vote-counting is a terrible system. This is only news to
those who havent been paying attention. Every problem thats arisen in the
2000 election has been on the public record for more than a decade. Yet
here we are. Why?

My first thought was that less-wealthy counties cant afford the latest
technology. Theyre stuck with outdated systems like the Vote-o-Matic, for
reasons of pure economics. But David Lublin doesnt think so. He teaches in
the American University School of Public Affairs Dept. of Government, and
is now on his second grant from the National Science Foundation to collect
election data from around the country.

"I wouldnt say the wealthier places always have better or well-conducted
elections," he says. "Often that is the case, but there are surprising
exceptions. It depends on the willingness of the local county authority to
spend the money, or the state to require them to do it."

Nor, for that matter, is increasingly sophisticated computer technology
the answer. In fact, it may only make the problems even worse. For
example, the next generation of voting computers what are whats known as
DREs ("Direct Recording Electronic"), kind of voting ATMs that allow
voters to cast ballot-free votes on a video monitor by pressing buttons,
or even on a touch screen.

"DREs are even worse," says Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist at Bryn
Mawr whos studied computerized elections for more than 10 years and
recently finished her doctoral dissertation on that exact topic at the
University of Pennsylvania. DREs leave no "audit trail" (paper trail)
whatsoever, she points out. Votes are recorded directly onto a memory
cartridge. There is absolutely nothing to ensure that the vote that
registers on the screen is the vote that gets recorded on the cartridge,
or that the vote that is recorded on the cartridge is the vote that prints
out on paper.

"Unless the voter sees that paper trail, how do they know?" she says. "I
could teach a 12-year-old to write a program that shows one thing on the
screen and another thing on the printout."

While some newer election computing companies say theyve figured out how
to create a foolproof electronic audit trail, Mercuri dismisses such
claims as "preposterous." Theres no way to make sure that software is 100
percent pure. "If we could do that in computer science, wed have the virus
problem solved," she says.

Since computers were first used to count votes in the early 1960s, there
have been dozens of instances of computer error in elections. And thats
counting only the known errors. There have been no verified frauds, but
that may be only because computer fraud is nearly impossible to verify.
Former Florida Gov. Kenneth "Buddy" MacKay suggested last week to Carl
Bernstein (in an article on the website Voter.com) that computer fraud may
have been behind his highly suspicious 1988 Senate loss to Connie Mack.
MacKay lost by 33,000 votes out of four million. In a development that
foreshadowed what happened this year, the tv networks had "called" a
MacKay victory only to later tell their viewers "never mind."

Funny thing was, in four large countiesMiami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and
Hillsborough200,000 fewer voters registered votes in the Senate race than
in the presidential race. Thats a 20 percent drop-off. In other counties,
and in earlier elections, the drop-off was around 1 percent. Computer
error or tampering remains the most likely explanation for the alarming
discrepancy, though none was ever proved. MacKay tried to get a look at
the source code for the vote-counting software but was rebuffed by the
election equipment companies who declared it proprietary.

"What could have happened in 1988," MacKay told Bernstein last week, "was
that the machines could have been programmed so that in my big precincts
every tenth vote got counted wrong."

Another "Sore Loserman," perhaps? Maybebut MacKay was echoing what Peter
Neumann, principal scientist at SRI Internationals Menlo Park, CA,
computer lab (and author of the 1995 book Computer-Related Risks), said
back then. Writing about the MacKay-Mack election in Risks Digest, Neumann
noted, "Remembering that these computer systems reportedly permit
operators to turn off the audit trails and to change arbitrary memory
locations on the fly, it seems natural to wonder whether anything fishy
went on."

Here are a few other amusing anecdotes from the annals of wacky election
computing:

In Middlesex County, NJ, this year, a DRE vote-counting computer went on
the fritz. It recorded votes for both the Republican and Democratic
candidates in the county freeholders race, but simply wiped out all votes
for their respective runningmates.

In the 1985 Dallas, TX, mayors race, Starke Taylor defeated Max Goldblatt
in an election so controversial that it led the Texas legislature to
investigate the flaws in the states computerized vote-tabulation process.
Allegedly, according to the Dallas Morning News, a computer had been shut
off and given "new instructions" after it showed Goldblatt leading by 400
votes.

During the Democratic presidential primary of 1980, in Orange County, CA,
a "programmers error" gave about 15,000 votes cast for Jimmy Carter and
Ted Kennedy to Jerry Brownand, of all people, Lyndon LaRouche.

There are many more such tales. Computers in Oklahoma skipped 10 percent
of the ballots in a 1986 election. A power surge in San Francisco switched
votes from one candidate to another. A Moline, IL, city alderman actually
took office in 1985 only to step down three months later when someone
figured out that a machine had misread hundreds of ballots due to a bad
"timing belt."

You get the picture. The Dallas case prompted the Texas Secretary of State
to direct that, in future elections, a "manual recount" could be ordered
to "ensure the accuracy of the count." The actual ballots, the computer
punch cards themselves, are the only existing "audit trail," to document
how people actually voted.

                 o

I dont want to appear "partisan," but with all of these well-documented
facts, it seemed to me that the Republican idea that machine counts are
better than human counts is patently absurd. So I called up Bob Swartz,
founder of Pennsylvania-based Cardamation, one of the nations largest
makers and sellers of computer punch cards and card-reading machines. (Not
many companies are in that field anymore.) Swartz has been in the
punch-card business for 40 years, though he doesnt do election business
anymore. I thought that made him a good person to ask.

Turns out, in his line of work, looking at computer cards with your own
eyes is standard procedure. "We didnt call it a hand count. We just called
it looking at the cards," he says. "We read the cards through the machine
twice, and if there are differences we look at the cards. If our goal is
to get 100 percent accuracy, theres no question thats the way to achieve
it."

Swartz fully expects card-reading machines to make mistakes. Its when they
do not make mistakes that he gets suspicious. "If you recount 400,000
votes and theres no difference," he says, "someone fudged the figures."

No election system can ever be fraudproof or error-free. That doesnt mean
we shouldnt try to improve on the dismal systems were using today. It just
seems that casting votes on paper ballots, then counting and recounting
them by hand, is the surest way to figure out who really won an election.
Assuming mostly honest personnel, and barring breathtaking acts of
ineptitude, human vote-counters will not, generally speaking, discard
ballots by the thousands on a mere whim. Nor will they, unless they are
severely reading-deficient or insane, record votes cast for one candidate
as votes cast for another candidate.

Further, it is much more conspicuous for a dishonest election official to
issue new instructions to a group of human beings midway through a
counting session than it is for a dishonest computer programmer to type a
few new lines of code into a machine. Perhaps most importantly, there is
nothing "proprietary" about a person picking up pieces of paper and going
"one for this guy, one for that guy." If Americans, or at least the
television networks Americans like to watch, werent so damned impatient,
conducting elections completely on paper ballots would be the most
sensible solution. Noncomputerized elections take a lot longer to produce
results, theres no denying that. But we dont hold elections all that often
in this country. We wait four years to vote for president. We cant wait
another week or two to find out who won?

If the never-ending election of 2000 (and I have to admit, it is taking a
long time) teaches us anything, its that we can indeed wait it out for a
while without untoward consequences.

If America returned to the paper ballot system, fraud and error in
elections definitely would not end. They would, however, be much easier to
detect and correct. Elections would be run by people, not corporations.
There are enough vested interests trying to influence every election. Why
do we need the extraneous interest of profit-making companies?

New York Press, vol 13 no 50


______________________________________
McKenzie Wark  http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark
Guest Scholar, American Studies, New York University
"We no longer have origins we have terminals"

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