In 1988 Ronnie Dugger wrote the definitive
article on computerized vote fixing. Much of what we saw in
Florida in 2000 was covered in his article, almost as though
someone used it as a guide. It's never before been on the
web since it predates the internet.
But here it is, digitized.
Post a link to it from your site.
Save it to your hard drive.
Put it on your own site.
Email it to everyone you know.
Alllie
(alllie@newsgarden.org)
ANNALS OF DEMOCRACY
COUNTING VOTES
By Ronnie Dugger
(Txt
Version)
The New Yorker, November 7, 1988
DURING the past quarter of a century, with hardly
anyone noticing, the inner workings of democracy have been
computerized. All our elections, from mayor to President,
are counted locally, in about ten thousand five hundred political
jurisdictions, and gradually, since 1964, different kinds
of computer-based voting systems have been installed in town
after town, city after city, county after county. This year,
fifty-five per cent of all votes-seventy-five per cent in
the largest jurisdictions-will be counted electronically.
If ninety-five million Americans vote on Tuesday, November
8th, the decisions expressed by about fifty-two million of
them will be tabulated according to rules that programmers
and operators unknown to the public have fed into computers.
In many respects, this electronic conversion
has seemed natural, even inevitable. Both of the old ways
-- hand-counting paper ballots and relying on interlocked
rotary counters to tabulate votes that are cast by pulling
down levers on mechanical machines -- have been shown to be
susceptible to error and fraud. On Election Night, computers
can usually produce the final results faster than any other
method of tabulation, and so enable local officials to please
reporters on deadlines and to avoid the suspicions of fraud
which long delays in counting can stimulate.
Recently, however, computerized vote-counting
has engendered controversy. Do the quick-as-a-wink, computerized
systems count accurately? Are they vulnerable to fraud, as
well, even fraud of a much more dangerous, centralized kind?
Is the most widely used computerized system, the Votomatic,
which relies on computer punch-card ballots, disenfranchising
hundreds of thousands of voters?
It appears that since 1980 errors and accidents
have proliferated in computer-counted elections. Since 1984,
the State of Illinois has tested local computerized systems
by running many thousands of machine-punched mock ballots
through them, rather than the few tens of test ballots that
local election officials customarily use.
As of the most recent tests this year, errors in the basic
counting instructions in the computer programs had been found
in almost a fifth of the examinations. These
"tabulation-program errors" probably would not have been caught
in the local jurisdictions. "I
don't understand why nobody cares," Michael L. Harty, who
was until recently the director of voting systems and standards
for Illinois, told me last December in Springfield. "At one
point, we had tabulation errors in
twenty-eight per cent of the systems tested, and nobody
cared."
Robert J. Naegele, who is the State of California's
chief expert on certifying voting systems and is also the
president of his own computer consulting firm, has been hired
by the Federal Election Commission (F.E.C.) to write new voluntary
national standards for computerized vote-counting equipment
and programs. Last spring, in San Francisco, at a national
conference of local-election officials, I asked Naegele whether
computerized voting as it is now practiced in the United States
is secure against fraud.
He pointed a thumb at the floor.
"When we first started looking at this issue, back in the
middle seventies, we found there were a lot of these systems
that were vulnerable to fraud and out-and-out error,"
he said.
I asked him whether he regarded as adequate
the typical fifty-five-ballot "logic-and-accuracy public test"
that is conducted locally on the Votomatic computerized punch-card
vote-counting system-which about four in ten voters will use
on November 8th-and he said, "No."
Would such a test discover,
for example, a "time bomb" set to start transferring a certain
proportion of votes from one candidate to another at a certain
time, or any other programmers' tricks?
"Of course not," Naegele
said. "It's not a test of the system. It's not security!"
The old mechanical machines prevent citizens
from "overvoting"-voting for more candidates in a race than
they are entitled to vote for-but the Votomatic systems do
not. Not only can people using these systems overvote but
election workers, if they are dishonest, can punch extra holes
in ballots to invalidate votes that have been correctly cast
or to cast votes themselves in races the voter has skipped.
In the 1984 general election, about a hundred and thirty-seven
thousand out of a total of 4.7 million voters in Ohio did
not cast valid ballots for President-mostly, according to
Ohio's secretary of state, because of overvoting. The computerized
punch-card voting system is "a barrier to exercise of the
franchise," and causes "technological disenfranchisement,"
Neil Heighberger, the dean of the College of Social Sciences
at Xavier University, in Cincinnati, concluded in a recent
study he made of the subject.
A federal judge, William L. Hungate, ruling
last December on a lawsuit in St. Louis, declared that the
computerized punch-card voting system as it has been used
in that city denies blacks an equal opportunity with whites
to participate in the political process. The suit was filed
by Michael V. Roberts, a black candidate for president of
the Board of Aldermen who in March of last year had lost to
a white by a fourth of one per cent in a city election in
which voting positions on ballots in the black wards were
more than three times as likely not to be counted as those
in white wards. Roberts, who was joined in the suit by the
St. Louis branch of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, contended that computerized voting is such
a relatively complex process that it is tantamount to a literacy
test, and literacy tests have been prohibited by federal law
as an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.
Judge Hungate found that in four local
elections since 1981 voting positions had not been counted
by the computerized system on anywhere from four to eight
of every hundred ballots in black wards, compared with about
two of every hundred in white wards (and also
found that in the March, 1987, election the computerized returns
from six per cent of the precincts had "irreconcilable discrepancies").
The evidence indicated that the computer had passed over the
uncounted positions because of either overvoting or undervoting,
which is failing to cast a vote in a race. The Judge ordered
officials to count by hand all ballots that contained
overvotes or undervotes and to intensify voter education in
the black wards, but the city appealed, arguing that the racial
differential does not always hold true in the city's elections.
The Missouri secretary of state, Roy Blunt, called the order
to recount the ballots by hand unfair and said that it could
"make punch-card voting unworkable."
In Pueblo, Colorado, in 1980, suspicions
about the vote-counting on punch-card equipment led to an
investigation by a computer expert, but nothing was proved.
In Pennsylvania,
in 1980, two of three examiners recommended that the Votomatic
punch-card system marketed by Computer Election Services (C.E.S.),
of Berkeley, California, be rejected, on the ground that it
was fraud-prone, but the secretary of the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania approved it anyway.
In Tacoma, Washington, in 1982 and 1987, in the only
known local referendums on computerized voting, citizens'
crusades, led by a conservative Republican, Eleanora Ballasiotes,
that focused on the vulnerabilities of computers to fraud
resulted each time in the voters' three-to-one rejection of
the systems that their local officials were about to
buy. A group of defeated Democratic candidates in Elkhart,
Indiana, sued local election officials in 1983, alleging
that computer-based irregularities had occurred in a 1982
election; they have since lost three lawsuits, and a fourth
one continues. In Dallas, Terry Elkins, the campaign manager
for Max Goldblatt, who in 1985 ran for mayor, came to believe,
on the basis of a months long study of the surviving records
and materials of the election, that Goldblatt had been kept
out of a runoff by manipulation of the computerized voting
system. The attorney general of Texas, Jim Mattox, was impressed
by the charges and conducted an official investigation
of them. Dallas authorities have declared that since there
is no evidence of criminal behavior the case is closed, but
Mattox has refused to close it. "I do not think that there
were adequate explanations for the anomalies," he told me,
in Austin.
COMPUTER programmers working for the private
companies that sell election equipment write their programs
in higher computer languages or the intermediate assembly
language, and these are translated or compiled into the binary
language of ones and zeros which computers understand. The
original programs, which are centrally produced, are commonly
called "source codes;" only a few
local governments own and control the source codes that are
used in their jurisdictions. According to Jack Gerbel,
a founder of C.E.S., who has sold more computerized vote-counting
equipment than any other individual in the country, about
half the time the companies' programmers also write the codes
that "localize" (or "initialize") vote-counting systems for
the specific elections of each jurisdiction. The
source and local codes together tell the computers how to
count the votes. Local public tests may or may not adequately
test the local codes, but, as Naegele said, they do not test
the source codes.
The election-equipment
companies, which thus both sell and program the computers
that tabulate public elections, have long contended, in and
out of court, that they own the source codes and must keep
them secret from everyone, including the local officials
who conduct elections.
n 1985, Jack Kemp (no relation of the congressman),
the president of C.E.S., which was then the leading election-equipment
company in the country, warned in so many words that an outsider
who got the company's source code could compromise elections
with it. Through an affidavit that Kemp furnished for a lawsuit
in Charleston, West Virginia, the company affirmed that the
security of the vote-counting in C.E.S.equipped jurisdictions
depended in large measure on its retention of the secrets
of the code, and that there would be "a grave risk" to this
security if the defeated candidates were permitted to see
the code. "The significance of the company's proprietary interest
in its software is incalculable from our perspective," Kemp
asserted.
That significance is incalculable from the
voter's perspective, too. Insofar as source codes have not
been opened to examination on behalf of the public-and most
have not-instructions to computers on how to count votes appear
to have become a trade secret. Only a few states have demanded
copies of the source codes, and only in the last year or two
have any states examined them. Thus
most of the local officials who preside over computerized
elections do not actually know how their systems are counting
the votes, and when they officially certify that the election
results are correct they do not and cannot really know them
to be so.
After systems that use computer punch cards as ballots have
counted the votes, manual recounts of the holes in the punch
cards can be demanded, provided the cards have not yet been
destroyed by local officials-as is permitted by most local
laws after a specified period of time. But in
a new computerized system, "direct-recording electronic" (D.R.E.),
which is becoming more widespread, there are no individual
ballots, and, the way these new machines are now being used
in many jurisdictions, recounts are impossible, for the program
destroys the electronic record of each voter's choices the
instant after it counts them.
The dominant company now in the sale and
programming of computerized vote-counting systems for public
elections, Cronus Industries, of Dallas, is better known as
its sole and wholly owned subsidiary, the Business Records
Corporation (B.R.C.). Cronus/ B.R.C. has accused the R. F.
Shoup Company, of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania-one of its rivals
for a fortymillion-dollar voting-equipment order from New
York City-of infringing B.R.C. patents in the very D.R.E.
vote-counting machine, the Shouptronic, that Shoup is trying
to sell to New York. In a lawsuit filed last November in Philadelphia,
Cronus, on whose equipment between thirty and forty-five million
votes will be counted this year, has also sought to discredit
Shoup, on the basis of a 1979
conviction of Ransom Shoup II, the president of the company,
of two federal felonies-conspiracy and obstruction of justice-in
connection with an F.B.I. investigation of an election in
Philadelphia that had been counted on mechanical-lever machines.For
these offenses, Ransom Shoup was fined ten thousand dollars
and given a three-year suspended sentence. Counterattacking,
the Shoup firm, whose equipment will tabulate an estimated
million and a half votes on November 8th, has accused Cronus
of reaching for "a virtual monopoly on the entire business
of supplying voting equipment for use in political elections
in the United States" and has alleged
that the Cronus vote-counting systems that are in use "inherently
facilitate the opportunity for various ... forms of fraud"
and "create new and unique opportunities for fraudulent and
extremely difficult-to-detect manipulation and alterations
with respect to election results."
In 1985 and 1986, Cronus bought Computer
Election Systems and also eight smaller election-equipment
and election-printing firms, while selling off three other
subsidiaries, thereby transforming itself, in eighteen months,
from a small conglomerate of disparate industrial businesses
into the titan of the computerized-vote-counting business.
Cronus is now responsible for most C.E.S.
systems that are still in service and for a computer-based
"mark-sense" voting system that B.R.C. has sold in the past
few years. B.R.C. also sells computerized voter-registration
systems; election supplies, including, this year, perhaps
a hundred and sixty million punch-card ballots; election assistance
and service; and other computerized information services for
local governments. C.E.S. used to take pride in publicizing
the millions of votes cast on its machines (a total of three
hundred and fifty million between 1964 and 1984), and after
Cronus bought C.E.S., in 1985, C. A. Rundell, Jr., then the
chairman and chief executive officer of Cronus, told a reporter
that his company had about forty per cent of the election-service
market.But when I asked Rundell earlier this year
how many votes Cronus systems will count in 1988 and in which
jurisdictions, he refused to say. "We certainly are not going
to provide you with a list of customers and the kinds of systems
they have," he declared. "We've got to ask how much competitive
intelligence we divulge to our competition." He did volunteer
that the total for votes counted by Cronus systems was below
thirty-five million. Officials at R. F. Shoup, however, seeking
to prove that Cronus is a monopoly, charge that Cronus systems
will count fifty or sixty million votes on November 8th. In
any case, Cronus and C.E.S. systems are used by the voters
in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Houston,
Phoenix, Miami, Seattle, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.
On Election Day, about one in every three
American voters still pulls down the lever on an old thousand-pound
mechanical-lever machine, and about one in every nine still
marks the old-fashioned paper ballot that is counted by hand.
In the past two years, however, more than eighty United States
counties have abandoned lever machines, and more than ninety
have abandoned paper ballots, the replacements being in most
cases either D.R.E. or mark-sense systems. In mark-sense systems,
which are also called "optical-scan," computers employing
light or electrical conductivity count votes that have been
cast on ballots with pencils or markers. Mark-sense is now
used by about eight per cent of the voters; a multi-punch-card,
count-the-holes computer system called Datavote, which is
sold by Sequoia Pacific Systems Corporation, of Exeter, California,
is used by about four per cent; and electronic D.R.E. systems,
the newest computerized voting technology, are used by about
three per cent. "The election business is shifting into the
mark-sense and the electronic [D.R.E.] stuff," according to
Richard J. Stephens, the president of a small election company
in Escondido, California, who has been in the field since
1966. "The punch-card systems will remain out there, but B.R.C.
is not trying to sell punch-card anymore-it's selling mark-sense
now."
THE private business of counting votes in
public elections can be realistically understood only as a
small, if extremely important, segment of the computer industry
itself, and thus a business that has both the strengths and
the weaknesses of the over-all industry. The computer industry's
strengths-astoundingly vast and rapid computational power,
the automation of trillions of transactions have been well
known for some time, but the weaknesses have come to be understood
only lately. In recent years, the vulnerability of computers
to tampering and fraud has become a commonplace in many industries.
Computer operators do not leave
fingerprints inside a computer, the events that occur inside
it cannot be seen, and its records, and printouts can be fixed
to give no hint of whichever of its operations an operator
wants to keep secret.
The practical problem of the computer age is invisibility.
Hackers-adventurous programmers-penetrate corporate and governmental
computers for fun and jimmy the programs in them for gain.
"Electronic cat burglars" have stolen billions of dollars
from banks and other businesses-a billion a year by a recent
estimate of the American Bar Association. By means of computer
fraud employees have raised their salaries and students have
raised their grades. Caltech students printed out more than
a million entry blanks for a McDonald's contest and won a
Datsun station wagon. Employees of a federal agency diverted
tens of thousands of dollars to nonexistent employees. In
the infamous 1973 Equity Funding Corporation fraud, company
officials and other employees typed into their computers names
of about sixty-four thousand people who didn't exist as holders
of more than two billion dollars' worth of life-insurance
policies that didn't exist but were "resold" to reinsurers.
"Electronic dead souls," the writer Thomas Whiteside has called
these fabricated customers.
Whether or not elections have ever been stolen
by computer before, some citizens and some officials are asking
if it could happen in the future. Could
a local or state office or a seat in the United States House
of Representatives be stolen by computer? Might the outcome
of a close race for a United States Senate seat be determined
by computer fraud in large local jurisdictions?Since,
under the state-by-state, winner-take-all rules of the electoral
college, a close Presidential election can be decided by relatively
few votes in two or three big states, could electronic illusionists
steal the Presidency by fixing the vote-counting computers
in just four or five major metropolitan areas?Could
people breaking into or properly positioned within a computerized-vote
counting company, acting for political reasons or personal
gain, steal House or Senate seats, or even the White House
itself?
Randall H. Erben, the assistant secretary of state in Texas,
who served as special counsel on ballot integrity to President
Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1984 and, in 1986, headed a similar
group for Governor Bill Clements, of Texas, told me in Austin,
"I have no question that somebody who's smart enough with
a computer could probably rig it to mistabulate. Whether that
has happened yet I don't know. It's going to be virtually
undetectable if it's done correctly, and that's what concerns
me about it." Willis Ware,
a Rand Corportion computer specialist, warned those attending
a 1987 conference on the security of computer-tabulated elections,
"There is probably a Chernobyl or a Three Mile Island waiting
to happen in some election, just as a Richter 8 earthquake
is waiting to happen in California." The
chief counsel of the Republican National Committee, Mark Braden,
told me that he has yet to see a proved case of computer-based
election fraud, but added, "People who work for us who know
about computers claim that you could do it."
Some
officials concerned with elections think about the unthinkable
in their field; namely, the stealing of a Presidential election
by computer fraud in the vote-counting in metropolitan areas
of key states. Steve White, the chief assistant attorney general
of California, said to me last spring in Sacramento, "It could
be done relatively easily by somebody who didn't necessarily
have to be all that sophisticated. Given the importance of
the national election, sooner or later it will be attempted.
There is a real reluctance to concede the gravity of the problem."
Jim Mattox, the Texas attorney general, while
discussing Cronus/B.R.C./ C.E.S., exclaimed to me in dismay
a year ago, One thing is
clear: one company in the United States should not have as
big an impact on elections as this company has got. Nobody
should have in a democracy. The right to vote is too sacred."
COMPUTERS can
be ordered to transfer votes from one candidate to another,
to add votes to a candidate's total, to determine an outcome
in accordance with a specified percentage spread. All the
computer experts I have spoken with agreed that no computer
program can be made completely secure against fraud.Where
they differed was in their characterizations of this fact.
Local election officials and election equipment-company specialists,
executives, and salesmen usually took the position that state
certification procedures and local logic-and-accuracy tests
provide enough security for reasonable assurance that elections
are honestly counted. The independent computer specialists
I interviewed were divided, generally speaking, into two camps.
One, led by Roy Saltman, of the National Bureau of Standards,
Robert Naegele, and Lance Hoffman, of George Washington University,
sees local-election theft by computer as possible, but stresses
the fact that no case of program tampering has been proved.
This camp attributes the manifold problems of computerized
vote-counting entirely or almost entirely to inadequacies
in the administration of elections and insufficient testing
of the equipment, and regards the theft of the Presidency
by computer as, in effect, impossible. The
other, led by the Pennsylvania voting-systems examiner Michael
Shamos and the computer specialists Howard Jay Strauss, of
Princeton, and Peter G. Neumann, of S.R.I. International,
a nonprofit research institution in Menlo Park, California,
emphasizes the ease of concealing theft by computer "without
a trace;" characterizes local elections as very vulnerable
to fraud; and regards the
theft of the Presidency by computer as entirely possible.
Should citizens delegate the job of vote-counting
to technicians? Most people do not know
enough about computers to be able to tell what is happening
during computerized vote-counting, even if they are looking
straight at the card readers and computers. In Dallas
last year, during a conference of citizens concerned about
this issue, David T. Stutsman, an Indiana attorney with experience
in contested-election cases, said, "In
traditional elections, the people in your neighborhood, your
neighbors, had the responsibility and the legal duty to supervise
an election. They counted the votes. The precinct officials
don't count the votes anymore. The power-that is, political
power-has gone to the venders, to the venders' representatives,
and to the people that operate those machines." He also said,
"You're putting more power in the hands of fewer people."
Demands for much stricter security in computerized
elections appear to be gaining adherents in many quarters.
Sometime after the November election, results the National
Clearinghouse on Election Administration, a grandly named
four-person office in the F.E.C., will publish voluntary,
but potentially influential, national standards for the security
and accuracy of computerized elections. In a late-summer draft,
the Clearinghouse proposed that the election-equipment companies
place their source codes in escrow, the idea probably being
that in the event of seriously disputed election results the
codes could be obtained and examined by representative's of
the public.
THE evolution from counting paper ballots
one at a time to counting as many as a thousand punch-card
ballots a minute occupied about seventy years-a period that
can be seen as having opened in 1892, when lever voting machines
first appeared. Four years later, Joseph P. Harris, the inventor
of the Votomatic system, was born, on a farm in North Carolina.
In the First World War, Harris was a flying instructor, and
afterward he helped pay for his doctorate in political science
at the University of Chicago by flying the mail between Chicago
and Cleveland in open-cockpit planes. A favored student of
Charles Merriam, who was seeking to develop a scientific basis
for understanding politics, Harris became a teacher and a
scholar who over four decades wrote many books on politics
and elections. He refined and championed the process of permanent
voter registration, and it was largely through his efforts
that permanent registration replaced the earlier system of
recurring reregistration. In the nine-teen-thirties, drawn
to Washington by the New Deal, he served on committees advising
President Roosevelt on economic-security and administrative
management issues.
Early in his career, Harris saw for himself that the politicians
in big cities stole votes easily. Touring voting places during
a Chicago election in the nineteen-twenties, he spotted a
shotgun at one precinct and also noted "a good deal of corruption
that you could see." In a 1934 book, "Election Administration,"
he recounted the details of proved ballot-stuffing, repeat
votes cast by paid drunks (sometimes fifteen or twenty times),
and shameless miscounting in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and
Cleveland, and he quoted Boss Tweed's testimony before the
Board of Aldermen in New York City that he had routinely instructed
his Tammany Hall men to "count the ballots in bulk, or without
counting them announce the result in bulk, or change from
one to the other, as the case may have been," and Tweed's
further statements that "the ballots made no result; the counters
made the result," and "I don't think there was ever a
fair or honest election in the City of New York." During several
summers in the nineteen-twenties, Harris supervised the installation
of lever voting machines made by the Automatic Voting Machine
Company, of Jamestown, New York (he gave up the job with A.V.M.
because he felt that it tainted him somehow). He was struck
by the machines' complexity, weight, and cost, but he also
realized that the lever machines represented a big step forward
in a long process. People had voted with kernels of corn or
black and white beans in Massachusetts in the sixteen-forties,
viva voce or by a show of hands in pre-Revolutionary times,
and on paper ballots that they wrote out for themselves or
had written out for them, then on printed ones, then on the
secret and official printed "Australian" ballots that
were adopted generally in the second half of the nineteenth
century. When a voter using the mechanical machine presses
down a lever beside a printed choice, the return of the lever
to its original position causes a tenth of a turn on a tens
counter, which is connected to a hundreds counter. A.V.M.
was the first large firm in the field. Samuel R. Shoup, the
grandfather of the president of the present R. F. Shoup Company,
organized the principal rival to A.V.M., the Shoup Voting
Machine Corporation (S.V.M.), in 1905.
By 1928, a lever machine was used by about one of
every six American voters. In the early thirties, while he
was a professor of political science at the University of
Washington, Harris began to have constructed in the university's
engineering shops a gizmo that he thought of as the application
of the principle of the player piano to the mechanical voting
machine. ("The computer was beyond my dreams," he said later.)
One voted on Harris's device by depressing keys that made
perforations in a paper roll, and in due course the machine
would automatically count the perforations and print the results.
A Seattle businessman went halves on it with Harris, and in
1934, after much difficulty, the moonlighting professor
won a patent, but by then he understood that financially the
project was far beyond him and his friends. He invited "the
I.B.M.," as he called the International Business Machines
Corporation, to develop and market his device, but, in 1937,
the company turned him down. On the eve of the Second
World War, he was still tinkering with the machine-considering
entering votes on the paper roll as lead marks that could
be read electrically, or even, as he wrote to I.B.M.'s director
for market research in 1939, "on a punch card."
For Harris, as for nearly everyone, the war
intervened, and he taught management and administration at
a school for military officers. One day in the early nineteen-sixties,
though, when he was teaching at the University of California
at Berkeley, a former student asked him if he had ever thought
of using a standard I.B.M. computer punch card for vote-recording.
"I hadn't, but I did," Harris wrote later; he had forgotten
his own idea of 1939. Soon after he had been asked
about the I.B.M. card, the election chief of Alameda County,
California, complained to him that the lever voting machines
could barely handle the current ballots, which kept growing
longer. "Joe," he said, "what we need is some kind of a simple
mechanical device that can be related some way to a computer."
In that context, the election official talked about the I.B.M.
Port-a-Punch, a hand-held device for punching out the rectangles
on the I.B.M. card. "I started to think," Harris said later.
After a cataract operation in 1962, as he lay bedridden for
two weeks with pads taped over his eyes, he had a eureka experience:
he suddenly visualized "a computer card in an inexpensive
holder with a permanent election `book' pre-marked with candidates
and issues."
The founding president of C.E.S., Robert
P. Varni, told me what happened next. We were in his apartment
in San Francisco, a twenty-third-floor Nob Hill penthouse
looking out across the great sweep of the bay, the islands,
and the bridges. "I was working for I.B.M.," he said. "One
of my accounts was U.C. Berkeley. I got a call from Joe Harris.
He asked about the I.B.M. Port-a-Punch. `I have an idea, and
I'd like to borrow it for a while,' he said. He didn't want
to buy it. It was an eight-dollar item. He wanted to borrow
it, along with about a dollar and a half's worth of punch
cards."
Assisted by William S. Rouverol, a retired
professor, who was an engineer, Harris cobbled together his
ingenious new device for computerized vote counting. "After
a while," Varni went on, "he called and said, `I've done something
interesting with that Port-a-Punch you lent me.' I went to
his office and he showed me the first prototype of the Votomatic."
Harris said later that he had derived the name of his invention
from the Shine-O-Matic, a shoeshine machine he had read about
in the Sunday paper.
Varni is now the trim, prosperous chairman
of a firm that computerizes police and fire departments. As
he recalled those early days, he often broke into a warm smile.
Harris didn't know anything about computers and needed someone
who did, so, in 1963, Varni sent him to Kenneth Hazlett, an
athletic young man who was the foreman of the university's
computer room. Hazlett had had only two years of higher education,
at Oakland City College, but he had been introduced to tabulating
machines during a two-year spell in the Navy, and after taking
an I.B.M. course in programming he had begun teaching the
skill to some of his staff at Berkeley.
"Joe Harris walked into my office with a
handful of these Port-a-Punch cards and wanted to know if
they'd go through a computer," Hazlett recalled. "I walked
him outside my office to a small I.B.M. computer, and from
the console I keyed in about a three instruction loop that
would simply flush these cards through the card reader. And
they went sailing through. Joe Harris just lit up!" Harris
realized that he could use the cards themselves as ballots.
He showed Hazlett a mockup of the prototype, and, Hazlett
said, "I agreed to do him a real program." To produce and
sell his invention, Harris then formed Harris Votomatic, Inc.,
with a quarter of a million dollars he raised from about two
dozen of his colleagues at the university, including Hazlett,
and from Varni. Having retired from teaching, he then began
driving around the West trying to sell his invention.
Devising the early programs for what became
the C.E.S. systems, Hazlett gave next to no attention to security
against the kinds of fraud that could be concealed in the
computerized system itself. "There are two problems," he told
me last spring in his sunlit apartment in Corvallis, Oregon.
"One is getting the system to work the way you want it to,
and the other problem is avoiding fraud. We concentrated mainly
on the first. Then, beyond that, we worked with county and
state governments, cooperated in developing procedures for
logic-and-accuracy-testing programs -which is running ballot
cards having known votes through and verifying the totals
that are produced, and even the counting by hand or machine
of selected precincts post-election to look for fraud or error.
And that's about all we can do."
Does Hazlett have confidence now in the security of computerized
elections against fraud?
"Not a hundred per cent," he said. However,
he added, he knew of no elections that had been stolen by
computer.
Is a logic-and-accuracy test actually
a test of a system's accuracy?
"Obviously it isn't as far as you could go in testing the
program," Hazlett said. "It's a very simple test. If
a programmer had the necessary programming tools, he or she
could get around that kind of test-of course. Knowing that
the deck is fifty-five cards, you could trigger some function
to come into service after fifty-five cards. Use your imagination-there
are any number of things you could do. It's not an easy problem."
According to Donald
G. Baumer, an engineer who worked with Hazlett, both of them
realized that the Votomatic counting system could be manipulated-for
instance, through the toggle switches that were on the front
of a Data General Nova computer -but it was assumed that nobody
would do this, because anybody who tried it could be seen.
In the workshop at his small election-equipment company, near
San Francisco, Baumer explained, "The concept was to devise
a program that no one could ever get to - you would have to
be a knowledgeable person, you would have to have the source
code, and you would be very visible, standing in front of
a computer throwing switches."
As Harris got older, he realized that he
could not wheel around the country selling Votomatics forever.
Managers who were looking for new products had taken over
Varni's unit at I.B.M., and in 1965-Varni having disclosed
his investment-I.B.M. bought the assets and patents of the
Harris Votomatic and became for four years the nation's principal
computerized-election-equipment company. Harris served I.B.M.
as a paid consultant throughout the period.
"Glitches"-the term that company people seem
to prefer for errors and accidents in computer elections-began
to emerge in those earliest years. For example, in May, 1968,
in Klamath County, Oregon, candidates' positions on the ballots
were rotated in the precincts to avoid giving any candidate
the unfair advantage of the top position everywhere, but the
ballots got mixed up, and voters in more than a fourth of
the precincts punched out rectangles for candidates they did
not mean to vote for. Harris said later that as the new system
became controversial, I.B.M. responded in some communities
"by instructing its staff to describe the machine as the Harris
Votomatic," not I.B.M.'s.
In Los Angeles County in the June, 1968,
Presidential primary, deputy sheriffs were to carry voted
punch cards from the precincts to two regional counting centers-one
on Third Street, and the other at the I.B.M. Service Bureau
Corporation, on Wilshire Boulevard, next door to the Ambassador
Hotel. However, after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot that
night at the Ambassador, police cordoned off a four-block
area around the scene, and the tapes containing the totals
from the Third Street center could not be brought into the
I.B.M. building. The counting was not completed until nine
o'clock the next morning. Reporters were irritated by the
delay, and officials at I.B.M. began to wonder seriously about
the risks of the election business, which, comparatively speaking,
was providing only a small profit.
That November, in Missoula County, Montana,
in the national contest between Hubert Humphrey and Richard
Nixon, another difficulty arose. Joseph H. Chowning, who was
an I.B.M. salesman then, told me not long ago, "Through a
programming error in a few precincts, ballots cast for Nixon
were counted for Humphrey or vice versa." In traditional Republican
strongholds, Nixon was defeated, while Democratic redoubts
went for him. In a precinct where both paper and punchcard
ballots were used, Nixon swept the paper ballots, but the
computer voted for Humphrey by a landslide. The error was
caught immediately, Chowning said, but he and an I.B.M. publicrelations
man had to fly to Missoula to dispel the unease.
One other event, a singular one, came to
Chowning's attention about this time. "Just before or after
the 1968 election, there was an article or editorial in a
small suburban Chicago newspaper that came out and said that
the reason I.B.M. was in the business was to make Thomas Watson
President of the United States," he recalled, referring to
the chairman of I.B.M. "I'm guessing, but I'm sure it went
right straight to Mr. Watson's desk." Ken Hazlett, too, has
a vague memory of this. "I wondered at the time if T. J. Watson
was interested in running for President," he told me.
Chowning went on, "Here I.B.M. had a product
that guaranteed two or three per cent of its gross income
and eighty to ninety per cent of its publicity, not all of
it favorable." I.B.M. got out of the vote-counting business.
By 1969, it had licensed five voting equipment companies to
sell the Votomatic: two in Illinois, one in New York, one
in Tulsa, and C.E.S., which was founded by Varni and three
other I.B.M. men-Chowning, Jack Gerbel, and Ken Hazlett (whom
I.B.M. had hired to write programs for the Votomatic)-and
which therefore had the great advantage of its executives'
association with I.B.M.'s reputation.
Varni and his team at C.E.S. had a good run.
By 1976, nearly seventeen million voters-more than a fifth
of all those voting for President that year-entrusted their
election decisions to C.E.S. counting systems.
The C.E.S. Votomatic punch-card system "has
probably had more effect on the country than almost any other
product," Varni said to me. Although today it is generally
regarded as an outmoded technology, it is by far the most
widely used method of counting votes by computer. The Votomatic
is based on the assignment of a tiny, numbered pre-perforated
rectangle on a standard eighty-column, twelve-row I.B.M. punch
card to each candidate and the assignment of other rectangles
to the "yes" and "no" positions on each question to be voted
on. This punch card, covered with numbers but displaying no
names of candidates and none of the propositions to be voted
on, is the ballot. The vote recorder, which is the
Votomatic, is a spined booklet listing the choices of the
day in writing and mounted over a plastic mask that is designed
to prevent voters from punching out any holes but the ones
they are supposed to be able to punch. The voter slides the
punch card underneath the booklet and then fits two holes
near the top of the card onto two posts that are intended
to keep the card properly aligned under the booklet. Alongside
the choices printed on each page, arrows point to holes that
match numbered rectangles on the underlying card. The voter
turns the pages and, using a simple stylus attached to the
device by a chain, punches out the rectangles that, as holes
in the punch card, express his or her choices.
After the polls close, stacks of the voted
punch cards are fed into card readers, in each precinct or
in one central counting place, depending on the preference
of the officials of the jurisdiction. A blower in each reader
creates an air-stream and fluffs up some of the cards at the
bottom of the stack; a pump creates a vacuum; and a spinning
cylinder attached to the pump seizes a ballot and flings it
past a light whose beam flicks through each punched-out hole,
the cards whizzing through the reader at a rate of up to a
thousand a minute. If the spinning cylinder doesn't grab two
ballots at a time, if the minute punched-out rectangles of
cardboard have separated properly from the cards, and if the
computer underneath and connected to the card reader has been
programmed correctly, the computer then quickly and accurately
tabulates the votes; that is, it counts according to its location
each pinpoint of light that twinkles through a card for a
millisecond.
The punched-out scraps, which have come to
be called "chad," are supposed to be forced between two vertical
rubber strips underneath the ballot and into a chad box. Sometimes,
however, a chad does not break completely free from the card
and becomes a "hanging chad," and sometimes voting-hole rectangles
are merely indented by the voter's stylus. "Hanging chad has
been with us since the invention of the Votomatic," Hazlett
told me. C. A. Rundell, of Cronus, informed me during an interview
in his office in Dallas last fall that because of the chad
problem, and also because of wear and tear on the ballots,
vote totals may not change the first time ballots are run
through the card reader, and probably won't the second time,
but the third or fourth time they may change, "and then you've
lost your audit trail." The inexact science of divining what
the voter intended in the case of a mere indentation or whether
the card reader counted a hole that was partly or wholly blocked
by a hanging chad has been called "chadology."
Presumably, most of the elections counted
by the C.E.S. systems went smoothly ("People don't want to
read about a good election," Jack Gerbel told me in September),
but the company did have problems. In the 1970 primary in
Los Angeles, voters in some precincts voted for the wrong
candidates because of incorrect rotations; in other precincts
ballot pages were missing. A computer program did not record
totals on a hundred of its counters. Ballot cards jammed in
the card readers and had to be duplicated by election workers-clerks
were seen poking holes in punch cards with pencils. The central
computer stopped or was stopped six times during the counting;
and it was discovered only after the counting that more than
five hundred precincts had been overlooked.
In 1970, the election commissioners in St.
Louis, who were considering buying the Votomatic system, asked
the accounting firm Price Waterhouse to evaluate it, with
devastating results. Security controls on the Votomatic
would be "more easily subject to abuse" than those on the
mechanical machines in place, the firm said. Candidates'
names could be misaligned with the rectangles on the ballot
"by manipulation of the ballot book pages' printing or positioning,
by manipulating the positioning of the punched card used to
record the vote, or by manipulation of the program used to
tabulate the vote," the report continued. "It
is possible to write a program in such a way that no test
can be made to assure that the program works the way it is
supposed to work.... It is possible to set card readers to
misread the information punched into the cards. It is possible
to have instructions in computer memory to call in special
procedures from core, tape, or disk files to create results
other than those anticipated. . . . There is no practical
way to assure accuracy of the proposed computer tabulation
short of complete duplicate processing on third party computers
with reproduced ballot card decks and third party control
programs."
Gerbel, who was taking over the C.E.S. sales
effort in major jurisdictions, responded with a long recitation
of the customary tests and safeguards, and also emphasized
the system's acceptance in fifteen states, discounted "information
supplied by competitors," and concluded, "For six years, the
personnel of C.E.S. have answered the comments made in this
report by conducting successful Votomatic elections."
IN 1977,
C.E.S. was bought out by Hale Brothers Associates, a San Francisco
investment company controlled by Prentis Cobb Hale, Jr.When
his family acquired C.E.S., through a "friendly cash offer,"
for twelve million dollars, Prentis
Hale, an influential Republican who was given to partridge-hunting
with General Franco in Spain, was best known as
the Hale in Carter Hawley Hale (C.H.H.) -the nation's seventh-ranking
chain of department stores and the largest chain in the West.
The year Hale bought the election company, C.H.H. earned fifty
million dollars on sales of a billion and a half dollars.
A couple of years later, C.E.S. survived
an investigation by the antitrust division of the justice
Department. "We became the target of a criminal grand jury,"
David L. Dunbar, the company's president at that time, told
me recently. The investigation lasted more than a year, and
the company turned over a whole file cabinet of records to
the justice Department. The investigation
was dropped very early in 1981-in January or February, Dunbar
recalled, adding, "I used to kid people we had to get Ronald
Reagan elected to get this thing killed."
As the eighties opened, C.E.S. was the unchallenged leader
in the business of computerized vote-counting equipment. In
1980, C.E.S. systems were in place where about thirty-five
million Americans were registered to vote, and they counted
about three out of ten of the votes that were cast in the
United States. Two years later, C.E.S. equipment tallied thirty-six
per cent of the votes in the country. As of November 6,
1984, nine out of twenty votes, 44.2 per cent-were
counted on C.E.S. equipment in a thousand and nineteen jurisdictions
in forty states. To put this a different
way, the electronic technology made and marketed by one small
company housed in an industrial building near San Francisco
Bay counted the votes that were cast in more than sixty-four
thousand precincts where almost forty-seven million Americans
were registered to vote.
The period 1977 through 1986, when
C.E.S. for the most part dominated the computerized-election
business, was a time of technical mishaps and rising suspicion.
A precursor of the serious breakdowns that lay ahead had occurred
in a legislative race in Los Angeles in 1976. The outcome
was reversed twice-once by a machine recount, the second time
by holding every one of the hundred thousand ballots up to
a light and counting the holes one by one. "Hanging chad"
and "bulging chad," as the indented tabs were sometimes called,
were blamed for shifts of tens of votes in both directions.
In 1978, a candidate for comptroller
of the State of Illinois refused to believe he had lost Madison
County by a large margin, and it turned out, according to
Michael Hamblett, a member of the Chicago Board of Elections,
that the totals had "flipped-here was a computer flip-flop."
That same year, in a statewide recount for
secretary of state of Ohio (which Mark Braden, the present
general counsel of the Republican National Committee, helped
to conduct), only sixteen votes changed out of about three
million. But overvoting on punch-card ballots was beginning
to trouble Ohioans. Anthony Celebrezze, Ohio's secretary of
state, estimating that about fifty-five thousand voters had
had their votes invalidated in this way, asked, "Are they
being partially disenfranchised by some peculiarity of the
equipment itself"
In El Paso, Texas, the winner of a
1978 school-board race, Marvin Gamza, was deprived
of his victory when the computer failed to count votes cast
for him in three precincts, because ballot layouts from an
earlier election had been used in them. Suspicions were
voiced that the mistake had been deliberately left uncorrected,
and the federal judge who heard the case, John H. Wood, was
angered when he learned, from the television news one night,
that some of the relevant ballots had been burned. He concluded
that "a willful effort" had been involved in the error, rejected
the claim of the putative winner, and installed Gamza on the
school board.But Judge Wood was overruled on appeal,
because Gamza had filed his protest too late. "The winner
lost," said Malcolm McGregor, Gamza's lawyer, but McGregor
doubted whether the mixing up of the layouts was premeditated,
because, he said, "a baboon would not have tried to steal
the election that way."
In 1980, computerized vote-counting faltered
seriously in a number of jurisdictions across the country.
A study by the city clerk of Detroit concluded that in a primary
conducted on the C.E.S. punch-card system, which the city
had just installed, votes on one out of every nine ballots
cast had been invalidated-fifteen thousand in all because
people had tried to vote in two parties' primaries.
In that same year, when a mark-sense system
sold by Martel Systems, of Costa Mesa, California, was used
for the first time in Orange County, California, a Republican
stronghold, there was a four-day delay in the count. On Primary
Night, more than fifty precinct-level memory cartridges had
broken down, and-because of programming errors, it was explained-the
computers had given about fifteen thousand Democratic-primary
votes meant for delegates for Jimmy Carter or Edward Kennedy
to delegates for Lyndon LaRouche and Jerry Brown.
Montana law permits voters to demand paper
ballots, and in Missoula (where votes for Humphrey and Nixon
had been interchanged in 1968) as many as thirty per cent
of the voters chose to vote this old-fashioned way. Still
in this same year, 1980, card readers broke down in jurisdictions
in Michigan, Arkansas, Indiana, and Utah. In Salt Lake City,
a central card reader started "putting out jumbled numbers
on about three out of every hundred ballot choices," according
to a news report. In a township in Ohio, two tax proposals
were switched; the voters would have taxed themselves five
times as much as they wanted to if the error hadn't been discovered
after the voting. In Custer County, Nebraska, the county
clerk said that a count on a C.E.S. system concerning a school-closing
issue showed more people voting than were registered.
The computer had also refused to read some ballots and had
read only parts of others. In Bradenton, on the Florida Gulf
Coast, a seventh of the county's precincts had to be counted
twice, because "soggy, warped, and mangled ballots" occasionally
jammed the computers. Directly across the panhandle, at Fort
Pierce, on the Atlantic, new computerized machines counted
Democratic ballots well enough but refused to accept Republican
ones. "It was awfully strange," the supervisor of elections,
James Brooks, was quoted as saying. "Those damn machines must
have been built by the Democrats."
In San Antonio, Texas, in perhaps the most
consequential breakdown in 1980, it was discovered
that the C.E.S. program that counted votes in the Presidential
election in Bexar County could not tally more than nine thousand
votes for any race, so the computers had not counted many
of the votes cast for Ronald Reagan and two other Republican
candidates. The official post-election canvass found that
sixteen-hundredths of a per cent fewer total votes were cast
than had been reported on Election Night, whereupon the San
Antonio Express noted, "As San Antonio moves into the
computer age, the slogan of the universal suffrage movement
becomes, `One man, 0.9984 vote.' " The recount dragged
on for several weeks, with local politicians pointing fingers
at each other. Mike Greenberg, a columnist for the Express,
learned that election officials had taken unmarked ballots
home overnight. "Even already marked ballots could be tampered
with," he went on to say, continuing, "Anybody with a straightened-out
paper clip could punch out a few more holes to either spoil
a ballot with the `wrong' votes or cast `right' votes in races
ignored by the legitimate voter." In due course, Bexar County
returned to lever machines.
A candidate for the school board in Carroll County, Maryland,
in 1984, T. Edward Lippy, finished third, with about
six thousand votes. When, in obedience to state law, the
voted C.E.S.-system ballots were taken to an adjoining county
to be recounted on a different computer system, about twelve
thousand five hundred uncounted votes were found, and it was
learned that in fact about nineteen thousand citizens had
voted for Lippy. He was proclaimed the winner. The error
was explained as a slip-up by a local data-processing official.
("It was my mistake," he said.) He had inadvertently replaced
the correct C.E.S. provided program with a test program that
would not count two votes if they were punched in one column
on the ballot, and most of the voters who favored Lippy had
also voted on a home-rule proposition in the same column with
the numbered rectangle assigned to votes for Lippy. The wrong
program had also cost President Reagan more than two thousand
votes in the first count. A standard pre-election test had
not caught the official's mistake; in a state without the
requirement to double-check the count, it could have been
missed.
In 1985, in Moline, Illinois, a candidate
for alderman served for three months before a recount removed
him from office. This mistake was laid to a slipping timing
belt that had caused the card reader to fail to count a number
of straight-party votes for the real winner. The apparently
defeated candidate, it turned out, had actually won handily.
IN the fall of 1980, Michael Shamos,
a computer scientist, law student, and businessman who was
teaching at Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, and
running a software company, saw an announcement on a computer
bulletin board that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was looking
for examiners for computerized-voting systems. He knew nothing
about such systems, but the job sounded interesting, so he
signed up and went to Harrisburg to examine the C.E.S. Votomatic
system. "What I saw that day," he told me not long ago, "was
hairraising and mind-boggling: antique, obsolete, unreliable
technology packed with a systems approach that was even more
unreliable."
We were talking in the upstairs study of
Shamos's home in Pittsburgh. On the wall above his desk was
a large Princeton University pennant. He has degrees in physics
from Princeton and Vassar; an M.S. from American University
in the technology of management; three degrees in computer
science, including a doctorate, from Yale; and a law degree
from Duquesne. Shamos continued, with feeling, concerning
the Votomatic system, "Counting paper ballots is no picnic.
I really thought hard about this. Am I being picky? I came
to the conclusion that it's far worse than a paper ballot.
After all, what is the rush? I for the life of me couldn't
figure out why anybody would use this."
That November, Shamos presented to Pennsylvania's
Bureau of Elections his evaluation of the C.E.S. election
system. Punch-card technology was obsolete, his report stated.
The C.E.S. system had not been modernized and was "a security
nightmare, open to tampering in a multitude of ways," Shamos
continued. "It is apparent that security was not taken seriously
as an issue during the design of the Votomatic." The report
went on to note that the ballot pages in the Votomatic booklet
could easily be shuffled or replaced; blank punch-card ballots
were easy to obtain; and the plastic seals on the boxes used
to transport voted ballots for central counting were easily
duplicated. Moreover, the system could not be verified
without examination of its source code, yet C.E.S. had refused
to produce that code; no effort had been made to restrict
access to the control panels or the toggle switches on the
computer, with which "any person can enter arbitrary numbers
into the machine's counters;" and the counting program, loaded
through a deck of punched cards, could be altered to change
the counting "by inserting or deleting a single one of the
cards or by transposing two of them."
Shamos now warned, "The following
scenario is thus fully possible. A would-be election fixer
enters a voting booth with a card concealed on his person
that, when read by the tabulating computer, will reset its
counters to values desired by the fixer. On leaving the booth,
he presents this card, conveniently wrapped in its secrecy
envelope, to an election official who, not being permitted
to examine it, drops the `ballot' into a box. After the election,
the card makes its way to the central counting facility where
it is read by the computer. Instead of being counted as a
vote or rejected by the system, the effect of this card is
to change the current vote total for any candidate desired."
In a carefully worded paragraph headed "Concentration
of Control at C.E.S.," Shamos noted, "All
software used in the Votomatic machines is obtained in the
form of secret card decks supplied by C.E.S. Without casting
doubt on the integrity of C.E.S. in any way, nonetheless,
the possibility exists that an unauthorized person may gain
access to the central point from which these programs are
distributed and alter them. The implications are frightening
when it is remembered that one-quarter of all votes cast in
the U.S. are counted by these programs."
Throughout the evaluation, Shamos wrote,
C.E.S. "took the attitude that the Votomatic system has been
in use for seventeen years, has been evaluated by more than
thirty states, and has never been denied certification. In
response to virtually every question regarding a deficiency,
the vender responded by stating that the problem had been
considered by a number of other jurisdictions and was found
not to be serious.... The Votomatic system must be denied
certification."
Pennsylvania assigns three examiners to inspect
each voting system submitted for certification, but the decision
about it is made not by them but by the secretary of the Commonwealth.
One of the other examiners found the system acceptable. The
third, C. Kamila Robertson, of the computer-science faculty
at Carnegie-Mellon (who said that the voting booklet had come
apart in her hands, and that "it would be easy to sabotage
the computer in this system ... the switches are there for
the switching"), agreed with Shamos. The secretary of the
Commonwealth certified the system, but Shamos's report soon
became one of the basic documents in the controversy over
computerized vote-tallying.
THE precinct-level corruption that Joe Harris
had witnessed in Chicago in the twenties was visible again
in the 1982 election there, but now instead of repeat
voters the precinct captains had repeat votes, as counted
on the C.E.S. system. According to the report of a grand jury
that investigated the 1982 election, and whose indictments
led to fifty-eight convictions, ward committeemen appointed
city employees as precinct captains, and these factotums either
produced for the political machine on Election Day or lost
favor with their patrons. The grand jurors reported, "One
precinct captain and his son disregarded the actual ballots
cast by voters and instead held their own fraudulent election
after the polls closed by running two ballots through the
voting machine. One ballot was a straight Democratic `punch
10.' That ballot was counted by the machine a total of one
hundred and ninety-eight times. To make the results less suspect,
they also counted a ballot containing some Republican votes
a total of six times. Consequently, all but two of the voters
in that precinct were disenfranchised."
The grand jurors said that in many Chicago
precincts in 1982 faked punch-card votes were cast
in the names of transients, the ill, the incapacitated, and
people who had moved away, had died, or had not voted. Runners
worked the boarding houses and hotels to find out who was
not coming to the polls. "The ballots either were punched
on the voting machines by people posing as the voter, or were
punched with ball-point pens or other similar objects in a
private place outside the polling area," according to the
grand jury's report. In one named precinct in the Thirty-ninth
Ward, the captain gave lists of non-voters to one of the election
judges, and she slipped them into her shoe. During the day,
she would draw out a list when no one was looking and forge
names from it on blank ballot applications. "The precinct
captain and others apparently retreated to the privacy of
the men's washroom to punch some of the ballots," the grand
jurors said.
THE legal conflict that perhaps best embodies
the doubts about computerized democracy, and demonstrates-whether
the plaintiffs or the defendants were right in this particular
case-many of the difficulties of proving charges of stealing
elections by computer, started in Charleston, West Virginia,
in 1980 and ended, for all practical purposes except
for the plaintiffs' liabilities, in a federal appeals court
in Richmond, Virginia, in 1986. In
1971, Jack Gerbel, of C.E.S., and an area C.E.S. representative
had presented the Votomatic for approval in West Virginia,
but the state's two examiners rejected it. They cited its
permitting of overvoting, and they stated, "The computer program
... can possibly be modified by an experienced data-processing
person, causing the computer to miscount votes cast for a
particular race." However, the West Virginia secretary of
state, Jay Rockefeller (who is now United States senator
from West Virginia), seeing, as he wrote at the time, that
the report of the examiners was negative, designated two new
examiners, and they approved the system.
At about 7 P.M. on November 4, 1980, as Ronald
Reagan was being elected President, Walter J. Price III, a
plump-cheeked, energetic young man in a blue blazer and khakis
and his "Election Day" tie-blue with diagonal gold and red
stripes-drove down to the voter registrar's office in Charleston.
A freshman Republican legislator in a county that Daniel Boone
had once represented in the Virginia Assembly, Price was going
downtown to see himself reelected, as he thought, and to watch
the operation of the new system the county had bought the
year before from C.E.S. He was not worried about vote fraud,
he told me later, because the first clerk of Kanawha County
the Republicans had had since 1932, Margaret (Peggy) Miller,
would be running the count.
Over the vehement objections of the voter
registrar, Carolyn Critchfield, Price threaded his way among
desks and people toward what the election workers called the
computer cage. This was a small room with windows on all sides
that began about four and a half feet above the floor and
a Dutch door that had a window in its top half. The two vote-counting
computers of the BT-76 (Ballot Tab) system in Charleston,
one of them designated the "master" and one the "slave," had
been set up on the floor inside, with punchcard readers on
top of them and printers beside them. On the computers, down
near the floor, were sets of toggle switches. Price has testified
under oath, and repeated in greater detail during lengthy
interviews with me, that, as he walked around the outside
of this room looking in during the next hour and a half, he
saw four kinds of actions, which, four and a half years later,
dominated the only known court trial so far of charges that
an election was stolen by computer. The people who Price said
took these actions have all vigorously denied doing so, also
under oath.
Traditionally on Election Night in Kanawha
County, the vote totals were announced and posted in the precincts.
This year, none were. Instead, the uncounted voted punch cards
were all carried from the precincts to the registrar's office
and run through one central system, which Walter Price was
looking at. Only these cumulative centralized counts, which
included no record of precinct-by-precinct totals, were coming
out of the whining, clacking printers; then they were ripped
loose and fed to the local reporters and to the citizens who
had gathered on the other side of the chest-high reception
counter.
Price said that at least four times while
he was looking into the computer room that night he saw Peggy
Miller, the county clerk, drop down into what he called a
coal miner's squat-"not on her knees but bent down with her
knees coming up toward her chest"-in front of the sixteen
toggle switches on the master computer, consult notes she
had on a pad or clipboard, put the notes down, turn a key,
flip some of the switches, and turn the key again. Such an
action was not called for in the counting of the votes. After
Peggy Miller finished flipping the switches, Price said, she
reclaimed her notes and stood up. On more than one of these
occasions, she walked over to the nearby "dasher," a slow
printer, "and she would type some things and then the printer
would run," he said.
The incumbent congressman for that district,
running again, was a Democrat, John Hutchinson. He had been
elected the mayor of Charleston three times in the seventies,
and in 1976, during his service at City Hall, he had run for
governor, but had lost. Although he and Jay Rockefeller, who
in 1980 was the Democratic governor, were not friendly, Hutchinson
was regarded by Walter Price as one of the five most influential
Democrats in the state. Mick Staten, Hutchinson's Republican
opponent, was a close friend of Peggy Miller's husband, Steven,
a lawyer, who was the general counsel for the Republican executive
committee of that congressional district, and Staton's largest
campaign contributor. Hutchinson had trounced Staton in a
special election the preceding June, and two polls conducted
by the Charleston Gazette had predicted that Hutchinson
would win again, in the counting that Price was watching,
by a spread of between fourteen and sixteen percentage points;
that is, by around twenty-five thousand of the votes that
were being counted. Hutchinson's wife, Berry, said that a
poll by the Democratic National Committee, too, had shown
that her husband would win by a wide margin. Staton himself,
however, had predicted that he would win, by five points.
Price said that during the counting his fellow-Republican
Steve Miller entered the computer cage, drew out of the inside
pocket of his suit coat a pack of cards between a quarter
of an inch and an inch thick and the same size as the ballot
and control punch cards, patted the cards to even them up,
and handed them to his wife. According to Price, they were
talking, but, being behind the glass, he could not hear what
they said. Price testified that Peggy Miller ran the cards
through the card reader, retrieved them, and gave them back
to her husband, and that he returned them to his breast pocket
and left the room.
Seated at a table lodged between elements
of the C.E.S. system was a man Price had never seen before.
Clearly, the person he was referring to was Carl Clough, the
Northeast sales manager of C.E.S., who had been with the company
for ten years. Price said he saw this man busily using a telephone
and what seemed to be a calculator. Open in front of him on
the table was a large case resembling a briefcase. Three or
four times, Price said, the man grasped the phone as one might
the handle of a suitcase, and, he told me, he "places it,
he very carefully places it" in the case; he "pushed
it down ... it was just a very deliberate pushing in" of the
phone. After a time, he said, the man put both hands to the
case, seemed to hold it down with one hand "like he was steadying,
like there was some resistance to," the phone's "coming out,"
and, with the other, pulled the phone out "with some force."
This resembles a description of a man using a modem, a device
that permits computers separated by hundreds or thousands
of miles to communicate with each other over telephone lines.
The operator of the master computer that
night was Darlene Dotson; the secondary, slave computer was
the responsibility of Vicky Lynn Young, just two years out
of high school. Vicky Young needed to keep her job, because
she was taking care of some of her close relatives. Nevertheless,
later, on the witness stand, she swore that on one occasion
during the counting in the cage Clough "told me to go over
and stand beside Darlene and help her with her computer so
that nobody could see."
Had this happened? Clough was asked during
the trial. "Absolutely not," he replied. Furthermore, he said,
he had had a briefcase in the computer cage, but there had
been neither a modem nor any other electronic equipment in
it. He thought that he had used a phone in the cage, but that
it could have been moored in an adjacent room. Young testified
that Clough had tools but had not used a modem; he denied
that he had any tools. Dotson averred twice before the trial
that there had been a phone in the room and that Clough had
used it "more than once;" at the trial she said there had
been a phone jack in the room, but no phone.
Peggy Miller said on the stand that she had not gone
into the computer cage at all on Election Night, thereby denying
Price's testimony. (Mrs. Miller, who has resumed her former
career as a schoolteacher, and is a candidate for the state
legislature on November 8th, later said to me of Price, "He
lied in court," and she also said, "He'll testify against
his mother if it'll get him something.") Steve Miller, asked
by the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, John Mitchell, "Did
you enter the computer room and take several computer-sized
cards out of your pocket and lay them down?" answered, "Absolutely,
positively no." Clough said the Millers had not been in there
while he was, although he had "stepped out a few times." A
county commissioner said that he had seen Peggy Miller in
the room. Dotson said that the Millers were not there and
that Peggy Miller "may have come in, but not all the time."
Young "didn't remember" Peggy Miller there, and said that
she did not see Steve Miller come in "that I remember."
In a document having to do with an appeal,
the defendants described Price's testimony as uncorroborated
and "soundly contradicted by every other witness called by
plaintiffs who was in a position to observe the occurrences
in the computer room." They characterized Young's testimony
as a denial that Peggy Miller had manipulated the toggle switches;
they stressed that Price had not known the identity of the
man he had seen with the briefcase.
On the night in question, Price, following
the returns, perceived that he was losing his position in
the House of Delegates, and after saying so to a friend of
his he exclaimed loudly, pointing to the computer cage, "The
only election I lost was in that room!" Hutchinson, too, lost
that night, and by nearly ten thousand votes-the five percentage
points by which his opponent, Mick Staton, earlier that fall
had predicted his own victory.
Leonard Underwood, a Baptist minister, who
had been defeated for the legislature by seven votes, challenged
the Charleston results in a lawsuit, but Peggy Miller said
that sixty-two days after the election-just two beyond the
earliest legal moment in the absence of a contested election-she
had had the punch-card ballots destroyed, not realizing that
Underwood's challenge was still pending. "Anytime an election
is completed ... those materials are cleaned out," she said.
"Otherwise we would have a continuous buildup of materials."
T. David Higgins, a Union Carbide computer
specialist who was also the chairman of the Kanawha County
Republican Party, testified during the trial that in Charleston
in the summer of 1981, at a political affair for Representative
Staton, he had spoken at length with Steve Miller:
He was very unhappy with
the fact that I was working with the joint House-Senate
subcommittee here at the Capitol which was looking into
the whole question of electronic voting in the state of
West Virginia. And he also said something to the effect
of how it worked out that my working with them, collaborating
with them, somehow in his mind cast aspersions of.... He
suggested that I thought there was something irregular in
the election of November, 1980, here specifically in Kanawha
County.
I said to him at that point
that I did not think they had done anything wrong in the election
of 1980. I said to him, "I do not think that you understand
enough about this computer to rig it to fix an election."
And Steve looked me in the eye, grinned like
a shark ... and said to me, "You underrated us."
(In a recent interview, Steve Miller denied
that he had said "You underrated us" to Higgins at the Staton
affair. "He told me about reports he had heard from Democrats
that `you guys had stolen the election,' and that he had told
them we weren't smart enough to do that," Miller said. "And
he's right, I grinned like a shark. In fact, I laughed out
loud. I told him, `Thank God, neither are you, David,' and
turned on my heel and walked off." Miller went on to describe
Higgins as "a conceited, arrogant fop" and "a shallow idiot."
On the subject of Walter Price's testimony, Miller said, "He's
a liar. I've never been in that computer room in my life."
As for Price himself, he said, "If I had a choice between
sitting down with him and a polecat, I'd pick the polecat.")
C.E.S. officials in Berkeley, upon learning
of the rising public alarm in Charleston, sent out one of
their programming consultants, C. Stephen Carr, who had probably
written or revised as many of the codes for votecounting machines
as anyone else in America. Testifying at hearings on electronic
voting that had been called by the West Virginia secretary
of state, in Charleston, Carr declared, "While any computer
system can be penetrated, the time and effort to penetrate
this one is so extreme as to render it effectively impenetrable."
Representative Staton was defeated for reelection
in 1982. The West Virginia legislature passed a law that year
requiring that after each election "at least five per cent
of the precincts shall be chosen at random and the ballot
cards cast therein counted manually." A special grand jury
that was convened to investigate the November, 1980, election
indicted Peggy Miller on six felony and nine misdemeanor charges
of election-law violations, none of them directly related
to the computers, and she was tried and acquitted on all counts.
THREE of the Democrats who had lost in 1980-Hutchinson,
Underwood, and Bill Reese, a candidate for county commissioner-continued
to be troubled by the outcome even after Miller's acquittal.
Underwood wanted the three of them to sue for damages.
John Hutchinson told
him, "Why, you're crazy as a bedbug, they beat me by ten thousand
votes."
Underwood replied,
"If you're gonna steal it, you can put in ten thousand as
easily as ten."
Dozens of times, driving past the Hutchinsons'
home, which is near his own in Charleston, Walter Price recalled,
he thought that he should go in and tell Hutchinson what he
had seen in the computer cage. "It occurred to me that that
poor man ought to know what really screwed him out of Congress,"
Price said to me. "Why I didn't do it I don't know."
In mid-1982, though, he said, he happened
to take a seat in front of the Hutchinsons at a public meeting
in the state capitol, and Berry Hutchinson, a shrewd and ebullient
woman, who is a member of an old-money Charleston family,
leaned forward and asked him, "Were you by any chance present
when the ballots were being processed in 1980?"
"Well, yes, I was," he replied.
She told him she and her husband would buy
him lunch in the basement cafeteria if he would tell them
what he had seen.
"For about thirty-five seconds," Price told
me, he flinched mentally at "having truck with Democrats"
and at having everybody see him walk through the capitol with
John Hutchinson, but then-"It was a flash of lightning"-this
response was erased by the thought Well, hell, you've got
to do what's right. Price thereupon said he would go. Over
lunch, he said, he described to the Hutchinsons what he had
seen, and during a visit to the computer cage after lunch
he showed Berry Hutchinson the toggle switches on the front
panel. Outside the registrar's office, she said later, she
asked him whether he would testify if they filed a lawsuit,
and he said yes.
Early the next year, John Hutchinson, Underwood,
and Reese, their evidence dramatically fortified by Walter
Price, sued the Millers, the registrar of voters, the county
commissioners, C.E.S. and four of its employees, and others
for about nine million dollars in damages, alleging (in their
third amended complaint) that various of the defendants had
"tampered, directly and/or indirectly, with the computer programming
of the election computer" and "rigged the counting computers
by the manipulation of control toggle switches and the use
of predetermined material or both in such a way that the computer
did not reflect an actual count of ballots cast." The plaintiffs
contended that by these and other means they had been deprived
of "their constitutional right to vote or receive votes [and]
their right to hold public office," and of income, reputation,
time, and money.
Needing a computer expert, the plaintiffs
turned to Wayne G. Nunn, a slender, soft-spoken man of thirty-six
who was a project scientist for Union Carbide, one of the
major chemical companies in West Virginia's Chemical Valley.
Nunn had supervised the design and installation of computer
networks, some costing several million dollars, for the firm's
laboratories and pilot plants. He had shared an office there
for three years with David Higgins, who was the chief of Union
Carbide's computerized technology-intelligence-information
network. Nunn also ran a small custom-software venture that
wrote programs, did consulting, and sold operating systems.
He had programmed computers in many different computer languages
and in the field of artificial intelligence.
Having no confessions from any of the defendants,
John Mitchell determined to rely on circumstantial evidence
in trying to prove a conspiracy. Three weeks before the 1984
Presidential election, Nunn conducted a nine hour examination
of the C.E.S. system, with Carr, who had programmed it, Kemp,
the C.E.S. president, and a dozen or so other people watching.
Because of a clerical slip-up in the listing of what Nunn
wanted to see, C.E.S. was not required to show him the source
code, the diagrams for the circuit boards, and the operators'
manuals. Nevertheless, feeling his way along in the microcosmic
darkness of the program's space, Nunn, with one punch card,
added ten thousand votes to the total of one of the candidates
in a mock race for President.
During a deposition he gave subsequently,
under extensive cross-examination by an attorney for the Millers,
Nunn said that he had perceived seven ways in which the C.E.S.
system in use in Charleston could be caused to miscount the
votes: by manipulating the toggle switches on the face of
the Data General Nova computer to change vote totals and the
figure for total votes processed; by altering the program
deck of cards during the counting; by running "summary cards"
through the computer to add votes for candidates; by changing
vote totals using the keyboard at the slow printer that was
part of the system, using another computer located nearby
and connected by a cable, or using a computer thousands of
miles away, by means of modems; or by
planting a "Trojan horse" (hacker jargon for secret, undetectable
commands that can be hidden in a computer program) in the
code that controls the vote-counting, requiring it to switch,
say, one out of every four votes from one candidate to another
or give a candidate a false victory by a certain percentage.
The plaintiffs were determined to make a
second effort to break the source code, and C.E.S. was determined
to prevent Nunn from studying it. C.E.S. asked Judge Charles
H. Haden II, of the United States District Court, whose wife
had been the chairperson of Reagan's reelection campaign in
West Virginia, not to let Nunn even see the code, because
it was "a `trade secret' . . . highly confidential." Alternatively,
the company said, if the Judge forced them to let Nunn inspect
the code Nunn should have to do it at C.E.S. headquarters
in Berkeley and should not be permitted to copy it or leave
with any notes.
Hutchinson and his fellow-plaintiffs assailed
the C.E.S. insistence on secrecy from a broad perspective.
"There should be full disclosure of matters involving public
elections," they contended. "[The] demand for `secrecy'
by C.E.S. only insures that the potential for fraud will be
perpetrated. This involves a matter of strong public policy."
(Perhaps the plaintiffs meant "perpetuated," but their
motion said "perpetrated.")
Judge Haden ordered C.E.S. to make the source code available
to Nunn in Charleston, but he ratified the company's practice
and requirement of secrecy, and he decreed, "Dr. Nunn will
not reveal any information to anyone.... No records shall
be made of information obtained." (During the trial, the Judge
stated from the bench, "They are entitled to protection of
the secrets.") But the litigants had extracted their minimum
requirement: Nunn had the code, and he examined it to his
satisfaction in a closed office at the local C.E.S. attorneys'
firm for parts of two days.
What he had was a printout of "the assembler
third pass listing" for the BT-76 program-a stack of computer
paper still joined together at the folds which was four or
five inches high. He was allowed to make notes but was not
provided with the computer he needed in order to test the
code systematically; all he could do was look at the highly
technical lines of the listing. This was grueling mental work,
and after three or four hours he was very tired. During the
second day, he decided there was nothing more he could learn
from just looking, sealed his notes, gave them to the C.E.S.
lawyers, and left.
Carr and Kemp flew to Charleston to crowd
into the computer cage again and watch Nunn's second examination
of the system. As the day wore on, the number of people watching
varied between ten and twenty-five, and sometimes Nunn could
hardly move around. Mustachioed, skinny, and dapper in a blue
suit, he examined the inside of the computer with a long black
flashlight, tested again how it worked, and printed out results
of a mock election. He announced that with the toggle
switches he had been able to manipulate the figure printed
out on a cumulative report for total ballots counted.
Several hours later, after further examining
the machine, Nunn cast and counted one punch-card ballot,
with just one vote on it, printed a cumulative report that
showed one cast and counted, stopped the computer, used the
toggle switches to change the vote for Position No. 1, re-started
the computer, printed out, and, showing the printout, announced,
"The next report is a cumulative report, again showing one
precinct processed, one ballot processed. But Position No.
1 now has ten thousand and thirteen votes." Then, again with
one ballot, he produced five votes. Then seven. "No punch
cards were necessary," he told me later. "I could have produced
the result of ten thousand or any number we wished without
counting a single ballot."
THE 1985 Charleston trial was conducted between
April 9th and May 2nd in a federal courtroom within a few
blocks of the registrar's office, where the votes had been
counted that November night in 1980.
Midway through the trial, Walter Price gave
his account of what he had seen in the computer cage. After
some gambits that Price parried easily, John F. Wood, Jr.,
the attorney for the Millers, pounced on two facts: that in
handwritten notes Price had made on what he had seen he had
not mentioned seeing Steve Miller give his wife the cards,
and that in his deposition he had once called the cards "sheets
of paper" and had not said that Steve Miller had taken them
out of his coat pocket. Wood suggested to the jurors that
the witness was making things up, and one of his closing questions
was "That's your story today, isn't it, Mr. Price?"
"I would not characterize my testimony here
as a story," Price retorted. While Nunn was on the stand,
the defense lawyers raised at least a hundred objections,
and Judge Haden sustained about half of them. Mitchell had
planned to have Nunn repeat for the jury, on Charleston's
C.E.S. system, his demonstration of how to steal an election,
but the attorney abandoned that because of positions the Judge
was taking on the admissibility of testimony. "There will
be no evidence presented in this case of a Trojan horse,"
Haden informed the jurors. "None will appear."
Nunn was prepared to testify that a "debugger" in the BT-76
program, while enabling a programmer to make repairs in the
program, was also a Trojan horse; Haden excluded such testimony.
Nor would the Judge let Nunn testify that when he had examined
the system he had found discrepancies in the locations of
memory addresses for the storage of information.
The fact that the C.E.S. system had been
officially approved for use in West Virginia had a perverse
effect during Nunn's testimony. Fifty-nine standards for computerized
vote-counting had been proposed in 1975 by Roy Saltman, a
specialist on the security of computer-tabulated elections,
in the then definitive National Bureau of Standards study
on the subject. Nunn had concluded that the C.E.S. system
sold to Kanawha County in 1979 violated thirty-nine of these
standards, but Haden refused to let him say so, on the ground
that the state's approval of the system rendered the Bureau
of Standards report "immaterial."
Nunn managed to tell the jurors (sometimes
only to have Haden order them to disregard the information)
that vote totals could be directly changed by means of the
toggle switches on the computer's front panel without leaving
a trace on an audit trail, and that summary cards, which in
the C.E.S. systems are the same size as the punch-card ballots,
could be used to add votes to candidates' running totals.
Nunn also testified that he had concluded that the program
had been changed during the counting.
To alter a candidate's votes with punch cards,
Nunn told the jurors, one does not need to know the candidate's
location in the computer's memory; all one needs is the number
of the candidate's ballot position (a number that anyone voting
in the election can know). With that and one punch card, Nunn
testified, "you can set his vote total in the cumulative
counters or in the precinct counters to zero," and then, with
a second card, "you give him, you know, ten million votes
if you want."
When the plaintiffs rested, the defendants
asked Judge Haden to render a directed verdict for their side
and send the jurors home. The legal situation was clear. Before
entering a directed verdict in a conspiracy trial, as defense
lawyers observed in statements to the Judge, he was obliged
to give the plaintiffs "the benefit of every reasonable inference,"
to read their evidence "in a light more favorable to them
"to give it "favored treatment."
"I find," Judge Haden ruled, "that the only
evidence that the 1980 election was rigged is purely speculative
in nature; it was mere suspicion; and it does not form the
basis for the Court ... to infer that a conspiracy may be
present.... The plaintiffs have never proven the existence
of a conspiracy or these defendants' membership in a conspiracy."
The ruling continued, "Consequently, all we have in this case
are a series of unrelated acts that have been proven, most
of which have a reasonable and an innocent appearance as easily
as they would have a culpable appearance, none of which ...
are attributable to more than one individual or to more than
one entity.... And there are certain things that have been
attributable to the defendants," but "the proof of individual
overt acts, however compelling some few of them may appear
to be to plaintiffs' counsel, does not suffice for the absence
of proof of the conspiracy." Haden entered directed verdicts
for the defendants and dismissed the jurors after their three
weeks' service.
A year ago, judge Haden entered a finding
that the plaintiffs would have to pay the legal costs of the
defendants, including C.E.S., which Mitchell estimated would
total about six hundred thousand dollars. Just two of the
C.E.S. lawyers had billed the election equipment company for
twenty-seven hundred hours' work on the case about fifteen
working months-and Haden re-billed this to the plaintiffs,
on his judgment that, despite the fact that an earlier judge
had ruled the case not frivolous, it was "meritless." According
to John Mitchell, almost everything that the three plaintiffs
own is tied up by liens pending Haden's entry of his final
order on costs and the resolution of the three defeated candidates'
certain appeal from it. [ is this
why no one sues!!!]
"C.E.S. wasted a lot of money defending a case totally without
merit," Stephen Carr, the chief programmer for C.E.S., declared
during an interview I had with him. We spoke in his office
at Information Processing Corporation, his company, which
does engineering work on computer products and consults on
computer programming, in Palo Alto, California. "Three politicians
who couldn't believe that the electorate hadn't voted for
them felt that they were surely gypped by the system. They
got a local Ph.D. consultant who worked at Union Carbide.
He was not dumb, but he had essentially, you know, taken money
to be their expert witness, and they tried to show how the
program could be manipulated. The case was so bad that after
they presented their side the judge threw it out of court-the
whole thing just died."
What was Carr's view of the ten thousand-odd
votes that Nunn produced with one summary card during the
first demonstration?
"With summary cards, you put in totals and multiple
counts," Carr agreed. "But they also, at least in our design,
would leave a very noticeable mark on the tape. Anyone who
was at all knowledgeable couldn't miss it: a record left that
these votes had come in from a special control card, not from
ballots. So I wasn't impressed."
Carr laughed and smiled, then continued,
"This is funny. Nunn also spent a bunch of time trying to
show how you would work from the front panel of the Data General
computer called the Nova. It was front-panel switches that
computers of that era had. And if you know enough and the
people will let you, in half an hour or maybe twenty minutes
you might manipulate what's inside the computer and change
things."
Walking me back to a room that was almost
filled with computers, Carr went to a Data General Nova there
and gave me a demonstration of how to raise a storage location
for data-sometimes called a memory address-into the lights
and change the figures stored in it. "But the chance of doing
this unnoticed is just nil," he said. "And doing it in a way
that doesn't cause the whole program to stop is terribly tricky.
You can always argue the theory that there's some superhuman
who's smart enough, but it's so hard to do that that somebody
that good probably doesn't use his talent to mess around with
one vote-counting machine. I mean, it's not citizens in West
Virginia; it's, you know, somebody that's the Godfather! It
just doesn't play in my mind that someone that was that up
to speed would care about the race in West Virginia.
And, you know, they had all kinds of theories that we out
in California cared about that race. What we wanted was to
run an honest election and get paid. Not even to run an election-to
provide the equipment that the local people could run an election
on. And I will say, as an outsider, I never saw in my contact
with C.E.S. people any evidence of any kind of impropriety,
or even caring. The people I saw at C.E.S. were interested
in making honest money."
Turning to charges about Trojan horses, Carr
said, "There have been some people who say that the way to
phony up these programs is to make them count correctly when
the counts are small"-as in a pre-election test with, say,
a hundred ballots-"and then cause a fudge factor to come in
when the counts are large; you then bring in your bias."
Carr granted that someone
could "put a special thing in the code that when it saw some
special pattern it did some special stuff."
How could that be detected?
"You could certainly
find that by examining the source code," Carr replied. "It
would take a while."
I asked Carr about audit trails. He mentioned,
as an example, "a printer that leaves a hard-copy record of
what things happened in time."
Could such a printer be turned off? "You
could imagine someone cutting a wire-you can imagine anything.
If the election officials and the clerks were used to running
the computer and the printer stopped, you'd pick it up right
away, because the printer makes a loud sound. And, of course,
typically these Election Nights there are representatives,
or monitors, from all parties watching."
I also asked Carr about the possibility of fixing national
elections.
One reason it would be very difficult for
a single programmer at a major election company to fix a national
election, he said, is that although the central source code
is general, local election officials have to prepare instruction
cards dealing with each local election's different candidates
and their different positions on the different local ballots,
"so that in one precinct Party One may be the Democrats, but
in another precinct Party Two may be the Democrats, and the
program then follows instructions to put all the votes for
Democrats together. So it would be very tricky to, in this
general program- If you set out to help one party in one state,
you might totally screw yourself in another, it's just that
tricky for the programmer back at C.E.S."
In a close Presidential election that
would be decided in a few large jurisdictions "it wouldn't
be impossible," Carr added.
I then asked him how, hypothetically, he
himself might go about such an undertaking.
In response, Carr adverted to his basic position:
"I just don't know how you'd do it. I really don't. Because,
even with the computer doing the counting, there are so many
people involved. It would take a major conspiracy. You'd have
to have a lot of people-twenty, thirty, a hundred people-on
your side. It wouldn't be one man. It certainly wouldn't be
anyone who did the program." Even if a corrupt official is
running the counting in a big city, "he still has to depend
on a lot of staff," Carr said. "It would take at least one
person from each of the disciplines-programming, the management-to
really get a start on it, and then there'd be tremendous risks
you'd be found out. I don't think it's doable."
WHAT had Wayne Nunn actually seen when he
looked at the C.E.S. source-code listing in the lawyers' offices?
What were the "secrets" he had learned? Bound by Judge Haden's
protective order, could he talk about them? On a Saturday
night last December, I drove from Charleston to Nunn's home,
a ranch-style house in the town of Poca, ten miles away. We
talked in the den, where he had an Apple Macintosh Plus on
his desk.
Could he say whether he had found a Trojan horse, or more
than one? "The only thing that I'm restricted from doing is
telling you exactly the code that's in the program," he said.
"It had lots of fascinating little nooks and crannies hidden
around in it that no one has ever let me talk about. There
are at least a half-dozen places, maybe a few less, where
you could lay in a Trojan horse in that source code-lay in
routines to do whatever you wanted to in an election-because
there's code in that system that shouldn't be there, is not
being used, is worthless to the operation of the system. It
can be replaced with anything you want it to be."
Had Nunn found a
trapdoor; that is, a place in a program where one can break
down its security system and emerge undetected deep inside
the program?
"Yes. There is one."
And had he found "wait loops" in
the program which conceivably could control outcomes, or "Christmas
trees"-Nunn's term for surprise packages in a program?
"They're all there.
There are wait loops there. There are routines that are not
documented in the manual and, from every way I can determine,
do not work."
As we talked, Nunn got up from the couch,
where he had been sitting, walked to his desk, and sat down
at the Macintosh. "You continue to ask questions," he said.
"I want to look for something here. I've come up with an idea."
After about ten minutes, during which
he went on answering questions, he called me over to the keyboard
and invited me to add on the computer any numbers that came
into my head. I added eight and thirteen, then two multi-digit
figures; the sums printed on the screen were correct. "Now,"
he said from the couch, to which he had returned, "add two
and two." On the off-the-shelf program of this standard brand
computer two and two added up to five. In ten minutes, before
my eyes, Nunn had made a Trojan horse for me. He printed the
five-step program out and gave it to me. I still have it:
10 input x
20 input y
30 if x = 2 then x = 3
40 print "The sum of x + y is", x+y
50 go to 10
Line 30 is the Trojan horse inserted into
the program that makes two and two five. "I've told it every
time it sees the number two, replace it with a three," Nunn
said.
I asked him if signs
of these various ways to interfere with the C.E.S. system
could be kept out of its audit trails.
"All of them can defeat
the audit trail, some of them better than others," he replied,
with some feeling. "Because, you see, built into that system
is the ability to turn the audit trail off. Every one of them
you can turn off."
What about the test decks that are run through
the C.E.S. systems before and after elections?
"That is the biggest joke in the world,"
Nunn said. "Anyone who knows how
to run the C.E.S. BT-76 system can be trained to steal an
election on it in twenty minutes. A summary card, anybody
can do." Of the switches he said, "As long as they are out
there on the front of the machine and they're turned on, someone
has the ability to stop the machine and fool with the panel
switches.... You have no control over what's done to the memory
of the machine.
"But it's even more serious than that. I
write this program. I go through it. I'm absolutely sure that
I know exactly what it's doing. I compile it and punch a deck
of cards and hand it to you. We meet a couple of days later
down here at the courthouse and you run what you say is my
program. There is no way on earth that I can stand there and
watch that computer run and swear in a court of law that that
is my program running. Now, it may have the same input and
output, but as far as swearing that it's my program, I can't.
I can't even look at the punch deck. Now, there may be a few
people in the world who can look at the punch deck for the
executable image"-that is, the program deck in object code-"and
read the punch cards and recognize the instructions, but I
can't do it. Damn few could. From that point of view, there
is no security."
That night, Nunn told me, step by step, how
to steal an election with the toggle switches that stick out
of the front of the Data General Nova computers in some C.E.S.
systems. "Briefly, using the toggle switches, what you do
is you halt the computer," he said. "You examine the memory
address at which the computer's halted-you make a note of
it. You go to the memory location that holds the counter of
the candidate that you want. You load the memory address for
the candidate you want to fix into it, and you say, `Load
address.' Then you load the number of votes to give him and
then you say `Deposit.' That's wiped out his real count and
given him a fraudulent count right then. If you want to go
someplace else and do it-some other memory location-you do
as many as you want. You just do this until you're finished.
Then you load the address where the computer stopped. O.K.?
And then you hit the button for it to continue. The program
continues on exactly the way it was. There's nothing in the
computer that- The computer never knows it's been halted."
There is no printout on any audit tape, Nunn
told me. If a time-and-date record was maintained and someone
noticed that the clock was running late, that would be the
only clue.
NO matter how deeply public officials
may dedicate themselves to it, the task of tightening up the
security on Election Night computers will remain a daunting
one-and, if complete security is the standard, impossible.
The computer scientist Roy Saltman, at the National Bureau
of Standards, who is the leading authority in the federal
government on the subject, stresses in his new report, "Accuracy,
Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying," published
in August, that no manipulation of election computer programs
has been proved, but he also warns of "the possibilities
that unknown persons may perpetrate undiscoverable frauds,"
by, for example, altering the computer program or the control
punch cards that manipulate it, planting a time bomb, manually
removing an honest counting program and replacing it with
a fraudulent one, counting faked ballots, altering the vote
recorder that the voter uses at the polls, or changing either
the logic that controls precinct-located vote-counting devices
or the voting summaries in these units' removable data-storage
units. The problem in this segment of the computer business,
as in the field at large, is not only invisibility but also
information as electricity. Secret instructions can be so
well hidden in software, especially if the language is the
lower-level assembly, that testers cannot be sure of finding
them. Testing all the possible paths that a computer program
(and therefore a hidden code) could follow through a punchcard
ballot apparently could not be done comprehensively short
of assigning the job to a second computer, and even then one
runs up against what Robert Naegele has called "the polynomial
problem"-the vastness of the programming possibilities in
the inner space of a program. Mathematicians at Natre
Dame, working with Deloris Davisson, a computer specialist,
have calculated that the number of possible programming pathways
for a program executed through a standard punchcard ballot
would be two to the nine-hundred-and-sixtieth power-a one
followed by two hundred and eightyeight zeros. "It's a number
that my computer can't hold," Davisson said. At the merely
mechanical level, computer experts in a large jurisdiction
cannot test punch-card systems for every voting possibility.
"It's an infinity as far as our work is concerned," said Rick
Fulle, assistant director of voting systems and standards
for the Illinois Board of Elections. "For our purposes, it
just can't be done." When a state examination of the C.E.S.
system in Chicago was suddenly scheduled, Fulle said, the
chairman of the state board demanded that all possible ballotpunch
configurations be tested, but Fulle figured out arithmetically
that running through the sixty-seven million-odd test ballots
necessary would occupy twenty staff members full time for
four hundred and seventy-seven years.
IF one regarded
the manifold issues of computerized democracy in a reductionist
way, perhaps the principal concern would be whether, in a
close election, the Presidency can be stolen by means of computer
vote fraud in several major jurisdictions.
Carr offered reassurance that although theoretically
such a calamity could occur, it would be extremely difficult
technically and would require too many confederates to be
feasible.
Michael Shamos, the
voting-systems examiner for Pennsylvania, does not believe
that a large number of people would have to be involved. "This
is false," Shamos replied when I asked. "One. One person.
The point is that, the way things are going, a national mechanism
exists that could be manipulated by anybody, from a single
individual to a nationwide conspiracy. It's not whether it
exists or not, it's the fact that the mechanism is there to
make it easy."
The leading candidates for the Presidency
are seldom separated by more than ten points, so "here's
what we do," Shamos said. "Working in a company headquarters,
I'm writing some election software, which will be sent by
Federal Express to jurisdictions in executable object code.
I'm going to program this thing so that if there are more
than eight hundred people voting in a precinct I'm simply
going to trade some votes, take them from other parties and
dump them into the party that T want to win. So all the totals
are going to be exactly right. I'm going to change ten per
cent of the votes, or five per cent-some small number. And
that software is going out to pivotal jurisdictions in the
country. And that is going to shift the national election.
It's easy for a programmer. And his superiors will never find
it. There's no way to find it unless they do an exhaustive
code audit themselves. And this is a solo effort-one guy who
happens to be well placed. Of course, many others are involved,
but they don't know."
If some jurisdiction that had been tested
for more than eight hundred votes discovered that the program
didn't count correctly, and returned it to the factory, the
programmer would simply say there had been a glitch on the
tape, or a bad ROM-a unit embodying "read-only memory"-"or
some other technical mumbo-jumbo," Shamos went on. "And we
have an election, and the wrong guy gets elected." If recounts
discovered errors in some localities they, too, would be attributed
to programming errors, he said.
Shamos believes it "not unlikely for some
guy to realize one day, he's sitting there in the room in
the midst of all those coding forms-he says, `My God! I can
control this whole thing!' " After all, Shamos said, "we have
enough tales of hackers who when they found they could do
something went and did it, maybe even not with malicious intent,
just to show that they could do it."
He then pointed out a second possibility:
"Of course, you can imagine that the venders of the system
are in with certain politicians. The politicians agree, `Yes,
I'll buy this system, if you fix the election my way next
time,' and they actually give orders to their subordinates
to do it. That's always seemed somewhat less likely to
me, because of the possibility of a whistle-blower. Then,
the third possibility is tampering by someone not in the employ
of the company, by a break-in at the vending company."
Summing up, Shamos said, "What does it mean
that one company is controlling a large fraction of the voting
in the United States? If you provide the software, you are
controlling, even if you are not manipulating. Computerized
vote-counting doesn't occur in the light of day, it occurs
inside silicon in a little black box. That box is completely
under the control of the vender, and if anything wrong happens
we might never find out."
During an interview in a hotel lounge in
San Francisco, Roy Saltman said, "If I broke into B.R.C.'s
master computer program and changed the code, how about the
nine hundred and ninety-nine other versions that are already
out there? It's not a massive, central thing-all the computers
are not connected to B.R.C. or to any single vender. There
isn't any kind of central control that controls everything.
I don't think that's a reasonable supposition. If you do the
recount of the ballots, the whole thing falls apart."
Robert Naegele believes that no one person
could steal an election by computer and, like Saltman, he
does not regard computerized theft of a national election
as at all plausible. In a large jurisdiction like Los Angeles
County, Naegele told me, five or six people would have to
be involved, and hardly any jurisdiction is so centralized
that one person could do it there. "My private opinion," he
said, "is that there has never been any successful fraud in
a computerized election. As I understand it, it's really not
feasible. To do this, you require a hell of a lot of very
sophisticated code.... I am not concerned about fraud on the
national level. I don't think that's happened, and I don't
think it's going to happen."
Like Carr, Peter Vogel, a computer lawyer
in Dallas who was recently appointed an examiner of computerized
voting systems by the Texas secretary of state, is skeptical
that any conspiracy among large numbers of people would work,
but, like Shamos, he thinks that
the Presidency can be stolen by computer-"because of the electoral
college."
Vogel said to me in his office, "If
you have a majority in the right states, it doesn't matter
who has the majority of the votes in the country. If you program
the right states for the right elections, I think you could
control the Presidential results."
Howard Strauss, of Princeton, gave me written
answers to a series of questions about the possible rigging
of United States elections by tampering with computer-tabulated
election systems. He said that "there are many, many ways
to do this," but all of them "can be largely eliminated" by
rigorously followed procedures.
"If one
software vender dominates the electronic-election market,
subverting that vender may be the easiest way to alter national
elections, he wrote. One individual, working alone,
would be able to effect changes in the code more quickly and
securely than a group, he believes.
What categories of
people might fix computers in elections? I asked. Strauss
replied, "In order of ease of subversion, some of the most
likely groups or individuals include election-system venders
and their programmers and consultants, election-system operators,
the Federal Election Commission, technical mavens of all kinds,
and election officials and workers. It is possible that foreign
agents, candidates and their staffs, and voters with special
interests could subvert any of the above individuals or have
sufficient expertise to subvert the process themselves."
Peter Neumann, of S.R.L, declared, "If somebody
is a skilled user of a conventional computer system, he has
the ability to do almost anything he wants and leave no trace,
because most of the computer systems today do not have adequate
protection or auditing facilities. Personal computers are
non-secure, for the most part. Now, in
the election systems the vulnerabilities are enormous. You
effectively have to trust the entire staff of the corporation
that is producing your software. Every single member has to
be trusted. It would take one person to rig the system, typically,
because of the way the thing is set up. There are very few
internal controls."
Speaking in his office at S.R.L, amid papers
stacked and scattered about on his desk and the floor and
a chair nearby, Neumann went on,"Even
if you can look at the source code, you can't guarantee that
there's not a Trojan horse embedded somewhere in the code.
Any self-respecting system programmer can hack the innards
of the system to defeat encryption techniques or any password
protection, or anything like that. All this stuff is trivial
to break, for the most part. In most computer systems out
there, it is child's play. Given the fact that the underlying
systems are so penetrable, it is relatively easy to fudge
data-for example, to start out with three thousand votes for
one guy and zero for the other before the counting even starts,
even though the counter shows zero. Essentially a Trojan horse
in the coding. I can do it in the operating system. I can
do it in the application program. Or I can do it in the compiler.
I can rig it so that all test decks work perfectly well. I
program it so that, after the test is run, at, say, six-fifty-five
in the evening, it simply adds thousands of votes. It would
never show up. He added that having a computer
count a set portion of one candidate's votes as if they had
been cast for his or her opponent would be "utterly trivial
to do."
As for stealing a Presidential
election, Neumann said, "I would put in a whole variety of
techniques. I wouldn't just rely on one. You might use a different
technique in each state, for example. You could trigger it
so that you didn't do anything wrong if everything was going
well, and if your candidate was losing you simply add votes-and
you have to subtract, too. You have to make all the consistency
checks satisfy. That's relatively easy to do."
Neumann exclaimed, "The possibilities are
endless!" He seemed to be enjoying them, but then drew bac.
"I think the possibilities for rigging elections with computers
are enormous. I'm not going to say it's ever been done. The
point here is it's in the hands of one very skilled programmer
or somebody who understands the system."
IN the face of such contradictory expert
testimony, it is all but impossible for laymen to ascertain
the precise degree of risk entailed by the use of computerized
voting machines. Nevertheless, given the crucial role of public
confidence in the integrity of the ballot, common sense suggests
that the question should be resolved definitively, by the
press and, perhaps, by Congress. The press has begun to grapple
with the issue, thanks in part to a series of articles
by David Burnham in the Times a few years ago, and press
coverage of contested computerized election contests has contributed
to several reform efforts in the field.
With lever machines, the risk of vote-stealing
has always been relatively easy to reduce. In one of the rules
that Joseph Harris laid down in a model election-administration
system, published by the National Municipal League in 1930,
no lever voting machine could be used until it had been examined
by "a competent mechanic." It is also necessary in lever-machine
precincts that on Election Day candidates and representatives
of parties be present at least twice-when the voting starts,
to make sure that the counters are set at zero, and after
the polls close, when the backs of the machines are opened,
to read the totals. These are the moments of maximum opportunity
for a vote-stealer: if he is not observed, he can simply turn
the counters to obtain a desired result.
In the opinion of many specialists, there
is only one comparably simple and effective way to deter fraud
on Election Day in most computerized jurisdictions: an immediate
hand recount of the ballots cast in a random group of precincts
selected after the vote-counting by various parties to the
election. Such a recount would be the greatest fear of anyone
implicated in stealing an election.
When Harris reflected on the fact that computerized
punch-card elections could be manipulated, he advocated, as
a remedy, that every county and city using the Votomatic "set
aside a number of precincts to count by hand and to compare
the results from a hand count to the machine count." Who chooses
the precincts? And when- before or after the election-does
anyone know which ones they will be? Harris, in his model
system, provided that "the candidates should be permitted
to designate the precincts which they wish to have recounted
and to amend and add to the list from time to time." "A manual
recount of at least one per cent of the ballots of each contest
is recommended," Roy Saltman wrote in his new report, and
he added, "Responsibility for selection of some of the precincts
to be recounted should be granted to candidates or parties."
Michael Harty, now the Maricopa County elections director,
in Phoenix, and the computer scientist
Frederick Weingarten, of the congressional Office of Technology
Assessment, suggest that voters who doubt the integrity of
a computerized tabulation should, one way or another, at
once secure the tabulating software as primary evidence.
Saltman also offered a set of recommendations
that are not so easily carried out: all vote-tallying software
should be obtained from an accountable source of stock offered
publicly by reputable venders and should be scrutinized for
"hidden code;" access to all stages of vote-tallying should
be controlled; the ballots themselves should be carefully
monitored administratively; every vote not cast by a voter
in a race should be registered by voting machines as not cast;
the use of pre-perforated punch cards should be ended, and
perforations should be made unnecessary by the use of spring-loaded
styluses. (The last change would require modification of the
Voto-matics. ) More broadly, Saltman recommended that the
professional science of internal controls which is used in
business be adopted in vote-counting.
Naegele proposed to the F.E.C. that vote-counting
codes should be written in higher-level computer languages,
because they are "quite a bit easier" to analyze for error
or, for that matter, fraud. He told me, in California, that
"the venders objected to this strongly," saying the vote-counting
goes much faster in assembly (lower-level) language. A recent
draft of the F.E.C. standards would make the use of high level
languages "discretionary only." "What I wish," Naegele said,
"is that some state would adopt a requirement for higher-level
language, so the others would follow."
Ken Hazlett, the programmer who pioneered
in the business with assembly language, expressed to me in
Corvallis an opinion even more emphatic than Naegele's about
the use of assembly language for computerized vote-counting:
"Insane! It should all be in high level language, so
there's a chance it'll be readable code twenty years later.
There's no room for assembly except in some small isolated
process."
The concepts of putting source codes in escrow
and providing for their examination by independent test agencies
seemed well established in the recent F.E.C. draft. Michael
Shamos argued during my interview with him that escrow is
not a workable concept for protecting election software (among
other things, he wanted to know to whom private custodians
of the code would be accountable), but the proposal is
popular.
A number of other remedies, in addition to
those in the studies by Saltman and the F.E.C's Clearinghouse,
have been suggested by individuals in the election community.
Terry Elkins, whose inquiries and accusations
concerning the 1985 mayoral race in Dallas led to the enactment
of reform legislation in Texas, maintains that election officials
should be made more accountable at law for their performances.
Michael Harty, who suggested that programmers of election
computers should be licensed, emphasizes the little-known
fact that most state election laws are not mandatory but "directory,"
and levy few or no penalties against officials who do not
obey them. Paul Goldy, the president of the International
Technology Group, of Woodbury, New Jersey, a smaller firm
in the computerized election market, advocates user groups
for local election officials, organized around specific products,
like the groups that many computer buffs belong to. Shamos
has proposed that persons who have criminal records for acts
of "moral turpitude" should be barred from the vote-counting-equipment
business.
R. J. Boram, the chief programmer of the
R. F. Shoup Company, and Shamos advocate a high-prestige national
election commission to test and certify vote-counting systems,
including the software for them; Howard Strauss and a Princeton
colleague have prepared for Election Watch, a small group
that is working for change in this area, a specific proposal
for a national testing authority. At a conference in Dallas
sponsored by Election Watch, Strauss said that representatives
of the venders and anyone else who could change the counting
program should be barred from computer rooms on Election Night.
Some citizens believe that vote counting
software should be in the public domain, available to all
parties and candidates, for whatever checks they wish to make
on it. "I'm not for a public process being handled by private
companies that won't let us see what's going on," says Susan
Kesim, a young executive of a computer-security firm in Indiana.
"Public-domain software -it's open. I want to see that it
added one to the total, because that's the process of voting."
"Maybe a private foundation should do it,"
Frederick Weingarten has suggested. "Maybe if there was a
consensus among the states, the federal government could write
its own software and certify it through the National Bureau
of Standards or the F.E.C.say, `This we guarantee is accurate
and untamperable.' "
Penelope Bonsall, the director of the F.E.C.
Clearinghouse, said of the public-software concept, "It's
a public policy question; it's too broad for us to consider.
It would have to compete with private interests. I don't know
who would fund it. I just don't see how you would eliminate
private efforts in this area."
By 1984, the year before Joseph Harris, the
exemplar of the entrepreneurial approach to computerized vote-counting,
died, a subtle change had come over him. By then, lawsuits
and accusations were bedeviling his baby, Computer Election
Services, Inc. In a newspaper interview, Harris predicted
that Americans would probably vote on TV monitors in voting
booths, and computers would announce the winners minutes after
the polls closed. But then he struck a note new for him, adding
that these changes would not come for about twenty years,
because such completely computerized voting would require
"extremely careful management and planning to prevent error
and fraud."
The new direct-recording electronic (D.R.E.)
vote-counting machines, which New York City is preparing to
buy on behalf of its three million registered voters, may
become the realization of Harris's vision of futuristic electronic
voting. When citizens vote on one of the D.R.E. systems, they
address themselves to a printed ballot affixed to the face
of the machine or displayed on a TV-like console and, with
a finger or an electronic pointer, press on a box with an
"X" in it beside their choice. The four surviving bidders
in New York City are Cronus, Shoup, Sequoia Pacific, and,
the one firm offering a TV-like system, the Nixdorf Computer
Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nixdorf
Computer, A.G., of West Germany. The bidders had to provide
the technological capability to retain a record of "randomized"
(that is, outof-sequence) electronic images of each voter's
set of choices, but the city reserved the right to buy this
capability or not.
Saltman's recent report indicated that the
D.R.E. systems have one characteristic that from a security
point of view may be even more important than the unavailability
of real recounts if a voter's choices are not retained electronically.
Since those choices are converted
onto the counters inside the machines, there is no way to
check from the outside whether they are recorded correctly.
If the machine retained voters' choices on magnetic tape,
the tapes would not necessarily be correct. Saltman wrote,
"The fact that the voter can see his or her choices on a display,
or even receives a printout of the choices made, does not
prove that those were the choices actually recorded in the
machine."
"There is no security
in using a computer to count ballots," Wayne Nunn told me
the evening he made me a Trojan horse. "I don't believe that
computers should be used to count votes. I believe that what
you should use for counting votes is a system that any voter
can appreciate-in which he can fully understand all steps
of the process. There shouldn't be any magic involved, because
a computer system to the general populace appears to be magic.
You put something in one end and, voila -something else comes
out the other. A computer is such a flexible thing that what
happens between the time when you put it in and the time when
it comes out can be what any clever individual wants."
-RONNIE DUGGER
Computerized Systems
for Voting Seen as Vulnerable to Tampering By DAVID BURNHAM,
The New York Times, July 29, 1985
The
Real Scandal Is the Voting Machines Themselves
Perspective
on election processes
Computer-Related
Elections
Electronic
Voting - Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D.
VOTE
SCAM ARCHIVE
Emphasis and links from Alllie
(alllie@newsgarden.org)
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