Will the 2004 Election be Stolen With Electronic Voting Machines?

Will the 2004 Election be Stolen With Electronic Voting Machines?

Will the 2004 Election be Stolen With Electronic Voting Machines? An Interview
with Bev Harris, Who Has Done the Groundbreaking Work on This Issue.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

BUZZFLASH: Electronic voting machines, including touch-screen voting, have been
touted as the salvation of a fair voting process. Your tenacious research over
the last year has shown that this idea may be the Trojan Horse of voting machine
reform, allowing elections to be stolen more easily than in the past. What are
the basic reasons that you argue that electronic voting machines pose a threat
to democracy?

BEV HARRIS: Four reasons:

1. Secrecy: What has always been a transparent process, subjected to many eyes
and belonging to all of us, has very recently become secretive and proprietary.
This happened when voting systems, which should be considered part of the
"public commons" were turned over to private companies. These companies now
assert that the process underlying the vote must be held secret from the voters.

2. Ownership: When a system that belongs to the public becomes secret, it
becomes doubly important to make sure we can completely trust those who run it.
Voting machine companies are not required to tell us who owns them. Two of the
top six firms have been foreign-owned: Election.com, owned by the Saudis until
an acquisition by Accenture recently, and Sequoia, now owned by DeLaRue (Great
Britain). Three of the top six firms have owners and/or directors who represent
vested interests:

-- Election Systems & Software, the largest company. Main owner is a company
owned by Senator Chuck Hagel's campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy.
Hagel has owned shares in both the voting company itself and in the parent
company run by his campaign finance director, and Hagel was the CEO and Chairman
of the voting machine company while it built the machines that counted his
votes.

-- Diebold, the second largest voting machine company. CEO is Wally O'Dell, who
recently visited George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch along with an elite group
of Bush supporters called the "Rangers" and "Pioneers. Days later, he penned a
letter to Ohio Republicans promising to help "deliver the votes" for Bush.
O'Dell sponsored a $600,000 fund raiser for Dick Cheney in July. Diebold
director W.H. Timken is also a Bush Pioneer.

-- VoteHere, the company striving to get its cryptography software into all the
other companies' machines (already has a contract with Sequoia), has as its
Chairman a close Cheney supporter and member of the Defense Policy Board,
Admiral Bill Owens. Former CIA director Robert Gates, who heads the George Bush
School of Business, is also a director.

-- Voting companies also have a somewhat incestuous group of key players -- Todd
Urosevich and Bob Urosevich founded ES&S, but Todd now is an executive with ES&S
while Bob is president of Diebold Election Systems. Sequoia and ES&S share
software and optical scan machines.

3. Disabling the safeguards: Voting systems have always had people trying to rig
them, with varying degrees of success. What has changed is scale. Whereas it
used to be that one had to run around bribing someone to shave the wheel on each
lever machine, or collect up ballot boxes and stuff them in a trunk, nowadays a
programmer can, essentially invisibly, create a back door into the vote system
for millions of votes at once. Whereas vote-rigging has always required physical
access before, modems and wireless communications devices now open up
possibilities for remote vote rigging that no one can observe.

-- The audit trail is being taken away: An audit is simply the act of comparing
two independent data sets that are supposed to match. Probably the most
important understory to the voting issue right now is this: The voting industry
is spending literally millions of dollars, and going through amazing feats of
contorted logic that can best be described as marketing gymnastics, to convince
us that we should discontinue proper auditing. They want us to eliminate the
ballot which you verify, and trust the secret system instead. Even with the
optical scan machines, which retain a paper ballot, some states have passed laws
to prevent us from looking at the paper ballot to use it for a proper audit.

-- Incorrect programming: One thing we've never had until we got electronic
vote-counting (which includes touch screens and optical scan machines), is bad
software programming. A lever machine can be tampered with, but you don't have
any software programming errors with it. Incorrect software programming has now
been identified in over 100 elections, often flipping the race to the wrong
candidate, even when the election was not close.

No one knows how many elections have actually been misprogrammed, and as we
eliminate paper ballots, no one will ever know. We do know that errors as high
as 25 percent are not uncommon, and software programming errors have been
documented as high as 100 percent, and in one small Iowa county, a single
machine miscounted by 3 million votes.

Incorrect software programming can take two possible forms: Accidental or
deliberate. Either one takes away our right to have our vote counted as we cast
it.

4. Secret certification and testing, which gives a passing grade to flaws -- The
whole reason we are supposed to accept secret software and secret ownership is
that, we're told, these systems go through extensive and rigorous certification
and testing. However, this turns out not to be the case.

First of all, the certification officials refuse to say what tests they do.

No one quite knows what the certifiers credentials are or why they keep hiring
the same guy, and were not allowed to ask that question.

It turns out that the states generally do not look at the secret programs at
all; they simply ask some routine questions and do a "Logic & Accuracy test"
that does not detect fraud, and has proven to miss huge software programming
errors quite often.

We now know that the certification process is fundamentally flawed. The recent
report by Scientific Applications International Inc. (SAIC) on the security of
the Diebold voting system identified 328 flaws, 26 of which it deemed
critical. The examination was ONLY done because, quite by accident, we got
access to the voting program files and a report was written that exposed
problems. But what this illustrates about certification is simply this: It
doesnt work!

BUZZFLASH: How could a company steal votes for one party and we would never know
about it?

HARRIS: Given inside access, which is available to software engineers and
support techs, anything is possible. In California, according to internal memos
we have obtained written by Diebold support techs and software engineers, in
some elections no one looked at the software code AT ALL, except for a couple of
programmers out of Canada. This is because the software that was certified and
approved, and supposedly frozen and held in escrow, was replaced with different
software for elections. All of the companies seem to do this: They allow their
techs, and sometimes even elections officials, to replace or update programs,
and you cant count on these updates being tested by anyone. In Georgia they
did this repeatedly.

Let me explain just how disturbing this is: The Diebold software that has been
certified includes something called GEMS version 1.11.14 and also GEMS version
1.17.17. However, according to company memos, they rewrote the guts of the
program when they made GEMS version 1.14.xx and then made even more changes,
significant changes, with GEMS version 1.15.xx. (The last two numbers vary; none
of these were certified.) These changes were made by programmers in Vancouver,
Canada and stuck on an unprotected web site, where support techs went and
retrieved them and put them on machines used in elections in California.

The story gets odder. The Canadian office, where the programmers come from,
employs only a few people. Key software engineers actually come from Russia,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hong Kong, and often speak imperfect English and
seem blissfully unaware of U.S. election law. Who knows what is in these
programs? What is the background of these people? You can do anything you want
to an election, if you write the commands that tell the computer what to do.

Getting into specifics requires some geek-speak, which is beyond the scope of an
introduction like this. Several chapters in our soon-to-be-released book, "Black
Box Voting," discuss this in more depth.

BUZZFLASH: What are the names of the manufacturers of the electronic voting
machines, and which one is the biggest?

HARRIS: These are the key players:

-- Election Systems & Software (ES&S)  currently the largest
-- Diebold Election Systems  currently the fastest growing
-- Sequoia Voting Systems  Still controls a significant share of American
voting machines.
-- Hart Intercivic  Like the others, their machines are not properly auditable.
-- VoteHere  This is a different kind of company. They have heavy ties to the
defense industry. Their current focus is to get their encryption system into all
the other manufacturers voting systems; their encryption concept is just
another attempt to do an end run around an open transparent system with paper
ballots.
-- Avante  This is a very interesting company, because it makes touch screens
WITH a paper trail, and a secure ballot box is attached to every machine. Their
machines have been used in Sacramento County and recently fared quite well in
Connecticut.
-- AccuPoll  This is another company we should pay more attention to. It not
only has touch screens with a voter verified paper ballot, but its software is
also Open source, meaning anyone can examine it.

BUZZFLASH: You have charged that the owners of some of these companies have
close connections with the Republican Party. The head of Diebold, for instance,
publicly vowed to do everything possible to see that Bush wins in Ohio in 2004.
Are you concerned that the Republican Party affiliation of some of these
companies could result in voting results skewed toward the GOP, in short, as a
result of manipulating the software?

HARRIS: Its a conflict of interest, just as having military defense contractors
involved in our voting system is a conflict. Conflict of interest provides a
motive to do something impure. Allowing secret code and combining it with
conflict of interest is just playing with electoral fire.

BUZZFLASH: You have been the victim of having your website
www.blackboxvoting.org shut down by Diebold. Briefly, why did they shut down
your site and how were they able to do that? You refer to their use of "DMCA" to
get your ISPN to clear your website. What is DMCA? What is the difference
between www.blackboxvoting.org and www.blackboxvoting.com?

HARRIS: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) laws, in the Internet world,
are almost as controversial as the Patriot Act, because they tread on rights,
contain draconian penalties, and can be abused in order to shut people up. What
DMCA does is criminalize copyright issues. They were pushed in by the recording
industry to prevent music piracy, but they have since been used for many other
things.

The provision that was used against us was an abuse of the DMCA
pull-down-demand- process. Using this, a company can claim they own copyright to
something, write a letter to your Internet service provider (ISP), demand that
the offending page be removed. The ISP must pull the page immediately or risk
losing everything. These pull-downs almost always take place without a court
order.

Now, in our case, Diebold didnt even claim we had a copyrighted document on our
site, they complained that we had a LINK to an unrelated site which, in turn,
had LINKS to documents which they claimed copyright to. And in our case, our ISP
overstepped its bounds. We do not know the extent to which it was pressured to
do so by Diebold or whether there were other types of political pressure. Our
ISP not only pulled the offending link, it pulled the page the link was on, then
it pulled our whole site down, then it removed access to the files on our FTP
site so that we couldnt even relocate the files to another location. We have
been told the site must remain down for 10 days, and we need to file a letter
disputing their claim and bleed lawyers fees to litigate this. Fortunately,
David Allen, who knows about these things, had a techie-to-techie conversation
with a rep at the ISP, and they decided their attorney had been wrong and
granted us access via FTP, though the site is still not up.

Now let me tell you what the Diebold didnt want people to see: Memos leaked by
an insider. It was not a Diebold page, it was an independent web site owned by
someone else.

These memos show a pattern of allegedly breaking the law, starting with using
uncertified software; Diebold insiders allegedly admit to doing end runs
around the voting system, and in one of the most shocking sets of memos, they
allegedly admit that a replacement set of vote totals was uploaded in Volusia
County, Florida which took 16,022 votes away from Al Gore in Nov. 2000. The
explanation for how a supposedly secure system can have replacement votes put on
it, and the whereabouts of card #3 which contained the second vote upload, are
missing in action. (The votes were given back to Gore, but only because a
Florida clerk noticed the tally going down and sent out an alert).

Now on the web sites: blackboxvoting.com is owned by David Allen, my publisher,
with Plan Nine Publishing. It contains breaking news stories, a generous archive
of articles, and commentary. I own the domain name blackboxvoting.org, but to be
fair, a webmaster named Roxanne Jekot, of Georgia hack challenge fame, did all
the work to create a very effective self-serve activism site, where people
could go and get directly involved and post their work and set up meetings, both
public and private. It is the .org site that was shut down, and I dont know if
Ill set it up again; I dont have the programming expertise to run it.

We are at the tipping point now. What brought us to this point, besides all
the hard work by many people, was a kind of drip,drip,drip public education
process, mostly using the Internet but also using radio quite a bit, and what
has finally tipped things is the program files from the Diebold web site and the
internal memos.

BUZZFLASH: Due to your work, states now seem to be reviewing electronic voting
machines, but not necessarily doing anything about it? Is that accurate?

HARRIS: Were getting there. My skills are primarily in investigating, writing,
and being a mouthpiece to get things into public attention. The set of skills
for changing laws, getting injunctions, and confronting officials in an
organized, systematic way is quite different. I have been eager to pass the
torch, and I think we are at that point, and you will see citizens groups having
a big impact in the very near future. The Black Box Voting book is designed to
facilitate activism, because although well start seeing action soon, we have a
very long fight ahead of us. Its a solid synopsis of what we know, to equip
citizens to argue this issue persuasively.

BUZZFLASH: Okay, you've identified a problem that goes to the heart of how we
choose our leaders in a democracy. You claim that the "salvation" of electronic
voting is rife with potential for corruption? We are just over a year away from
a national presidential election. Can anything be done in time to ensure an
accurate vote count?

HARRIS: It has to be. We should not do any more elections until we have
trustworthy and fully auditable voting systems. The stakes are high and the
timeline is short.

BUZZFLASH: You have described many of the relationships in the Black Box Voting
industry as incestuous. Can you explain how a recent State of Maryland
"investigation" into a touch-screen voting machine vendor illustrates that?
[LINK]

HARRIS: Yes. Check this out: The SAIC is charged with doing an independent
investigation of the security of Diebold software. They then give us about 69
heavily redacted pages out of a 200-page report, and in this, they take whole
sections of the voting system off the table for examination. Now, the SAIC has
ties to the voting industry  specifically, Admiral Bill Owens is the Vice
Chairman of the SAIC and he is the Chairman of VoteHere. SAIC has ties to the
ITAA [LINK], and the ITAA just tried to thrust a $200,000 PR campaign on the
voting industry to solve the PR problem caused by the Diebold revelations. And
theres more. You dont even have time for how much more there is.

BUZZFLASH: You have a book coming out, "Black Box Voting." When is it going to
be released? What does it cover? (We will be offering it as a BuzzFlash
premium).

HARRIS: Are you ready for this? Wednesday, Oct. 1, we will start releasing this
book for free in electronic format. We know that some of the people most likely
to be disenfranchised cannot afford a book, and we want the book to be available
to everyone. We know that time is of the essence, and we want tools to be
available to activists immediately. On Wednesday, we will release two chapters
every two days in free electronic format until the book has been thoroughly
propagated around the world. Then the paperback version will go to print.
([LINK], watch for the announcement at the top of the homepage)

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

* * *

About Bev HARRIS: [LINK]

BuzzFlash Note: We are offering Diebold's response to Harris's charges as they
appeared in a Seattle Times article [LINK]:

Diebold has steadfastly maintained that its elections machinery and software
are safe. The company's position was bolstered yesterday by Maryland Gov. Robert
Ehrlich Jr., who released an independent review of Diebold's touch-screen
machines and said that, if properly used, they "can contribute to one of the
safest, most secure election systems available."
Harris' Web site was shut down by her Internet service provider late Tuesday
after a Diebold attorney said she was violating the company's copyright by
posting a link to a New Zealand site that contained 15,000 pieces of Diebold
e-mail.
Harris earlier removed Diebold e-mail from her site, www.blackboxvoting.org,
in response to an earlier legal threat by the company. Her publisher's site,
www.blackboxvoting.com, which does not contain links to the memos, was operating
yesterday. Harris said she plans to put her Web site back on the Internet as
soon as possible.
Harris said the e-mail supports her claims that Diebold's high-tech voting
systems are subject to abuse. She said she was "stunned" the company
acknowledged the authenticity of the potentially damaging documents.
Harris said she posted the memos after they were provided to her by a Diebold
insider. She called the company's claim of copyright infringement "a flat-out
attempt to shut somebody up. ... I still have a mouth, Diebold. Cease and desist
my mouth."
A call to Diebold's public-relations department yesterday was not returned.
Company spokesman Mike Jacobsen, who is on leave, was reached at his home last
night. He said the memos were stolen from Diebold and the company wants them
back.
Jacobsen said Harris also stole company property when she circulated numerous
company files she found on an unprotected Web site. The files included source
code for the company's touch-screen voting machines, which have recently been
bought by election officials in Georgia, Maryland and other states.
Diebold insists its machines meet the security requirements of national and
state certification and has dismissed as flawed a critical analysis by software
experts from Johns Hopkins and Rice universities. (One of the study's authors
later acknowledged he was on an advisory committee to Bellevue election-software
company VoteHere and held VoteHere stock options.)

Best,
Matthew St. Amand
As My Sparks Fly Upward

The Deregulation/Privatization Scam

The Deregulation/
Privatization Scam

Cut-throat Capitalism
vs. the People

By Norman D. Livergood

The "High Cabal," that group of American and European zillionaires who have
already bought and paid for the U.S. President and most Congresspersons, is
busily destroying our nation. Their political lackeys make sure that their
military-industrial-telecommunication corporations receive taxpayer subsidies
and contracts. And now they're hard at work destroying our election system:
first by rigging the 2000 and 2002 elections in Florida and other states and now
through their recall plot in California. And most of their mischief has been
done through their deregulation/privatization treachery.

The "High Cabal" has taken most of their manufacturing to lower-wage countries,
through NAFTA, WTO, IMF, and other globalization scams.

But, historically, federal, state, and local governments have managed certain
businesses and industries which the American public thought best kept in public
hands: prisons, schools, forests, parks, military bases, retirement funds,
utilities, etc. And American citizens have also wanted their government to
regulate certain businesses and industries which the citizens felt could only be
scrutinized by public agencies, not privately-owned enterprises.

So, beginning in the 1960s the power elite's front organizations (Cato,
Heritage, Libertarian Party, Ivy League universities, etc.) began to raise a
loud outcry that governmental regulatory agencies had been "captured" by the
industries under regulation. Of course, the allegations were largely true--their
political puppets had made sure that the public regulatory agencies such as OSHA
(Occupational Safety and Health Administration), EPA (Environmental Protection
Agency), and EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), were either
crippled or co-opted.

But many Americans, made unaware by the "High Cabal's" subversion of American
education for most of the twentieth century, can't see that the groups claiming
to be watching out for citizens' interests are actually fronts for the American
ruler group. They eat up the catch slogans of: "get the government off the backs
of the people" and "consumer choice." So they stand still when the elite's
political puppets put through legislation which is creating their dream state:
deregulation and privatization of public institutions.

The power elite's political puppets broke up some of their large competitors,
such as AT&T, IBM, Savings and loan institutions, and airlines, so the cartel
could increase its holdings in the telecommunication, computer, banking, and air
travel industries.

Then, the cabal began its deregulatory experiments with the opening of access to
networks. Under this approach, the physical infrastructures of the networks
(such as airports, cables, pipes) remained regulated natural monopolies, but
access to these networks was opened so that the remaining elements could be
submitted to competition: airline traffic, telecommunication services, gas and
electricity production, etc.

From 1998 to 2000, Southern California Edison (SCE) and Pacific Gas and Electric
(PGE) paid out $7 million to California politicos to deregulate the state's
electrical power sytstem. State Senator Steve Peace, the point man for the
deregulation scam, received $179,409 between 1994 and 1998. SCE and PGE got
their money's worth: they made more than $6 billion in profits after
deregulation began and they have combined assets of approximately $71 billion.
In 2001, these political hacks in California completed the biggest
deregulation/privatization scam of all time. They first repealed the 1996 state
law that sought to boost competition in the state's $20 billion electrical power
industry, pretending that the purpose was to pass on the phantom savings to
customers.

Rothschild have personal assets of $5 Trillion Try Beating That!

Who do you think is calling the shots?