Diebold Vote Fixing. Real?

I've not said anything on the subject of election fixing over the last few years. I've seen lots of allegations of vote fixing in Ohio and other states, but never paid much attention to them. It would take extraordinary audacity for anyone to actually fix election results in any major way and I've pretty much ignored the issue. Basically, it would take a lot of evidence to convince me that it really happened. But after reading this article by Robert Kennedy in Rolling Stone, I have to admit that it seems a lot more plausible than I previously thought. At the very least, there's a lot of smoke in that article; there could well be fire too.

The article contains specific allegations from a former Diebold employee, which I regard as a credible source. Among the allegations are that Diebold won a contract in Georgia that it should not have won because of political connections:

Hood had been present in May 2002, when officials with Cox's office signed a contract with Diebold - paying the company a record $54 million to install 19,000 electronic voting machines across the state. At a restaurant inside Atlanta's Marriott Hotel, he noticed the firm's CEO, Walden O'Dell, checking Diebold's stock price on a laptop computer every five minutes, waiting for a bounce from the announcement.

Hood wondered why Diebold, the world's third-largest seller of ATMs, had been awarded the contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in.

"The Diebold executives had a news conference planned on the day of the award," Hood recalls, "and we were instructed to stay in our hotel rooms until just hours before the announcement. They didn't want the competitors to know and possibly file a protest" about the lack of a fair bidding process. It certainly didn't hurt that Diebold had political clout: Cox's predecessor as secretary of state, Lewis Massey, was now a lobbyist for the company.

That's a pretty damaging allegation, and it ought to be investigated. The nine bids for the contract should all be made public so we can see if Diebold actually was the highest. And Secretary of State Cathy Cox should be put under oath and asked all of the details on why Diebold was picked. The second allegation is that, due to time constraints, Diebold was given total control over the election process without direct state oversight:

The problem was, Diebold had only five months to install the new machines - a "very narrow window of time to do such a big deployment," Hood notes. The old systems stored in warehouses had to be replaced with new equipment; dozens of state officials and poll workers had to be trained in how to use the touch-screen machines. "It was pretty much an impossible task," Hood recalls. There was only one way, he adds, that the job could be done in time - if "the vendor had control over the entire environment." That is precisely what happened. In late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized Georgia's entire electoral system. The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state - all without any official supervision. "We ran the election," says Hood. "We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it."

That agreement should be made public. And again, Cox should be put under oath and questioned about this. The third allegation is that shortly before the elections, a patch was applied to the voting machines that did not do what it was supposed to do, leading to questions as to what it actually did do:

Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a "patch," a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood says. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."

Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by the state. But thanks to Cox's agreement with Diebold, the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level."

According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties - the state's largest Democratic strongholds. To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. "We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11," Hood says. "There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it's easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way." Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch being applied to more than 1,200 others.

The patch comes on a memory card that is inserted into a machine. Eventually, all the memory cards end up on a server that tabulates the votes - where the patch can be programmed to alter the outcome of an election. "There could be a hidden program on a memory card that adjusts everything to the preferred election results," Hood says. "Your program says, 'I want my candidate to stay ahead by three or four percent or whatever.' Those programs can include a built-in delete that erases itself after it's done."

If there was adequate oversight of this process, the full contents of that patch would have been vetted ahead of time to make sure it did what they said it was going to do, and was necessary. The patch would also be kept by the government so that if any questions ever arose about the proper functioning of the system, they had a record of everything that was done. That appears not to have been done in this case, which certainly raises a good deal of suspicion.

The next allegation is that pre-election polls show that the elections may have been fixed:

It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the election in Georgia: Diebold's machines provided no paper trail, making a recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote, polls showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent, leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss - darling of the Christian Coalition - by five percentage points. In the governor's race, Democrat Roy Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican Sonny Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three percent of the vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent.

This is the least convincing argument Kennedy makes. It's not at all unusual for election results to conflict with pre-election poll results, particularly if the lead is only 5 or 10 points. Given the margin of error in any poll and the inherent limitations of knowing who is actually going to go and vote and who is not, this just isn't a prima facie argument for the election being fixed.

Hood goes much further in his allegations:

Diebold's response has not been made public - but its machines remain in place for Georgia's election this fall. Hood says it was "common knowledge" within the company that Diebold also illegally installed uncertified software in machines used in the 2004 presidential primaries - a charge the company denies. Disturbed to see the promise of electronic machines subverted by private companies, Hood left the election consulting business and became a whistle-blower. "What I saw," he says, "was basically a corporate takeover of our voting system."

And there are some disturbing connections here that at least have an appearance of impropriety:

The United States is one of only a handful of major democracies that allow private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes using their own proprietary software. Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. In 2004, 36 million votes were cast on their touch-screen systems, and millions more were recorded by optical-scan machines owned by the same companies that use electronic technology to tabulate paper ballots. The simple fact is, these machines not only break down with regularity, they are easily compromised - by people inside, and outside, the companies.

Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004. That year, Diebold would count the votes in half of Ohio's counties.

The voting-machine companies bear heavy blame for the 2000 presidential-election disaster. Fox News' fateful decision to call Florida for Bush - followed minutes later by CBS and NBC - came after electronic machines in Volusia County erroneously subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Al Gore's total. Later, after an internal investigation, CBS described the mistake as "critical" in the network's decision. Seeing what was an apparent spike for Bush, Gore conceded the election - then reversed his decision after a campaign staffer investigated and discovered that Gore was actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes.

Investigators traced the mistake to Global Election Systems, the firm later acquired by Diebold. Two months after the election, an internal memo from Talbot Iredale, the company's master programmer, blamed the problem on a memory card that had been improperly - and unnecessarily - uploaded. "There is always the possibility," Iredale conceded, "that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an unauthorized source."

Amid the furor over hanging chads and butterfly ballots in Florida, however, the "faulty memory card" was all but forgotten. Instead of sharing culpability for the Florida catastrophe, voting-machine companies used their political clout to present their product as the solution. In October 2002, President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, requiring states and counties to upgrade their voting systems with electronic machines and giving vast sums of money to state officials to distribute to the tightknit cabal of largely Republican vendors.

The primary author and steward of HAVA was Rep. Bob Ney, the GOP chairman of the powerful U.S. House Administration Committee. Ney had close ties to the now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 from Diebold to lobby for its touch-screen machines. Ney's former chief of staff, David DiStefano, also worked as a registered lobbyist for Diebold, receiving at least $180,000 from the firm to lobby for HAVA and "other election reform issues." Ney - who accepted campaign contributions from DiStefano and counted Diebold's then-CEO O'Dell among his constituents - made sure that HAVA strongly favored the use of the company's machines.

Ney also made sure that Diebold and other companies would not be required to equip their machines with printers to provide paper records that could be verified by voters. In a clever twist, HAVA effectively pressures every precinct to provide at least one voting device that has no paper trail - supposedly so that vision-impaired citizens can vote in secrecy. The provision was backed by two little-known advocacy groups: the National Federation of the Blind, which accepted $1 million from Diebold to build a new research institute, and the American Association of People with Disabilities, which pocketed at least $26,000 from voting-machine companies. The NFB maintained that a paper voting receipt would jeopardize its members' civil rights - a position not shared by other groups that advocate for the blind.

Sinking in the sewage of the Abramoff scandal, Ney agreed on September 15th to plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges - but he has already done one last favor for his friends at Diebold. When 212 congressmen from both parties sponsored a bill to mandate a paper trail for all votes, Ney used his position as chairman to prevent the measure from even getting a hearing before his committee.

The result was that HAVA - the chief reform effort after the 2000 disaster - placed much of the nation's electoral system in the hands of for-profit companies. Diebold alone has sold more than 130,000 voting machines - raking in estimated revenues of at least $230 million. "This whole undertaking was never about voters," says Hood, who saw firsthand how the measure benefited Diebold's bottom line. "It was about privatizing elections. HAVA has been turned into a corporate-revenue enhancement scheme."

And it turns out that Georgia was not the only state where this sort of thing went on:

No case better demonstrates the dangers posed by electronic voting machines than the experience of Maryland. As in Georgia, officials there granted Diebold control over much of the state's election systems during the 2002 midterm elections. (In the interests of disclosure, my sister was a candidate for governor that year and lost by a margin consistent with pre-election polls.) On Election Night, when Chris Hood accompanied Diebold president Bob Urosevich and marketing director Mark Radke to the tabulation center in Montgomery County where the votes would be added up, he was stunned to find the room empty. "Not a single Maryland election official was there to retrieve the memory cards," he recalls. As cards containing every vote in the county began arriving in canvas bags, the Diebold executives plugged them into a group of touch-screen tabulators linked into a central server, which was also controlled by a Diebold employee.

"It would have been very easy for any one of us to take a contaminated card out of our pocket, put it into the system, and download some malicious code that would then end up in the server, impacting every other vote that went in, before and after," says Hood. "We had absolute control of the tabulations. We could have fixed the election if we wanted. We had access, and that's all you need. I can honestly say that every election I saw with Diebold in charge was compromised - if not in the count, at least in the security."

After the election, Maryland planned to install Diebold's AccuVote-TS electronic machines across the entire state - until four computer scientists at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities released an analysis of the company's software source code in July 2003. "This voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts," the scientists concluded. It was, in fact, "unsuitable for use in a general election."

"With electronic machines, you can commit wholesale fraud with a single alteration of software," says Avi Rubin, a computer-science professor at Johns Hopkins who has received $7.5 million from the National Science Foundation to study electronic voting. "There are a million little tricks when you build software that allow you to do whatever you want. If you know the precinct demographics, the machine can be programmed to recognize its precinct and strategically flip votes in elections that are several years in the future. No one will ever know it happened."

In response to the study, Maryland commissioned two additional reports on Diebold's equipment. The first was conducted by Science Applications International Corporation - a company that, along with Diebold, was part of an industry group that promotes electronic voting machines. SAIC conceded that Diebold's machines were "at high risk of compromise" - but concluded that the state's "procedural controls and general voting environment reduce or eliminate many of the vulnerabilities identified in the Rubin report." Despite the lack of any real "procedural controls" during the 2002 election, Gov. Robert Ehrlich gave the state election board the go-ahead to pay $55.6 million for Diebold's AccuVote-TS system.

The other analysis, commissioned by the Maryland legislature, was a practical test of the systems by RABA Technologies, a consulting firm experienced in both defense and intelligence work for the federal government. Computer scientists hired by RABA to hack into six of Diebold's machines discovered a major flaw: The company had built what are known as "back doors" into the software that could enable a hacker to hide an unauthorized and malicious code in the system. William Arbaugh, of the University of Maryland, gave the Diebold system an "F" with "the possibility of raising it to a 'C' with extra credit - that is, if they follow the recommendations we gave them."

But according to recent e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone, Diebold not only failed to follow up on most of the recommendations, it worked to cover them up. Michael Wertheimer, who led the RABA study, now serves as an assistant deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "We made numerous recommendations that would have required Diebold to fix these issues," he writes in one e-mail, "but were rebuffed by the argument that the machines were physically protected and could not be altered by someone outside the established chain of custody."

In another e-mail, Wertheimer says that Diebold and state officials worked to downplay his team's dim assessment. "We spent hours dealing with Diebold lobbyists and election officials who sought to minimize our impact," he recalls. "The results were risk-managed in favor of expediency and potential catastrophe."

During the 2004 presidential election, with Diebold machines in place across the state, things began to go wrong from the very start. A month before the vote, an abandoned Diebold machine was discovered in a bar in Baltimore. "What's really worrisome," says Hood, "is that someone could get hold of all the technology - for manipulation - if they knew the inner workings of just one machine."

Election Day was a complete disaster. "Countless numbers of machines were down because of what appeared to be flaws in Diebold's system," says Hood, who was part of a crew of roving technicians charged with making sure that the polls were up and running. "Memory cards overloading, machines freezing up, poll workers afraid to turn them on or off for fear of losing votes."

Then, after the polls closed, Diebold technicians who showed up to collect the memory cards containing the votes found that many were missing. "The machines are gone," one janitor told Hood - picked up, apparently, by the vendor who had delivered them in the first place. "There was major chaos because there were so many cards missing," Hood says.

None of this is conclusive proof that any particular election was tampered with. But it's pretty compelling circumstantial evidence that, at absolute minimum, it would not be difficult to do. And that should be a major cause for concern.