It's time to worry your pretty little heads, folks.

by Pokey Anderson

October 12, 2008

For too long, the people of this country have been told, in essence, "Don't worry your pretty little heads." Whether they were asking to see exactly how their elections work, or wondering exactly what securities were in those billion dollar baskets being sold to their pension fund, the door has been closed. 

Whether it's the economy or elections, we've now seen that things we have a stake in should not be hidden behind closed doors. Nor should they be so complex that even those tasked with monitoring find it impossible to do.  

When huge amounts are at stake and the temptation for a bad apple to steal is at its highest, transparency should be at its highest.

In the financial system, global financial well-being is at stake. In U.S. elections, national and global well-being are also at stake.

As I wrote in May 2007, "Given what's at stake -- the reward for stealing an election could amount to control of a jurisdiction, or even the entire US treasury -- the threat level is quite high. ... You could think of hackable electronic voting machines as leaving your checkbook out on the sidewalk, with a bunch of signed checks."

The secrecy surrounding our elections should be limited to the secrecy of who you cast your vote for. Yet, officials who are supposed to be our public servants have allowed layers of secrecy atop numerous aspects of elections: who owns and runs voting machine companies, who their programmers are, what the software says, reports by entities that are supposed to certify voting equipment, and even raw exit poll data by the nation's biggest exit polling group, the one that works for ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, etc.  All secret.  Want to stand quietly near the central tally area and observe on election night? In some jurisdictions, your public servant will call the police and have you removed.  In Alaska, an effort by a major party in 2004 to obtain the electronic voting results file to investigate odd results was rebuffed by the Alaska Division of Elections, which maintained that the format belonged to a private company, Diebold, and could not be made public.  

In addition to election policies and procedures being shrouded in various layers of secrecy, the very medium that now counts most all US votes is by its very nature secret, unobservable, and complex.

In my report linked below, I described nine potentially-fatal vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines.  Each security vulnerability offers a route for an undetected error, or for an undetected crook, to change the result of an election.  Protecting our elections from flaws or fraud would be difficult enough, but the evidence is that the handful of companies that provide our voting equipment aren't trying terribly hard.  An expert hired by the State of Maryland to inspect its voting equipment, William Arbaugh, said: "There's no security that's going to be 100 percent effective. But the level of effort was pretty low. A high school kid could do this. Right now, the bar is maybe 8th grade."

You want election security? Hey, there are passwords. Diebold used an easily-guessed password of 1111.  ES&S uses the identical password for all machines in the entire country, so presumably thousands of people know the password.  An investigation into 18,000 lost votes in Sarasota, Florida discovered that "the administrator password had been changed to an unknown password."

But electronic voting machines themselves are physically locked up, right, and protected against intrusion?  Not exactly.  Some states store machines in stairwells. In some states, the machines go home with election workers for one or more nights before the election.  Could your voting machine contract a virally-transmitted disease in one of these sleepovers? 

Well, the machine itself is locked, right?  Well, sort of.  In what I call the Leave No Comedian Behind Election Security Provision, Diebold has been protecting your votes on its AccuVote-TS voting machine with a key that is the same one commonly used in ... hotel minibars. 

In case you were a crook and didn't want to take the trouble to go to a hotel, Diebold posted on its website a picture of the actual key used across the country.  Someone with a few tools actually made a working key.  Professor Ed Felten of Princeton has demonstrated that with one minute of access to that machine, an attacker could install malicious code that could steal votes undetectably and change all records to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count.

What about optical scan machines? Many people vote on paper ballots, which are electronically scanned and tallied by optical scan machines.  Unfortunately, these involve software, and that software is vulnerable to flaws or fraud.  Tiny electronic devices similar to flash drives become the electronic equivalent of the old, big wooden ballot box.  They can be programmed with a virus, or they can be "stuffed" with hard-to-detect extra votes before use.

Even electronic transmission of vote totals can raise questions.  THE swing state in the 2004 presidential election, Ohio, sent its electronic results on Election Night to a server nestled amongst highly partisan servers in Tennessee.  Some of these servers were the ones Karl Rove turned to to maintain his personal email system. A lawsuit in Ohio is attempting to discover what Ohioans' votes were doing in Tennessee that night.

If the people of the United States want our representatives in elective office to be responsive to us, we need to be absolutely sure we elected them.  We need to demand 100% transparency of election procedures, from how votes are cast and counted to how names are added or subtracted from voter rolls.  Because of the inherent nature of computers, software-driven casting and counting of votes as currently practiced across the U.S. is not transparent.  And, it is too complex for the ultimate stakeholders, you and me, to adequately monitor.  

As the ultimate stakeholders, we must demand that our election system be reformed, not for some feel-good but fake "voter confidence" goal, but for absolutely transparent, accurate and honest elections.

If you want to read about nine of the reasons electronic voting is too vulnerable to use, with citations for many of the above statements, read my report: "Peering Through Chinks in the Armor of High-Tech Elections," by Pokey Anderson, May 27, 2007, Voters Unite, http://www.votersunite.org/info/PeeringThruChinks.asp

If you want to find out the latest on protecting our votes, check out www.bradblog.com, www.blackboxvoting.org, www.votersunite.org, or www.electiondefensealliance.org.

If you want to help, get in touch with one of these groups or find a local group.  Or, send a donation of any amount.  Citizens have been working day and night on this issue without pay, making great progress with only shoestring budgets for expenses.  Adequate funding would help immensely.  Whatever issue you care about -- climate change, economic fairness, whatever issue -- probably won't get far if your elected representatives weren't elected.  No matter how good your arguments are, they might ignore you.  Honest and transparent elections are the foundation for the will of the people to be respected, and necessary to turn this country around.

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Pokey Anderson has broadcast and published numerous reports on voting machine issues over the past five years. She co-anchors a weekly news and analysis radio program, The Monitor on KPFT-Pacifica/Houston.