Verbum Sapienti Satis Est

Hack the Vote
NYTime's Paul Krugman
December 2, 2003

Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote,
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes
to the president next year." No surprise there. But Walden
O'Dell - who says that he wasn't talking about his business
operations - happens to be the chief executive of Diebold
Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in
increasingly widespread use across the United States.

For example, Georgia - where Republicans scored spectacular
upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections - relies
exclusively on Diebold machines. To be clear, though there
were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence
that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence
that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold
machines leave no paper trail.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced
a bill requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper
trail and that their software be available for public
inspection, is occasionally told that systems lacking these
safeguards haven't caused problems. "How do you know?" he
asks.

What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence.
The details are technical, but they add up to a picture of
a company that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy
about security, and may have been trying to cover up
product defects.

Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting
machines, found Diebold software - which the company
refuses to make available for public inspection, on the
grounds that it's proprietary - on an unprotected server,
where anyone could download it. (The software was in a
folder titled "rob-Georgia.zip.") The server was used by
employees of Diebold Election Systems to update software on
its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of
security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the
machines both the information and the opportunity to do so.

An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns
Hopkins and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and
subject to abuse. A later report commissioned by the state
of Maryland apparently reached similar conclusions. (It's
hard to be sure because the state released only a heavily
redacted version.)

Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that
corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and
circumvented tests that would have revealed these problems.
The company hasn't contested the authenticity of these
documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to
prevent their dissemination.

Why isn't this front-page news? In October, a British
newspaper, The Independent, ran a hair-raising
investigative report on U.S. touch-screen voting. But while
the mainstream press has reported the basics, the Diebold
affair has been treated as a technology or business story -
not as a potential political scandal.

This diffidence recalls the treatment of other voting
issues, like the Florida "felon purge" that inappropriately
prevented many citizens from voting in the 2000
presidential election. The attitude seems to be that
questions about the integrity of vote counts are divisive
at best, paranoid at worst. Even reform advocates like Mr.
Holt make a point of dissociating themselves from
"conspiracy theories." Instead, they focus on legislation
to prevent future abuses.

But there's nothing paranoid about suggesting that
political operatives, given the opportunity, might engage
in dirty tricks. Indeed, given the intensity of
partisanship these days, one suspects that small dirty
tricks are common. For example, Orrin Hatch, the chairman
of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently announced that
one of his aides had improperly accessed sensitive
Democratic computer files that were leaked to the press.

This admission - contradicting an earlier declaration by
Senator Hatch that his staff had been cleared of
culpability - came on the same day that the Senate police
announced that they were hiring a counterespionage expert
to investigate the theft. Republican members of the
committee have demanded that the expert investigate only
how those specific documents were leaked, not whether any
other breaches took place. I wonder why.

The point is that you don't have to believe in a central
conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of
an insecure, unverifiable voting system to manipulate
election results. Why expose them to temptation?

I'll discuss what to do in a future column. But let's be
clear: the credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake.
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