DIEBOLD'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: JEFFERY W. DEAN, Convicted Hacker creates Diebold Software. You got a problem with this?
thoughtcrimes.org
[NOTE: This text is copied from Chapter 14 of Bev Harris's book "Black Box Voting".]
In King County, Washington, an individual named Jeffrey Dean obtained a contract to program the voter-registration system. According to sources within the King County elections office, Dean also had a key to the computer room, the passcode to the GEMS computer and 24-hour access to the building. So here’s a man with access to our personal information and to the programs that count 800,000 votes.
According to the Diebold memos, Jeffrey W. Dean apparently had access not only to King County, but also to the entire suite of optical-scan software used in 37 states and the security-sensitive Windows CE program for the touch screens. He had access to our votes, but what Jeffrey Dean is not allowed to have is access to handling any checks. That is because his criminal sentence for twenty-three counts of felony Theft in the First Degree forbids him to handle other people’s money, now that he has been released from prison. According to the
findings of fact in case no. 89-1-04034-1:2
“Defendant’s thefts occurred over a 2 1/2 year period of time, there were multiple incidents, more than the standard range can account for, the actual monetary loss was substantially greater than typical for the offense, the crimes and their cover-up involved a high degree of sophistication and
planning in the use and alteration of records in the computerized accounting system that defendant maintained for the victim, and the defendant used his position of trust and fiduciary responsibility as a computer systems and accounting consultant for the victim to facilitate the commission of the offenses.”
An embezzler who specialized in sophisticated alteration of computer records was programming the King County voting system, and is also mentioned specifically in the Diebold memos in connection with programming the new 1.96 version optical-scan software and the touch-screen Windows CE program. Let’s look at some of the features Dean says he programmed for a “ballot on demand” optical scan application:
Jeffrey W. Dean, January 22, 2002 RE: serial numbers on ballots: “The BOD [Ballot on Demand] application that we have been running in King County since 1998 does put serial numbers on the ballots (or stubs) along with a variety of optional data. The application also will optionally connect the ballot serial number to a voter.”3
Diebold told The Associated Press that Dean left the company when they took over,4 but in fact, Diebold retained him as a consultant:
From: Steve Moreland, 4 Feb 2002: “I am pleased to announce that effective today, John Elder will be assuming the role of General Manager of the Printed Products department of Diebold Election Systems, Inc. ... Jeff Dean has elected to maintain his affiliation with the company in a consulting role,
reporting to Pat Green. The Diebold Election Division management team greatly values Jeff’s contribution to this business and is looking forward to his continued expertise in this market place.
While in prison, Jeffrey Dean met and became friends with John Elder, who did five years for cocaine trafficking. At the time of this writing, Elder manages a Diebold division and oversees the printing of both ballots and punch cards for several states. Punch-card manufacturers manage a high-risk security point because this is where the die cutting is done. By setting the cut so that some chads dislodge more easily than others, it is possible to manipulate a punch-card election. Diebold’s printing division also bids on printing for other voting-machine vendors, such as Sequoia.
Jeffrey Dean was released from prison in August 1995, and Elder was released in November 1996. In their prison-release documents, both wrote that they had lined up employment at Postal Services of Washington, Inc. (PSI Group), the firm that sorts 500,000 mail-in absentee ballots for King County. 5
King County contracts the mailing of its absentee ballots out to Diebold’s print and mail division, which was run by Jeffrey Dean and is now run by John Elder. This division subcontracted with PSI Group to sort King County’s incoming absentee ballots.
Sorting the incoming ballots is a high-risk security point for absentee ballots. We know how many absentee ballots we send out but don’t know many are filled out and sent back in, especially if they pass through a middleman before being counted by elections officials. Elections officials may tell you they count the ballots before outsourcing for precinct sorting, but in major metro areas, up to 60,000 ballots
arrive in a single day and elections offices are generally not staffed to handle this. It also makes no sense to count ballots by precinct and then send them out for sorting.
Jeffrey Dean, when released from prison, had $87 in his inmate
account. He had been ordered to pay $385,227 in restitution for his embezzlements. Most of us would find it difficult to bankroll a business under those circumstances, yet somehow Dean (and his wife, Deborah M. Dean) managed to become the owners of Spectrum Print & Mail. According to securities documents for Global Election Systems, who hired Jeffrey Dean as a director and senior vice president in 2000 and 2001, Dean had been running Spectrum since 1995 — shortly after Dean was released from prison. In September 2000, Spectrum was purchased for $1.6 million by Global Election Systems.6
We’ve had a cocaine trafficker printing our ballots, an embezzler programming our voting system and our absentee ballots being funneled through a company that hires people straight out of prison. And when we try to find out what software is actually authorized, we get the buffalo shuffle.
I don’t believe there is a certification program in existence that can protect us from inside access. We need criminal background checks, full financial disclosure for all state elections officials, and robust, fraud-deterring audits.
Everyone out of the pool. We have to disinfect it. These public-policy issues can’t be addressed with certification or
even by mandating paper ballots. We need procedural protections. We just “got lucky” and discovered Diebold’s files. What about the other companies? The truth is, we have no idea how big this problem is.
Every time we ask questions, we get the wrong answers. We need a short-term moratorium on counting votes by machine. I know it sounds radical. If, temporarily, we have to do the old-fashioned thing and count by hand, let’s just roll up our sleeves and do it. We shouldn’t require citizens to vote on systems that can’t be trusted. In an audit, when there is an anomaly with a spot check, you pull the whole subset of records for a more careful examination. We just spot-checked Diebold. I’d say we found an anomaly. Now we need to pull the subset of voting-system vendors, give everyone a background check and send an auditor in to check their records.
And perhaps their memos. We need to get an independent evaluation of the software on all of our voting machines, to find out what the heck is actually on them.
Public Policy
It’s time to rethink our public policies for voting. We took away transparency, and look what happened: We got bit. Now we need to bring transparency back. The Declaration of Independence does not say, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of
the computer programmers.” Unless ordinary citizens with no computer expertise can see with their own eyes that votes are being counted accurately, the audit system must be considered a failure. In a democracy like ours, you don’t need to be a lawyer to sit on a jury. You shouldn’t need to be a computer programmer to count a vote. The “many eyes” method simply means that we let as many independent parties as possible view the vote-counting. I spoke with Christopher Bollyn, a reporter who has written several articles about the erosion in integrity of our voting system as it migrated to computerized counting. He described an election he witnessed in France: When it comes time to count, as many citizens as can fit in the
room are allowed to come in and watch the counting. Sworn election officials, some from each party in the election, in front of all the observers, count the ballots into piles of 100. Each set of ballots is placed in a bag. Then, one bag at a time, the election officials count the ballots, announcing each one. They tally up one bag and move to the next, until all are done. It takes a relatively short time to count 1,000 votes, and by having many election precincts throughout the country, all of France can be counted in a matter of hours, in front of thousands of eyes.
In the U.S., we complain that our citizens don’t think their vote matters. Here’s a concept: Let people see their vote. Not a video representation of a vote hiding in a black box, but the actual vote. Count votes before they leave the neighborhood. Invite people in to watch the counting. And add a 21st Century twist: Install a Web camera, so citizens can watch the vote-counting live, on the Internet. If we want people to care about voting, we musn’t take the people
out of “we, the people.” |
