Electoral Dysfunction
lacitybeat.com
One Florida official exposes a gaping flaw in the electoral system – and is ignored by everyone, including California
~ By ANDREW GUMBEL ~
on Sancho is a rare, if not unique, figure in America’s blasted electoral landscape, a county election supervisor who actually cares about the reliability, transparency, and public accountability of his voting systems. Since his bailiwick is Leon County, the area in and around Florida’s state capital, Tallahassee, he also has a unique vantage point on what arguably remains the most electorally dysfunctional state in the union, and he provides regular, withering commentary on the anti-democratic skullduggery of the other Bush administration, the state government led by George W.’s brother, Jeb.
For both these things, he is now being hung out to dry.
Specifically, Sancho is being cold-shouldered by the three voting machine manufacturers certified to sell equipment in the state of Florida – Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia – after he had the temerity to investigate and publish details of an alarming security flaw in one of their products. None is currently prepared to do business with him at all. The Florida state authorities, meanwhile, have told him that if he doesn’t hurry up and buy an updated system from one of the three vendors he risks finding himself in violation of federal law and having his office taken over by the state.
It’s a chilling scenario. A public official takes steps to defend the integrity of elections in his county, and he is promptly identified as a threat who needs to be removed. It would be bad enough if the Sancho affair were limited to Florida, but really it has implications all over the country. The more we find out about the expensive computerized systems being installed in county after county, and state after state, the more it becomes apparent that the processes to inspect and certify them are wholly inadequate and may well be opening the door to election-stealing on a scale this country has never seen before.
And yet, with vast quantities of money and bureaucratic pride at stake, the official reaction to the shortcomings remains, overwhelmingly, to pretend that they don’t exist. California, sadly, is no exception to this general pattern.
Here’s what happened in Leon County. Last May, Sancho invited a Finnish computer expert called Harri Hursti to test his claim that the Diebold vote tabulation software used in Leon County was so vulnerable that a corrupt county insider could alter the outcome of an election while leaving no detectable trace of his or her handiwork. Hursti successfully manipulated the system on repeated occasions with the aid of what he said was a commercially available agricultural scanning device. Leon County uses paper ballots that are then optically scanned by machine; it was the memory cards keeping track of the tally on each of these counting machines that Hursti managed to alter.
Sancho first asked Diebold to address the security flaw, and – in his account, at least – the company refused to do so. On the contrary, Diebold sent a threatening lawyer’s letter to Sancho intimating that any security risk in its systems had been incurred by him, not the company’s software writers. Sancho is now suing Diebold for breach of contract and has severed relations with them. Toward the end of last year, he approached both ES&S and Sequoia to supply an alternative system that would, among other things, make Leon County’s voting machines accessible to disabled voters, as required by HAVA, the 2002 Help America Vote Act.
Florida representatives of both companies, according to Sancho, initially agreed to do business with him, only to be overruled by senior management. ES&S’s chief operating officer, Gary Crump, left a voice-mail message on Sancho’s mobile phone at the end of December explaining that his company was not interested in doing business with new clients – an extraordinary thing for any commercial company chief to say, and one that apparently contradicted ES&S’s subsequent dealings with at least one other county in Florida.
Sancho was left in no doubt that he had been blacklisted. “This whole thing has opened up a terrible can of worms,” he tells me. “One of the reasons voting machine companies would like me removed is that I’m a walking and talking contradiction of what they’ve been attempting to spin about the integrity of their systems. For a long time, vendors have been making light of any attack on their credibility, calling anyone who raises doubts ‘wackos’ and ‘crazies.’ There’s a clear campaign going on to denigrate anybody who raises any issues about their equipment or their companies.”
The attitude of the Florida state authorities has been little short of flabbergasting. The security flaw in the Diebold tabulation system might not matter so much if election supervisors like Sancho were at liberty to conduct sample manual counts of the paper ballots to ensure the machines were tallying them properly. Such manual counts, though, were outlawed in Florida last year at the behest of Florida’s secretary of state. That’s the office once occupied by Katherine Harris, the Cruella de Vil of the notorious 2000 presidential election. It has since become a direct adjunct of Governor Bush’s office.
It was the current Secretary of State, Sue Cobb, who wrote a letter to Sancho at the beginning of the month warning him that he might be out of a job if he doesn’t have a HAVA-compliant system in place by May. At no stage has she or her immediate predecessor Glenda Hood demonstrated any disquiet at the outcome of the Hursti experiment. Rather, they have breezily suggested that if Sancho has a problem with his Diebold equipment then it’s up to him, and him alone, to negotiate a solution with the company. Plenty of other Florida counties are Diebold clients, and they have taken absolutely no corrective action.
For now, Leon County is in something of a stalemate. Sancho has received the overwhelming support of his county commissioners, of several Florida newspapers, and of his own county electorate, which recently swept him to a fifth four-year term in office. He is hoping to resolve the disabled-voter problem with the help of a new, telephonic system being developed by a small Kentucky company called IVS. The beauty of IVS’s system is that it records votes without processing or counting them – that job would be done by existing machinery – and so may not be subject to the state and federal certification process for voting systems. Sancho is far from confident, however, that the secretary of state will agree with that assessment.
The Sancho affair has certainly had repercussions in other states, but it has not stopped Diebold and others from continuing to sell their patently flawed machinery. Far from it. Here in California, Secretary of State Bruce McPherson seriously considered inviting Harri Hursti to repeat his experiment in the Golden State. Last summer, McPherson upbraided Diebold for a host of shortcomings in their new-model electronic touch-screen machine, the TSx, and told the company he was withholding certification until the problems were fixed. He also asked his technical advisory panel, the Voting Systems Technology Assessment Advisory Board, to look at possible flaws in the memory cards used in Diebold’s tabulation software for both optical-scan and touch-screen systems.
McPherson’s attitude has undergone a dismayingly sudden change in the last month, however. First, he decided not to invite Hursti after all. Then he responded in extraordinary fashion to the published findings of the VSTAAB, which not only corroborated Hursti’s findings but suggested the flaws might actually be quite a bit worse. The panel found 16 different software problems that could permit hackers to “change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates, change the races being voted” and even crash the machines altogether without so much as the need for a password. Three days after that report was issued, though, McPherson decided to allow the TSx to be used in this year’s mid-terms, rationalizing the problems as “manageable”.
This is not only nonsensical. It is borderline insane. As Ion Sancho told me, public authorities are supposed to be “the gatekeepers and protectors of the citizen” but instead they appear interested only in protecting the interests of the voting machine companies. We need to generate the broadest possible outrage about this travesty of our democratic rights. And we need to do it fast. |
