VOTESCAM? It doesn't matter who votes, it matters who counts the votes...
So said Joseph Stalin. He may be the godfather of Senator Chuck Hagel (R. Nebraska) who was the owner of the largest vote counting operation in the nation, ES&S in the early 1990's. He's never really severed his ties from this operation.
Then again we have the Jeb Bush mafia running voting rackets in Florida:
gregpalast.com
Then there is the Diebold crowd, rock-ribbed and righteous Republicans to a fault. One that may extend to extent of fraud....in Georgia....you be the judge...
"A method of counting the votes that is decided upon in secret, and is so complex and confidential that it cannot be verified by anyone other than the manufacturer of the machine doing the counting is simply not acceptable, no matter how well-intentioned or objective the manufacturer may be. The lack of certification is even more troubling. A full, public investigation is required to ensure that the people involved in running the last election fulfilled their responsibilities to the citizens of Georgia."
workersrighttovote.org
The Georgia Debacle - in plain english
by Pamela Troy
In the wake of the 2000 presidential election, many state governments were scrambling to deal with the implications of a presidential election with a disputed outcome. The state of Georgia was especially concerned. Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox's office had discovered that 94,000 presidential ballots had not been counted in Georgia, more than double the national average. As a result, Governor Barnes allotted $54 million in his FY 2002 budget to purchase a new statewide system. A 21st Century Voting Commission, composed of several hundred members, was formed in January 2002. It was headed by Georgia Technology Officer Larry Singer and Professor Britain Williams of Kennesaw State University.
Time was of the essence. In fact, the limited amount of time was an issue that would repeatedly come up in the months leading up to election day in November 2002. "Am I worried about the timetable?" said Brit Williams in the spring of 2002. "Of course I am. We're talking about November."
Little is known about the selection; the entire process was exempt from the state's Open Records Law because it involved voting equipment. This was a cause of concern for Robert Pastor, former head of the Georgia Chapter of Common Cause, who in April 2002 was quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "On this issue more than any other, it's incumbent on the government to develop a process that is transparent and generates confidence in the voter." What is known is that the group considered bids from nine different vendors, weighing factors such as reliability and ease of use; and that in April 2002, the committee unanimously recommended Diebold as the vendor. Cathy Cox affirmed the recommendation and the agreement between supplier and the state was signed.
According to Probate Judge Ken Van Horn, a member of the Commission, Diebold was the early favorite, and remained so, despite its bid being the most expensive. "I thought Diebold had the best product and was the best company," said Van Horn. "Diebold currently guarantees repair of their ATM machines in Georgia within 2 hours of being called. The company is thriving by meeting critical tech support needs in a timely manner."
The new machines designed and implemented by Texas-based Diebold Election Systems, Inc. are touch screen machines similar to ATM machines; this system records the votes internally, and the votes are then fed electronically to the Secretary of State's office. The machines have been touted by some as the latest state-of-the-art voting technology. Other experts, however, have expressed strong doubts. While voters are shown an onscreen summary of their vote, the machines provide no paper trail and no receipt. (A spokesperson for Diebold, which provided new machines statewide in Maryland as well, said that election officials never asked for paper backups.) The software that runs these new machines is "proprietary," meaning that no external review of the software is allowed. In spite of this, Geogia Secretary Cathy Cox praised the machines, and the review of "how you voted," saying, "While such a review is not a revolutionary idea, it is vitally important. Our system's thoroughness is setting the standard for elections everywhere."
Besides the lack of a paper trail, there are those unreviewed last-minute patches to consider.
In the summer of 2002, the state of Georgia was preparing its new voting system for the upcoming election in November. Two companies were working together on this project: Diebold, the company that made the electronic voting machines that would be used, and Automated Business Systems and Services (ABSS), a Maryland company that offers contract help with computer services, product management, etc. The sources for much of our information on what happened there in the summer of 2002 are two ABSS employees. One is Rob Behler, who was the product deployment manager; he was responsible for assembling the machines correctly and on time at the warehouse, and for shipping the correct number of machines out to the Georgia counties. The other is James Rellinger, who dealt with the database servers. Behler worked with the machines from mid-June to mid-July, during which time the software was being upgraded and "fixed" in preparation for the testing at Kennesaw State University, which would be conducted by Dr. Wiliams (also head of the Georgia Independent Testing Authority and of security for the implementation of the voting machines in Georgia).
Unless otherwise noted, all of the quotes in the account to follow come from an interview with Mr. Behler conducted by Beverly Harris, author of BLACK BOX VOTING.
According to Mr. Behler, the machines arrived at the warehouse in Dekalb in mid-June from two separate locations. The touchscreens came from a factory in North Carolina, the booths from California. They were assembled on pallets in the warehouse by ABSS, and then run through a series of tests: the power cord checked, the machine booted up, the printer and barcode checked, the Windows CE operating system updated. Shortly before the machines were due to be passed on to Brit Williams, Rob Behler went in on a Saturday, accompanied by his two sons, to do a quality check. He found that 25% of the machines would fail. Behler checked a machine and found it was bad, then another, and another. "I knew we had a problem." The real-time clock was reading an incorrect date and sending the machines into a loop. Behler came to the conclusion that "NO ONE had done a quality check" on the 6,000 machines before shipping them.
On Monday, at the weekly meeting with Diebold employees Norma Lyons (a local who served as the liaison between Diebold and the counties), Wes Craven, and Keith Long, Behler raised the issue. "I said, 'Hey guys, we've got a problem -- there's 20-25% of the machines that are palletized that are failing."
The solution was to do an update of Windows CE to fix the dates. An engineer named Talbot Iredale, Diebold employee, would write a "patch" which would be posted on an FTP site on the Internet, an inter-company website typically used by Diebold employees for software updates. The patch was, according to Behler, produced in 24-48 hours.
Here is where the stories start to diverge. Behler claims that it was later discovered that the patch had not been tested. "If I'd known they hadn't tested it I simply wouldn't have installed it! My background tells me that's a no-no." Kara Sinkule, of the Secretary of State office in Georgia, however, said in a March 5 letter that "The patch prior to being installed was examined by the state's certification experts at KSU and discussed with the national testing labs. Once it was cleared by these entities, the patch was then allowed to be on the voting units by Diebold. Dr. Brit Williams, one of those certification experts, apparently told the Washington Post "that Georgia's patch was checked before it was installed and did not affect the tallying of votes," but also apparently told Bev Harris that nobody but the programmers at Diebold could know what was in these patches.
But back to Behler's account. At the warehouse, ABSS employee James Rellinger or another engineer would copy the patch using Behler's laptop, put it on memory cards, and use the the cards to boot up the machines. "These machines look at the card and then erase the flash, reprogram with whatever they said needed to be fixed." This is the apparent origin of the "rob-georgia" file which Beverly Harris found when she discovered Diebold's unprotected FTP site after the 2002 election. While it is a relief to find that the "rob" was apparently meant to refer to a name (Rob Behler) rather than a verb, the mass of contradictory statements surrounding it raises some rather serious questions.
Dr. Williams is quoted in the Washington Post as saying that the terminals could not be reprogrammed by inserting a cartridge, which raises the question of whether Williams is quibbling with the semantics of "cartridge" as opposed to "card," or whether he's claiming that this patch he examined was not accessed online by the people at the warehouse but copied onto a disk and mailed to him (Dr. Williams). In that case, how was the patch put on the machines? Michael Barnes, of the Georgia Secretary of State Elections Division said, "That FTP site did not affect us in any way, shape or form because we did not do any file transferring from it. None of the servers ever connected so no one could have transferred files from it. No files were transferred relating to state elections." Kara Sinkule also has claimed, "We were aware of the Diebold FTP site, but Georgia never used it (our model didn't require us to)." The Diebold manual, however, backs up Behler's account in that on page 322 it specifically instructs users to upgrade the software from the FTP site.
Diebold Systems, for its part, flatly denies (in Salon) that the program patch was ever applied to the Georgia voting machines.
So there we have it. A patch was created that was checked at KSU. (There is no documentation to indicate this. According to Clifford D. Tatum, Assistant Director at Legal Affairs in the State Election Commission, "No records exist regarding a change in software used by the voting system.") The patch was installed on the voting machines but it wasn't accessed through the FTP site because, according to Sinkule, that model didn't need to use the FTP site (even though the Diebold manual says it does); and it wasn't (according to Dr. Williams) put on the machines with a "cartridge" because you can't reprogram them that way. Exactly how it was done remains unclear. Sinkule says that the patch "was not to the voting software" anyway, even though it was named GEMS.exe.
Diebold says, "Patch? What patch? There wasn't any patch."
After they had started the first round of updates at the warehouse and had done a "couple hundred" machines, they were interrupted by a call from the Diebold office in McKinny, Texas. "They'd say, 'Oh no no, the way we had you do, that's not going to work, here's another thing to do. Okay, we just did a few hundred machines, now we gotta do it this way ..."
Behler claims that the response of the machines to these updates was completely erratic. "Look, we're doing this and 50-60 percent of the machines are still freezing up! Turn it on, get one result. Turn it off and next time you turn it on you get a different result. Six times, you'd get six different results - meaning the machine does something wrong different each time you boot it up. One time and it would freeze on you, next time it would load the GEMS program but have a completely different type of error, like there'd be a gray box sitting in the middle of it, or you couldn't use a field... What it was doing was it was checking for the right time, and kept going back trying to get a better time, and while it was doing that, it was supposed to get the battery status but it was still busy trying to get the time. (Kara Sinkule confirms this when she says, "The patch repaired a communication issue between the TS units operating software [Windows CE 3.0] and the voting software.") And then when we loaded the software to fix that, the machines were still acting ridiculous!"
Behler carried his concerns to Darrell Graves, the project manager, and all the way up to Diebold President Bob Urosevich. Diebold responded by assembling teams to investigate the problems and bringing them out in vans to the warehouse. "They were actually swapping parts out of these machines that were onsite. They'd cannibalize a machine with a bad printer or whatever, they'd grab the screen off of that to put on another machine with a failing screen, they'd retest it. They were not just breaking them down, they were taking pieces off and putting it back together."
According to Behler, there were a total of three updates, the last "fix" being in August, after he left. "This is an example we did: we would plug it in, boot it 3 times, unplug it, boot it three more times. I wrote a sheet on this. Four people from Diebold arrive to deal with the problem. When they left, they still did not know why it was still sporadic. This guy came in from McKinney, he was about the second in command. He's a good friend of Bob Urosevich. About second to Bob [GREG LOWE?]. He flew in and I went to Dekalb and I tested and together we went through, and we wrote down every single error, and he booted them himself, and was looking at the results and seeing how sporadic they were. and we found out of the machines we tested, about 75% of the machines had different sporadic things. Brit was there, KSU was doing their testing. They were bombing these machines out left and right. We couldn't get enough from the factory because so many were bad. You'd get a shipment of 300, but 75 were bad, they couldn't put them out fast enough to replace all the defects. It was the software, not the hardware, that's where the problem was."
While all this was going on, Behler claims that security was surprisingly lax. Nobody was wearing badges; people were coming in and out of the warehouses; the FTP site used had no password; Behler's own laptop, which was used to download the patch, was unsecured; keys and cards were being left in machines; and the actual inventory of the machines was sloppy and imprecise.
This casts an odd light on a quote from Dr. Williams in The Washington Post. "They're talking about what they could do if they had access to the [computer program] code, if we had no procedures in place and no physical security in place. I'm not arguing with that. But they're not going to get access to that code. Even if they did, we'd detect it." It should be noted that Dr. Williams is not saying here that procedures and physical security WERE in place. He simply presents a hypothetical "IF we had no procedures in place and no physical security in place"; sticks in the rather meaningless phrase "I'm not going to argue with that"; then states flatly, "But they're not going to get access to that code"; and concludes "Even if they did, we'd detect it"; a rather lame ending to such a string of oblique and ambiguous sentences. It reads as if Dr. Williams is seeking to imply strongly that security was in place, without SAYING that security was in place, and then concluding that it's no big deal if it wasn't anyway, because "we'd detect it."
According to Behler, an emphasis was put on keeping information from Brit Williams.
"You know one of the main things that really just made me so upset, they were just like, 'This Brit guy, don't even speak to him, it's a political game, you've gotta play the politics.' Well, he walks in and says 'What are you guys doing?' I said, 'We're putting in an update.' He said, 'Will it change what it does?' We said, 'Just do your normal test, we're supposed to get the machines ready for you.' He tells someone at the office and they freaked out. They were like, 'What the heck are you doing???'"
"I wasn't supposed to talk to him at all, I guess, because I actually spoke to him I got reprimanded. They said, 'If they ask you any question, you gotta say "Talk to Norma, to one of us."'"
This account seems to contradict Williams' claim that he checked the patches being put on the machines. It sounds here as if he didn't even know about them until he saw them being installed.
Behler seems to feel that, in light of the problems they were encountering with the machines, the Monday morning meetings dealt too much with the issues of training users rather than ensuring the testing and accuracy of the machines. Shortly before he left in mid-July, there was a crisis concerning the testing of the 1,900 machines for Fulton County, which were warehoused in too small a space for adequate testing. Also before he left, "They told me I needed 1,100 machines for a demo. I thought, 'The trick is coming up with 1,100 machines that actually work.'"
Apparently, Behler was dismissed because of a conflict between him and project manager Darrell Graves, another ABSS contractor, possibly concerning Behler's concerns about inventory tracking. About a week after he left, it was discovered that the problem with the machines involved the real time clock issue. "But they'd already had us do their 'upgrade' on thousands of machines by then." Another patch was put on in August. James Rellinger, according to Behler, stayed on through December, even though his contracted ended on November 2.
A "demo" took place during the August 20 primary. According to a piece by Larry Harstein and Doug Nurse in the September 1, 2002 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, many of the machines failed. "Gwinnett County had one touch-screen machine on display at each of 137 polling places. Voters were encouraged to try out the machines before or after casting their real ballots. In some cases, the screens froze." This, and poll worker errors in setting up the machines, resulted in a failure rate of "50 percent or higher." They were so much trouble that elections supervisor Lynn Ledford cancelled plans to use the machines for the September 10 runoffs. "In Fulton County, at least 11 percent of the touch-screen machines failed."
"The machines worked well in Hall and Marion counties, the only counties where real primary votes were recorded electronically. The touch-screen machines in those counties had received a software upgrade that those in Gwinnett and Fulton had not." (It sounds as though they were never able to load the patch onto these machines.) "And only the poll workers in Hall and Marion had gotten extensive training in using the machines, made by Diebold Election Systems of Ohio."
"So far, Gwinnett has 151 touch-screens. THE COUNTY EXPECTS TO RECEIVE ABOUT 1,100 MORE ON SEPT. 13. All are scheduled to receive software upgrades well before Nov. 5, Ledford said."
And what of the election itself?
Six days prior to the election, a poll commissioned by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed Democrat Roy Barnes running 11 points ahead of Republican Purdue (51%-40%). The same poll had Democrat Max Cleland leading Republican Chambliss 49%-44%.
Training classes were provided by Secretary of State Cox's office for poll workers in advance of election day; but the classes were optional, and reportedly only about half of those workers chose to participate. Many of the Election Day glitches were handled by Diebold staff members, who were on hand to provide tech support per the state's contract.
Voting machines were widely reported as freezing up. These were rebooted by Diebold technicians. "They are locking up," said Mary Cranford, election supervisor in Coweta County, "and we have to turn them off and turn them on. The voting is taking a little longer." Barbara Berry of Walker County reported that there was trouble transmitting the voting data over phone lines. Diebold also had to reboot some of their equipment during the course of the day. Decatur County reported problems with their machines resulting in temporary memory loss. "Our poll workers were not prepared for these unexpected malfunctions," said Decatur County Election Superintendent Tripp Barwick, "but we had trained people standing by to remedy the situation at once."
In Atlanta's Fulton County, 2,180 ballots and 67 memory cards were misplaced until the Thursday after Election Day, but the additional 928 ballots were reportedly added to the final totals. Bibb County and Glynn County each had one memory card missing as well. In DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were found to be missing; these were later recovered from terminals which were broken down and taken out of service.
Problems in Terrell and Bryan Counties included ballot errors that could possibly have resulted in contested elections and lawsuits, according to officials there.
On Election Day in November 2002, Sonny Purdue took 51% of the vote (an 11-point swing) , and Chambliss won with 53% (a 9 point swing).
Explanations offered for the dramatic vote swings in favor of Republicans were that voters were angry with Barnes over the new state flag from which the Confederate bars had been removed, and that Cleland, a war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was punished over his lack of support for President Bush's war plans and that "turnout variations among different demographic segments played a significant role in those victories." A 2003 study released by Secretary of State, Cathy Cox, however, showed that the demographic of the voters had in fact changed very little. In the absence of VNS or other reliable exit polling, the reasons for these dramatic upsets can only be taken on faith.
In fact, a great deal of Georgia's experience in the 2002 election seems to have been rushed, careless, and based on faith. The decision-making process that led the state to choose Diebold was cloaked in secrecy. The codes used to count the votes and the patch used to repair the software are unknown quantities, described in confusing and often contradictory terms by various authorities and protected, we've been told, by a private corporation's interest in keeping its industry secrets. Whether or not there was simply a confusing software glitch that took a while for Diebold to iron out, or a deliberate attempt to subvert an election, this does not qualify as a process that is "transparent and generates confidence in the voter."
It should be noted, that according, again, to Clifford Tatum's office, "we have determined that no records exist in the Secretary of State's office regarding a certification letter from the lab certifying the version of software used on Election Day." It should also be noted that Georgia law requires certification of any changes made to voting software. The reasons for such a law should be obvious, and make ignoring it a very serious omission.
A method of counting the votes that is decided upon in secret, and is so complex and confidential that it cannot be verified by anyone other than the manufacturer of the machine doing the counting is simply not acceptable, no matter how well-intentioned or objective the manufacturer may be. The lack of certification is even more troubling. A full, public investigation is required to ensure that the people involved in running the last election fulfilled their responsibilities to the citizens of Georgia.
What can I do?
Sign the petition to Stop the Florida-tion of the 2004 election
workingforchange.com target=
Call your representatives and ask them to support Congressman Russ Holt's The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003
holt.house.gov target=
Sources and links:
More Voting Irregularities
workersrighttovote.org
View the Kara Sinkule email here
workersrighttovote.org
And the contradictions by all involved - Michael Barnes (Kara's boss), Dr. Williams, and Diebold themselves
workersrighttovote.org
Black Box Voting web site
blackboxvoting.com
Who are we?
workersrighttovote.org |
