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Sum of a Glitch
Evidence shows that machines might be the real swing voters this November
By Bev Harris August 24, 2004
In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by Election Systems
and Software (ES&S) flipped the governor's race. Six thousand three
hundred Baldwin County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after
the polls had closed and everyone had gone home. Democrat Don Siegelman's
victory was handed to Republican Bob Riley, and the recount Siegelman
requested was denied. Three months after the election, the vendor shrugged.
"Something happened. I don't have enough intelligence to say exactly
what," said Mark Kelley of ES&S.
When I began researching this story in October 2002, the media was reporting
that electronic voting machines are fun and speedy, but I looked in vain
for articles reporting that they are accurate. I discovered four magic
words, "voting machines and glitch," which, when entered into
a search engine, yielded a shocking result: A staggering pile of miscounts
was accumulating. These were reported locally but had never been compiled
in a single place, so reporters were missing a disturbing pattern.
I published a compendium of 56 documented cases in which voting machines
got it wrong.
How do voting-machine makers respond to these reports? With shrugs. They
indicate that their miscounts are nothing to be concerned about. One of
their favorite phrases is: "It didn't change the result."
Except, of course, when it did:
" In the 2002 general election, a computer miscount overturned the
House District 11 result in Wayne County, North Carolina. Incorrect programming
caused machines to skip several thousand party-line votes, both Republican
and Democratic. Fixing the error turned up 5,500 more votes and reversed
the election for state representative.
" This crushing defeat never happened: Voting machines failed to
tally "yes" votes on the 2002 school bond issue in Gretna, Nebraska.
This error gave the false impression that the measure had failed miserably,
but it actually passed by a 2-to-1 margin. Responsibility for the errors
was attributed to ES&S, the Omaha company that had provided the ballots
and the machines.
" According to the Chicago Tribune, "It was like being queen
for a day-but only for 12 hours," said Richard Miholic, a losing
Republican candidate for alderman in 2003 who was told that he had won
a Lake County, Illinois, primary election. He was among 15 people in four
races affected by an ES&S vote-counting foul-up.
" An Orange County, California, election computer made a 100 percent
error during the April 1998 school bond referendum. The Registrar of Voters
Office initially announced that the bond issue had lost by a wide margin;
in fact, it was supported by a majority of the ballots cast. The error
was attributed to a programmer's reversing the "yes" and "no"
answers in the software used to count the votes.
" A computer program that was specially enhanced to speed the November
1993 Kane County, Illinois, election results to a waiting public did just
that-unfortunately, it sped the wrong data. Voting totals for a dozen
Illinois races were incomplete, and in one case they suggested that a
local referendum proposal had lost when it actually had been approved.
For some reason, software that had worked earlier without a hitch had
waited until election night to omit eight precincts in the tally.
" A squeaker-no, a landslide-oops, we reversed the totals-and about
those absentee votes, make that 72-19, not 44-47. Software programming
errors, sorry. Oh, and reverse that election, we announced the wrong winner.
In the 2002 Clay County, Kansas, commissioner primary, voting machines
said Jerry Mayo ran a close race but lost, garnering 48 percent of the
vote, but a hand recount revealed Mayo had won by a landslide, receiving
76 percent of the vote.
The excuses given for these miscounts are just as flawed as the election
results themselves. Vendors have learned that reporters and election workers
will believe pretty much anything, as long as it sounds high-tech. They
blame incorrect vote counts on "a bad chip" or "a faulty
memory card," but defective chips and bad memory cards have very
different symptoms. They don't function at all, or they spit out nonsensical
data.
In the November 2002 general election in Scurry County, Texas, poll workers
got suspicious about a landslide victory for two Republican commissioner
candidates. Told that a "bad chip" was to blame, they had a
new computer chip flown in and also counted the votes by hand-and found
that Democrats actually had won by wide margins, overturning the election.
Voting machine vendors claim these things are amazingly accurate. Bob
Urosevich, who has headed three voting machine companies under five corporate
names, said in 1990 that his company's optical-scan machines had an error
rate of only "one-thousandth of 1 percent."
At that time Urosevich was with ES&S (then called American Information
Systems). Recently, the same Urosevich (now president of Diebold Election
Systems) gave an even more glowing endorsement of his company's touch-screen
accuracy.
"Considering the magnitude of these elections, which includes more
than 870,000 registered voters within the four Maryland counties, we are
very pleased with the results as every single vote was accurately counted,"
he said.
In 1992, when Chuck Hagel accepted his position as chairman of American
Information Systems, he offered a rousing endorsement: "The AIS system
is 99.99 percent accurate," he assured.
But do these claims hold up?
According to the Wall Street Journal, in the 2000 general election an
optical-scan machine in Allamakee County, Iowa, was fed 300 ballots and
reported 4 million votes. The county auditor tried the machine again but
got the same result. Eventually, the machine's manufacturer, ES&S,
agreed to have replacement equipment sent. Republicans had hoped that
the tiny but heavily Republican county would tip the scales in George
W. Bush's favor, but tipping it by almost 4 million votes attracted national
attention.
November, 2003: Officials from Boone County, Indiana, wanted to know why
their MicroVote machines counted 144,000 votes cast when only 5,352 existed.
Better than a pregnant chad-these machines can actually give birth.
In the 1996 McLennan County, Texas, Republican primary runoff, one precinct
tallied about 800 votes, although only 500 ballots had been ordered.
"We don't think it's serious enough to throw out the election,"
said county Republican Party Chairman M.A. Taylor. Error size: 60 percent.
Here's a scorching little 66 percent error rate: Eight hundred and twenty-six
votes in one Tucson, Arizona-area precinct simply evaporated, remaining
unaccounted for a month after the 1994 general election. No recount appears
to have been done, even though two-thirds of voters did not get their
votes counted. Election officials said the vanishing votes were the result
of a faulty computer program. Apparently, the software programming error
and the person who caused it are still at large.
Some voters aren't so sure that every single vote was accurately counted
during the 2002 general election in Maryland.
According to the Washington Times, Kevin West of Upper Marlboro, who voted
at the St. Thomas Church in Croom, said, "I pushed a Republican ticket
for governor and his name disappeared. Then the Democrat's name got an
'X' put in it."
No one will ever know whether the Maryland machines counted correctly
because the new Diebold touch-screen system is unauditable.
Tom Eschberger became a vice president of ES&S not long after he accepted
an immunity deal for cooperating with prosecutors in a case against Arkansas
Secretary of State Bill McCuen, who pleaded guilty to taking kickbacks
and bribes in a scheme related to computerized voting systems.
Eschberger reported that a test conducted on a malfunctioning machine
and its software in the 1998 general election in Honolulu, Hawaii, showed
the machine worked normally. He said the company did not know that the
machine wasn't functioning properly until the Supreme Court ordered a
recount, when a second test on the same machine detected that it wasn't
counting properly.
"But again, in all fairness, there were 7,000 machines in Venezuela
and 500 machines in Dallas that did not have problems," he said.
Really?
Dallas, Texas A software programming error caused Dallas County, Texas'
new, $3.8 million high-tech ballot system to miss 41,015 votes during
the November 1998 election. The system refused to count votes from 98
precincts, telling itself they had already been counted. Operators and
election officials didn't realize they had a problem until after they'd
released "final" totals that omitted one in eight votes.
In one of the nonsensical answers that we hear so often from vendors,
ES&S assured us that votes were never lost, just uncounted.
The company took responsibility and was trying to find two apparently
unrelated software bugs, one that mistakenly indicated precinct votes
were in when they weren't, and another that forgot to include 8,400 mail-in
ballots in the final tally. Democrats were livid and suspicious, but Tom
Eschberger said, "What we had was a speed bump along the way."
Caracas, Venezuela In May 2000, Venezuela's highest court suspended elections
because of problems with the tabulation for the national election. Venezuela
sent an air force jet to Omaha to fetch experts from ES&S in a last-ditch
effort to fix the problem. Dozens of protesters chanted, "Gringos
get out!" at ES&S technicians. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez
accused ES&S of trying to destablize the country's electoral process.
Chávez asked for help from the U.S. government because, he said,
the United States had recommended ES&S.
Some people, when you give them the short but horrifying version of the
electronic voting issue, insist on minimizing the problem. You tell them
about an election that lost 25 percent of its votes, and they say, "That's
just an isolated incident." When you add that another election had
a 100 percent error, they call it a "glitch." When you tell
them a voting machine was videotaped recording votes for the opposite
candidate than the one selected, they say, "There are problems in
every election."
No. We are not talking about a few minor glitches. These are real miscounts
by voting machines, which took place in real elections. Almost all of
them were caused by incorrect programming, whether by accident or by design.
Is this not alarming? These voting systems have miscounted our votes,
flipping elections even when they are not particularly close. Even more
alarming: We have no idea how many miscounts go unnoticed.
To correct current procedural flaws, we need to bring in the right kinds
of experts-auditors-and we need to keep the system simple.
Here are some procedural safeguards we should consider:
" Verify the machine tally while still at the polling place. Run
a report of the tally from the polling place before phoning, modeming
or driving anything to the county. Post this report on the door of the
precincts and make copies available to the press.
" Compare the polling-place tally with the matching totals assigned
by the central county office. If there is a discrepancy, pull out the
paper ballots and do an audit.
" Provide clearly delineated accounting for the votes that appear
separately from the precinct totals, like absentee votes and provisional
votes. Polling-place tallies should always match what is posted at the
polling place. Separate the other votes cleanly and record them in a way
that is easily understandable for everyone.
" Hand audits must be a routine part of every election, not just
used for recounts. Hand-audit any anomalies.
" Make "random" spot checks truly random by using a transparent
and public method for random selection.
" Allow the press, and any citizen, to audit if they pay for it.
If they discover that the election was miscounted, reimburse them. Find
ways to do these audits inexpensively.
" Allow each party to select a handful of precincts to hand-audit.
Discretionary audits shine light into any precincts deemed suspicious.
" Require audits for insufficient randomness (e.g., three candidates
each get 18,881 votes; voters arrived in alphabetical order).
" Require that the audit be expanded if discrepancies are spotted,
whether or not the discrepancy would overturn the election.
" When voting machines miscount, require that fact be disclosed.
If it is the fault of the vendor, require such failures to be disclosed
to prospective buyers.
" Consider a 100 percent audit of the paper ballots. It may be easier
and cheaper to do a 100 percent audit than to counter the political tricks
that will arise when we introduce judgment (like what constitutes an "anomaly")
into a robust spot-checking procedure.
Taking back our vote is not something we can depend on others to do for
us. This requires the top talent we have. Nothing less will do. This job
needs you.
What are we fighting for? Simply this, and we must accept nothing less:
We want voting systems to produce voter-verified paper ballots, and those
ballots must be considered the legal record when used for recounts and
audits. We must use robust fraud-deterring auditing methods, and we must
place a much higher priority on catching and correcting software miscounts.
We need a temporary interim solution, so we can be confident that our
votes are secure in the next elections. We also need a long-term solution,
a bill passed by Congress.
We need to develop public policy, auditing procedures, and tamper-proof
voting machines based on input from experts in a variety of fields, and
we must not allow our collective common sense to be overridden by profit
motives, or the desire to save face because of past mistakes.
________________________________________
Bev Harris is executive director of Black Box Voting, a nonprofit consumer
protection group for elections. She is author of Black Box Voting, now
available from Talion, from which this article was excerpted.
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