The new iVotronic voting system in use in Miami-Dade County and other areas of Florida was produced by Omaha, Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software (ES&S). In 2001, ES&S received an order from various counties in Florida for $70.6 million to provide the new system. Of this sum, Miami-Dade County paid $24.5 million, while neighboring Broward County paid $18 million. A group called, appropriately, the Florida Association of Counties lobbied for ES&S before the Florida legislature after endorsing ES&S’s touch-screen iVotronic machines, receiving a commission of $300,000 from ES&S in return. The chief lobbyist for ES&S in the deal was Sandra Mortham, who served as Florida’s top election official from 1995-99 and founded “Women for Jeb” (Bush). Some local officials have suggested that Mortham’s actions exhibited a conflict of interest.
The iVotronic system resembles touch-screen devices already familiar in various parts of the US. For example, in the convenience shops of many petrol stations, customers can order hamburgers and hotdogs at fast food service counters by just such a mechanism. The user-friendly machines allow the hungry patrons to scroll through a variety of different screens to choose toppings, such as chili, cheese, mustard, relish, and so forth. Likewise with the iVotronic system.
Each “voting booth” device comes in a “suitcase” type container with everything inside: the iVotronic terminal, attachable legs on which the “voting booth” stands so that the touch-screen surface is horizontal, and “privacy screens” that attach to both halves of the open “suitcase” to enclose the touch-screen in a mini booth-like set-up. The “voting booth” is activated by insertion of a “ballot activator” – a 3” x 3”, one-inch thick plastic cartridge with an “infrared eye” on it – into a slot in the upper left corner of the iVotronic terminal. Once the “voting booth” is activated, the voter can proceed to fill out the “ballot.” With a very long ballot such as in Miami-Dade County in 2002, the iVotronic machine presents a series of several different “pages” to the voter, who can scroll through the many screens by pressing the “next” or “back” buttons. No ballot is finally cast until the red “vote” button above the touch-screen surface is pressed at the end. Once this is done, the “virtual ballot” is – as it were – in the “virtual ballot box,” and the voter cannot go back and change it.
The “media kit” handed out by the media relations division of Miami-Dade County includes an “equipment overview” section and explains the steps necessary to vote in terms of pushing buttons and graphics on computer screens. But it does not explain where the vote “goes” after the red “vote” button is pushed to finalize the ballot. As the ES&S “online demo” says on the company’s website, “Your secure electronic ballot is contained in the ballot activator cartridge, eliminating the need for a traditional paper ballot,” but exactly where and how the ballot information is collected, processed, stored, and sent is unclear. While the answers to these questions may seem straightforward to computer experts, they are needless to say beyond the scope of knowledge of the average voter anywhere in the world. Furthermore, even if an election official with computer expertise were to cogently explain the system to a skeptical “Luddite” voter, it is difficult to see how such a voter could be entirely reassured. Ultimately and perhaps ironically given the concerns such state-of-the-art machines are ostensibly intended to assuage, the “trust” variable in a system like the one in use in Miami-Dade County is geometrically higher than anything imaginable in an old-fashioned system of placing a paper ballot in a box with a slot in the top.
Following is an excerpt from an article on the potential for voting systems to be rigged, viewable at http://www.talion.com/voting-machines.html:
Can voting systems be manipulated?
Experts say yes, and it’s getting worse! Did you know...
- That even when we use paper ballots, most states forbid even their election officials from looking at them? The ballots are removed from the counting machine and sealed in a box; only the number on the counter is used to tally the votes. Even recounts often don’t involve looking at the ballots themselves (unless a hand recount is ordered). Yes, it’s true. The most progressive states do a spot check with a hand count of 1 percent of the votes. One percent is inadequate! But most states don’t even require anyone to look at the paper ballots at all.
- That the public cannot send in its own computer guy to audit the code? Yes, it’s true: in most cases, election officials have to ask the company that provided the machines to troubleshoot problems. The voting machine companies went to court to have their counting code declared “proprietary” so no one can look at it. Computer experts who have analyzed the code say it is “spaghetti code” that is almost indecipherable.
- That there are standards for computer software programming, that make the code easy to audit, and even spot changes in the programming, and better yet, even provide a history of all the coding done? These are industry-wide standards that voting companies should use, but they don’t.
- That it only takes ONE “true believer” to compromise a voting system? It could be anyone who gets access. There are many ways to do this. Implant a Trojan Horse that, as soon as a particular vote passes a “tipping point,” will start throwing votes the other way; or, stick the mischief into the message (when the modem transmits a certain result, the receiving computer sends data back to change the database). For even more fun, a good programmer can have the code erase itself as soon as it does its work. Or, you can have the program perform random “errors” scattered across a system.
- That a touch screen that registers Democrat when you press Democrat doesn’t have to count your vote as Democrat? What you see on the screen involves a different process than how the machine counts the vote.
Can these things be tampered with? If you have any doubt, read this: article by Ronnie Dugger, who will show you how easy it is for a single individual with access to fudge the vote-counting on these machines, in ways that can never be detected. (See sidebar 2 for more information on misprogramming the machines.)
Evidently technology breeds complacency, since – though it would appear America and the West are entering an era of voting by casting “cyberballots” into cyberspace – citizens seem so awestruck and “blown away” by the high-tech machinery facing them in the polling station to contemplate the negative implications. A news item from April 2002 reads as follows:
An electronic vote at Vivendi Universal SA’s shareholder meeting last Wednesday may have been hacked, throwing suspicion on shareholder votes at other companies using electronic voting technology, the company announced Sunday… A preliminary inspection of the equipment revealed no signs of tampering, Vivendi said. However, it said that a small team with a transmitter-receiver and detailed knowledge of the protocols used by the wireless voting system could have fraudulently manipulated the vote. (See “Vivendi: Electronic vote may have been hacked,” Network World Fusion, Apr. 29, 2002.)
There has been little public discussion to date of why, under the current rapid computerization of elections, the sort of computer hacking witnessed at Vivendi could not be practiced on a larger scale in an election. According to a segment on CNN around the time of the 2002 US election, several systems in use around the country used “memory cards” to collect ballot data, and these cards were taken to the county courthouse or other central counting facility after the polls closed. But such systems also featured the alternative of sending the data via modem. Even those not expert in computers or the workings of the Internet must by now be familiar with the potential for intercepting e-mail and other data sent electronically. Already systems such as Echelon are in place to track electronic communication for security purposes, and the US Department of Justice has advocated heightening such measures to fight the “war on terror.” Such techniques employed by political forces seeking to influence elections could eradicate genuine democratic opposition, and turn Western-style parliamentary democracy into a sham.
Mechanical fiasco in the primaries
On September 10th, 2002, Florida held primary elections. Unlike in many other states, in Florida the Democratic and Republican primaries (which select the final candidate from among a slate from the same party) were held on the same day. In other words, those wishing to vote for their party’s candidate were casting ballots in the same polling stations on the same day using the same voting equipment. The same-day primaries may not have struck the casual observer as significant in terms of fairness, but given the problems encountered by voters on that day, it almost certainly was.
For example, BHHRG heard a couple of callers on an election news programme on the National Public Radio (NPR) station in Miami, 91.3 FM, complain that although they were registered Democrats, when they had showed up to vote in the primary they discovered that they were listed as registered Republicans. Likewise, voters reported several instances of the iVotronic system (in use for the first time on September 10th) malfunctioning during the primaries. Some of these problems seemed connected to fast-food grease on voters’ fingers hampering the effectiveness of the machines, but the cause of other glitches was perhaps less mundane. For example, several voters reported that they had attempted to vote Democrat, only to watch the touch-screen register their votes as Republican when they pressed the relevant window. The CNN segment examining the various computerized voting systems cited reports from 12 precincts in Miami-Dade County that had encountered just such problems with the iVotronic machines on the gubernatorial ballot. Clearly, this particular problem could have been eliminated if the primaries for the two parties had been held on separate dates. As it was, the memory of the mechanical error-ridden primary less than two months prior to November 5th was heavy in the atmosphere during the days leading up to the general election.
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