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Unlike some of the more fanciful
lower-order candidates, Jerry Kunzman never deluded himself into
thinking he could actually win the California gubernatorial recall
election. In fact, the 39-year-old Bay Area entrepreneur, a registered
Republican, never seriously entertained the notion of finishing in the
top 10. So he was more than a little surprised to discover that, in
rural Tulare County, he had finished fifth - behind Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Cruz Bustamante, and Tom McClintock, but ahead of
Peter Camejo and some of the more prominent dropout candidates such as
Arianna Huffington, Bill Simon, and Peter Ueberroth.
In fact, Kunzman won roughly one-third of his 2,176 statewide votes in
Tulare, even though he never set foot there during the campaign and
knew not a soul in Visalia or any of the surrounding farm communities.
He did almost as well in Fresno County, a little to the north. And,
bucking the notion that his message somehow held particular appeal to
Central Valley conservatives, there was the further anomaly of
Humboldt County on the north coast, where he garnered 10 percent of
his overall support.
"I wouldn't have expected that at all," a nonplussed Kunzman said in a
phone interview from the Richmond offices of the National Auto Sport
Association, where he is chief executive. "In the Central Valley, a
radio station offered to play a 60-second message from me for the last
three weeks of the campaign, so maybe that made a difference. But I
sure would love to know what happened in Humboldt."
It was a similar story for Ronald Palmieri, a Los Angeles
entertainment lawyer who came in fourth in Tulare County - a bizarre
placement for an openly gay candidate in a socially conservative part
of the state, especially since he had come out vehemently against the
recall and ran on the slogan "Don't Vote for Me!" Ditto for Randy
Sprague, a fraud investigator from Elk Grove, outside Sacramento, who
finished sixth in Tulare.
So what happened? Did this trio really refresh parts of the California
electorate that other candidates could not reach, or was something
screwier going on? The numbers don't make sense.
Ever since the 2000 Bush-Gore fiasco in Florida, where shady purges
from the voter rolls and voting technology problems put the American
presidential vote count in serious doubt, the machinery of democracy
has been in trouble. The sacred principle of One Person, One Vote only
works if the votes are accurately counted. Florida made it clear that
the old punchcard system is susceptible to serious mechanical flaws,
especially in a close race when everything might come down to reading
dimples and chads. That is why the ACLU fought in the federal courts
to have the recall postponed until next March, when a new generation
of voting machinery could be introduced throughout California.
But new computer-driven touchscreen voter machines, it turns out, may
be worse - much worse. For the past few months, an increasingly loud
chorus of leading computer scientists has warned about the dangers of
touchscreen voting machines. Mounting evidence from elections across
the country, including California's recall election, indicates that
the machines are prone to software bugs and breakdowns, extremely easy
to tamper with, and impossible to verify because of strict
trade-secrecy agreements by which the equipment is sold to county
elections officials.
The first all-touchscreen election in the country, in Georgia last
November, was marked by huge, unexplained last-minute swings that
resulted in the surprise elections of Republican governor Sonny Perdue
and Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss. The results raised significant
concerns about the reliability of the machines, made by Diebold
Election Systems, particularly since they had been "patched" at the
last minute following a major software breakdown. The patches, which
amounted to a complete reprogramming, were never tested. Then, in
January, the source code apparently used in Georgia suddenly popped up
on an open-access Internet site - a big security no-no that was
followed by the discovery of hundreds of security flaws by computer
security experts who conducted two separate studies of the code for
Johns Hopkins University and for the state of Maryland.
Worse, there were concerns that the companies making the machines were
themselves politically engaged. Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell told fellow
Republicans (he is a major fundraiser for Bush 2004) he was "committed
to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next
year."
Touchscreens made by the three leading U.S. manufacturers (used by
about 10 percent of California voters on October 7) are not currently
configured to print out receipts of individual voting choices, so
there is no separate paper trail to follow in case of controversy, and
no possibility of conducting recounts. What is in the machine is in
the machine - whether it is right, wrong, incorrectly processed, or
subject to malicious interference.
Critics also have concerns about other uses of computers, especially
in the tabulation of votes, irrespective of how they were actually
cast. Again, it is a matter of properly functioning software and data
security. That might not sound like such a stretch in this digital
age, but the record of recent elections around the country suggests
there are plenty of anomalies arising from computer tabulation that we
need to worry about. Last November's mid-terms produced one election
in Texas where the computers declared a landslide victory to a
candidate subsequently found, after a hand recount, to have lost. In
another Texas county, three candidates for local office all won
exactly 18,181 votes - a bizarre coincidence that was never
investigated further. And in Alabama, the close race for governor
turned on the last-minute, highly suspect cancellation of 7,000 votes
in a rural county, where the discrepancy was blamed on a
computer-tabulation error.
When A Test Is Not A Test
No one is asserting that California's October 7 recall election
results were changed by the introduction of touchscreen voting. The
outcome was clear and uncontested, with victorious Republican
Schwarzenegger drawing heavy crossover voting from the Democratic
majority. But had the recall part of the ballot been closer - a three-
or four-point margin of victory for "Yes on Recall," say, rather than
the actual 10.8 points - it could have been Florida all over again.
Jeremiah Akin, a 28-year-old computer programmer from Riverside
County, developed concerns about the reliability of computer voting
systems several weeks before October 7, when he was invited to be one
of six observers monitoring a pre-election test of the county's
Sequoia touchscreen voting machines. Riverside was the first
California county to switch entirely to touchscreen technology. This
was a source of local pride three years ago, when Florida's punchcard
vote was a mess and Riverside, by comparison, seemed squeaky-clean.
The county's registrar of voters, Mischelle Townsend, remains an
ardent booster for her system and rarely wastes an opportunity to say
that computer scientists who raise objections do not know what they
are talking about.
That, according to Akin's account, was the tenor of her remarks at the
start of the so-called "logic and accuracy" test on September 9.
Townsend handed out leaflets and company brochures from Sequoia to
bolster her claims that the system was reliable, saying it was
"terrible" that critics were causing voters to lose faith in
electronic voting. She claimed that Sequoia used its own proprietary
operating system and was thus immune to the well-documented security
problems known to have assailed Microsoft Windows, which is used in
the Diebold system. She also asserted that, contrary to what the
critics said, her machines did print out a paper trail. It was only on
closer questioning that she conceded her paper trail was merely a
printout of data stored within the voting machines, not an independent
record of individual voting choices. That kind of independent paper
trail, she argued, was impractical, unreliable, and a useless
duplication of effort.
Then came the test itself. The "logic and accuracy" exercise is
limited to an inspection of the machines in "test" mode, not in live
election or post-election verification mode - a shortcoming that
computer scientists say renders the test next to useless. (It's a bit
like a doctor asking a patient to stand up and, on that basis,
declaring her to be in perfect health.) But, as Akin reported, even
this very partial test was less than satisfactory.
The observers were not invited to verify the test information entered
on the machine's data cards. Then, while the machines processed the
information, the observers were taken to another part of the
registrar's office and eventually invited to go home for lunch. By the
time Akin returned, the data cards had been removed from the machines
out of sight of the observers. Contrary to what he had been told
earlier, he then saw that the data was in fact being tallied with a
Microsoft Windows program called WinEDS. (The proprietary software
only applies to the vote-entering part of the operation.) Finally, he
learned that his five fellow observers had signed a form testifying
that they had observed the test and verified the results, even though
they had left before it was finished.
Akin's exhaustive report, even if it does seem a bit hostile to county
officials, gets right to the heart of why computer voting is making
people so nervous. Not only are the machines' inner workings utterly
unverifiable, but the public officials responsible for them seem to
have a near-blind faith in the technology.
The experience of another California county, San Luis Obispo, in last
year's gubernatorial primary election offers a perfect illustration of
the problem. Under election rules, it is strictly forbidden to begin
processing the results until the polls close. Many months after the
election, however, a tally of absentee ballots from 57 of the county's
164 precincts popped up on an open-access Internet site operated by
Diebold. The tally was time-stamped 3:31 p.m. on March 5, 2002 - more
than four hours before the polls closed. Under pressure from computer
voting critics, not county officials, Diebold has acknowledged the
incident, although it says it is still under investigation.
Akin's report likens a computer voting machine without a
voter-verified paper trail to a supermarket that tells you how much
you owe without showing you a receipt for your individual purchases.
He wrote: "If you asked to see your receipt, the cashier would say,
don't worry we print them all out at the end of the day to make sure
that no one was incorrectly charged. If you asked to see your receipt
at the end of the day you would be told that it is not possible ... .
How long would you continue to shop at that store?"
This experience was mirrored by Kim Zetter, a reporter for Wired
magazine, who recently signed up for poll-supervisor training in
another all-touchscreen zone, Alameda County. She focused her inquiry
on the security of the polling stations themselves and discovered it
would be extremely easy for someone intent on messing with the
machines to gain access unnoticed. Both the machines and the memory
cards sit in the polling stations for days before the election, she
discovered. Volunteers - assumed to be in good faith and hence not
subject to background checks - are entrusted with keys and combination
numbers. The machines have two blue tamper-resistant ties threaded
through holes in their carrying cases, but the ties are easily
purchased on the Internet and can be replaced without detection. At
least one case is opened the night before the election, leaving it
completely unsecured.
David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University who is
also California's leading critic of computer voting machines, called
these security flaws "jaw-dropping," only adding to his contention
that the machines are simply untrustworthy. He and others have argued
that there are multiple ways an electronic voting system can be rigged
before, during, or after an election without leaving a trail - even by
a single programmer with the right access. "What we have is a
technological gap, since there is no way of going back to see how
voters voted," he said. "This is a case where the technology is
actually undercutting any security procedures you could have."
Ghost in the Machine
Because the California recall vote was so decisive, it looks like the
state dodged a bullet. The one clear piece of evidence that all was
not right - and still isn't - is the alarmingly high number of ballots
that registered a blank on the key issue of whether or not to recall
Gray Davis.
According to provisional figures from the Secretary of State's office,
the "undervote" rate on Question 1 throughout the state was 4.6
percent. In other words, voting machines of all types would have us
believe that one voter in 20 chose not to pronounce on the recall
question at all. In Los Angeles County, which had the biggest
problems, the undervote rate was just shy of 9 percent. Exit polls
suggest the true number of voters who deliberately left Question 1
unanswered was around 2.6 percent, leaving a gap of at least two
percentage points that can be ascribed to machine malfunction or other
administrative errors.
By far the worst performing machines, as the ACLU predicted, were the
soon-to-be-discarded Vote-o-matic punchcards, which registered an 8.17
percent undervote rate. The touchscreen machines, by contrast,
fulfilled the promise of their user-friendly interface and finished
among the best, with an average recorded undervote rate of 1.51
percent. But it is clear, looking at the complete data, that getting
rid of the undervote problem is a lot more complex than simply moving
to computer technology - and not just because of the trustworthiness
of the results the computers spit out.
One punchcard system used in 14 counties, called Datavote, performed
admirably, with an undervote rate of 1.95 percent. Optical scan
systems, which are tabulated by computer, fluctuated wildly from the
top-performing ES&S Eagle in San Francisco and San Mateo counties
(1.87 percent) to the altogether less impressive Sequoia Pacific
Optech machines used in five counties including San Bernardino (4.35
percent).
What is one to make of these conflicting data? One possible conclusion
is that the machines all have their faults and that no system,
ultimately, is reliable enough to withstand close scrutiny except
perhaps the Canadian and European method of counting paper ballots by
hand. Another possible conclusion is that elections are complex,
wildly fluctuating operations in which the machines are just one
factor, alongside ballot design, polling station procedure, and so on,
and we just can't know the true vote without a degree of electoral
monitoring and review. This is the kind of oversight that the U.S.
usually reserves for emerging democratic societies like Armenia or
Albania.
Either way, it is not a pretty picture. Steven Hertzberg, founder of a
San Francisco-based watchdog group called Votewatch, has heard
numerous reports suggesting the very presentation of the recall
question was flawed, since a vote for Gray Davis entailed marking the
word "No" next to his name, and vice versa. "You would think the
ballots would be user-tested ahead of time, but we have absolutely no
indication that they are," Hertzberg said. One survey he saw, based on
a sample too small to have absolute statistical validity, suggested as
many as 15 percent of voters missed a question on the ballot because
they either could not find it or did not understand it.
Although the issue has not been discussed extensively in the
mainstream media, suspicion of the electoral system has grown so
widespread among political challengers and in Internet chat rooms that
just about any anomaly or malfunction now becomes instant fodder for
conspiracy theories. The implausibly strong showing of lower-order
candidates in Tulare County is a classic of the genre. There has been
intensive, but utterly unsubstantiated, talk of Diebold - which, like
the other big voting machine manufacturers, is a major contributor to
the Republican Party - deliberately skimming votes from Cruz
Bustamante and redistributing them to the lesser candidates. Had
Schwarzenegger not won fair and square, the speculation has run, then
Diebold and the other voting machine companies would have made it
happen anyway.
That is one explosive scenario, symptomatic of the sheer unknowability
of what goes on inside the voting machines, and of the very real
concern that elections could be thrown by the manipulation of
proprietary software.
In the end, however, what happened in Tulare County probably had
nothing to do with computers. David Dill, the Stanford professor, has
discovered that, in Tulare, the candidates on the replacement part of
the ballot were crammed together in three columns, creating some
confusion as to which check box referred to which candidate. Kunzman,
Palmieri, and Sprague were all positioned next to much better-known
candidates. (For example, Palmieri, who came in fourth, was next to
Schwarzenegger.)
In other words, it was the butterfly ballot all over again, the same
design fault that caused several hundred retired Jews in Palm Beach
County, Florida, to vote for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore in the
2000 presidential election. Luckily for Tulare, and for California,
the glitch made no significant difference on October 7. But it is part
of a pattern of electoral dysfunction that only seems to be
increasing, not diminishing, in the wake of the Florida coup. At some
point in the future - possibly as soon as next year's presidential
election - the geopolitical fortunes of the planet could once again be
at stake.
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