[Mb-civic] Chasing Down Flaws in Electronic Voting

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0817-12.htm

Published on Tuesday, August 17, 2004 by the International Herald Tribune  
Chasing Down Flaws in Electronic Voting  
by Adam Cohen  
  
The elections director of Mohave County, Arizona, was so proud of his new 
electronic voting system that Bev Harris barely had the heart to point out its 
vulnerabilities. But she did, and before long she was ticking off the ways that 
she said an outsider could hijack his central tabulator - the computer that 
stores all of the county's votes - and steal an election. 

By the time she had shown him a "backdoor" way to gain access to his 
software without a password, the elections director was visibly concerned. 
Before she left, he asked her to send him a list of things he could do to 
safeguard this year's election. 

Harris's visit to Mohave County was part of a monthlong trip in which she and 
her deputy, Andy Stephenson, traveled to 10 states, investigating flaws in 
electronic voting and giving on-the-fly computer security tutorials. 

The trip started out in Ohio, where they knocked on the doors of employees 
of Diebold, one of the largest and most criticized voting machine companies. 
It ended in late July in Las Vegas at Defcon, a hackers' convention, where 
the consensus was that cracking a voting machine might not be so hard. 

Harris, the director of Black Box Voting (the Web address is 
www.blackboxvoting.org), has made herself public enemy No. 1 for voting 
machine manufacturers, and some elections officials, with her hard-edged 
attacks on electronic voting and her investigative style. (She acknowledges 
that at one point in Ohio, she and Stephenson hid in the bushes with a 
microphone, eavesdropping on Diebold workers.) 

But there is no denying that Harris, a one-time literary publicist from the 
Seattle area, is responsible for digging up some of the most disturbing 
information yet to surface about the accuracy and integrity of electronic voting 
in the United States. 

"I wouldn't want to play her role," says Aviel Rubin, a Johns Hopkins 
computer science professor and a leading critic of electronic voting. "But 
we're all better off that she's out there." 

When they're in road-trip mode, Harris and Stephenson are a high-tech 
public-interest group on wheels. The phone rings frequently with leads to be 
investigated. As they drove through San Bernardino, California, Harris took a 
call from an official in Indiana who claimed a voting-machine salesman 
picked up a top elections official in a limousine and took her on a shopping 
spree. 

In the San Bernardino County elections office, Harris asked the registrar of 
voters to explain why, in the presidential primary in March, the vote totals 
went down in the days after the election. He explained that the county's 
electronic voting system had faulty software that accidentally held onto some 
test votes and added them to the real votes that were cast. He insists that the 
story showed that the system worked well, since the extra votes were 
eventually found. Harris is skeptical. 

Even many of Harris's detractors concede that her past investigations have 
shaken up the electronic voting field. While surfing the Internet last year, she 
came across secret source code - programming instructions - for Diebold 
voting machines and made it publicly available. Rubin relied on the code she 
found in a report last July in which he identified what he called "stunning, 
stunning flaws" in Diebold software. 

More recently, Harris caused waves in King County, Washington, her home 
county, when she revealed that one of the main designers of its elections 
management computer system was a convicted felon, who had embezzled 
$465,361 from a Seattle law firm. 

Harris worries a lot about the U.S. election this year. One of the key 
vulnerabilities, she says, is the central tabulator, which could control a million 
or more votes in some counties. There will be thousands of election workers 
- including temporaries who may not even have had their backgrounds 
checked - with access to these computers, who she believes could change 
vote totals rapidly. "It isn't hacking an election," she says. "It's editing an 
election." 

Harris hopes to expand her small Black Box Voting organization into a 
consumer-protection agency for electronic voting and election procedures. 
There is clearly a need. When electronic voting was rolled out, with even less 
security than is in place now, groups like the League of Women Voters and 
the American Civil Liberties Union did little to warn about the dangers, and 
large public-interest organizations and foundations are still doing too little. 

The burden has been carried by a small group of public-minded citizens. Dr. 
Rebecca Mercuri of Harvard University, David Dill of Stanford University and 
Rubin have done heroic work in academia to investigate electronic voting. 
Organizations like the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, which found a 
significant flaw in the audit function in Florida voting machines, and the 
Computer Ate My Vote movement are also making a real difference. 

For now, Harris is continuing to work her leads. She has to follow up on an e-
mail message she picked up on the road in Arizona, from an elections judge 
in Santa Clara, California, saying there was a problem there. "Usually when 
it's an elections judge, it's something good," she says. 

Most disturbing of all, she has heard reports that one of the big machine 
manufacturers may be including a modem connection between a county's 
tabulating computer and the manufacturer's own headquarters, which could 
allow it to change vote totals from afar. 

"It's pretty much never-ending," Harris says with a sigh. 

Copyright © 2004 the International Herald Tribune 

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