Insurance, health interests fill Baucus' coffers

By Mike Dennison, Billings Gazette, State Bureau, published June 14

As Sen. Max Baucus has taken the lead on health reform legislation in the U.S. Senate, he also has become a leader in something else: campaign money received from health and insurance industry interests.

In the past six years, nearly one-fourth of every dime raised by the Montana Democrat and his political action committee has come from groups and individuals associated with drug companies, insurers, hospitals, medical supply firms, health service companies and other health professionals.

These donations total about $3.4 million, or $1,500 a day, every day, from January 2003 through 2008.

Baucus, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, which is drafting a major health care reform bill this month, insists that this cascade of money is not unduly influencing his work.

"No matter the issue, Max always puts Montana first," said his spokesman, Ty Matsdorf. "Max will continue to do what's right for our state, and groups like SEIU (a union representing thousands of health care workers) and AARP (a senior citizens' group) wouldn't line up in support of his health care reform effort if this wasn't true."

Baucus' office also lists numerous examples of how his proposed reforms are challenging the health care and insurance industries, such as requiring insurers to accept all customers, regardless of health condition.

Yet some reform activists and others who watch the political system say it's foolish to think this money doesn't hold some sway.

"When you spend so much of your time raising money, as members of Congress do, from those who have a compelling interest in the outcome of legislation, it has to change what you think about it, and the viewpoints that you have," said David Donnelly, director of Campaign Money Watch, a Washington, D.C., group that tracks money in politics. "It's just human nature. ... and members of Congress are human."

Advocates of national, public health insurance for all -- a proposal largely excluded from the health reform debate -- say their exclusion points to the power of moneyed interests in Congress.

"I'm convinced that this (money) has a profound influence," said Quentin Young, national coordinator for Physicians for a National Health Program. "Otherwise, how could Baucus, an otherwise respected and wise politician, say categorically that single-payer (national health insurance) is off the table?"

Only Baucus' Republican counterpart on the Finance Committee, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, rivals him in terms of percentage of funds from these business sectors.

The Gazette State Bureau examined fundraising data for Baucus, Grassley, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (who chairs the Senate Health Committee, which is drafting health reform legislation), the other two members of Montana's congressional delegation, and President Barack Obama.

The data are compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that tracks and sorts campaign donors by profession and industry. Here's a summary of what the State Bureau discovered:

From 2003 to 2008, the Baucus campaign and his Glacier PAC, which raises money and distributes it to other candidates, received 23 percent of their $14.8 million from health care and insurance interests.

The $3.4 million from these sectors includes $853,000 from pharmaceutical and health products, $851,000 from health professionals, $467,000 from hospitals and nursing homes, $466,000 from health service and HMO interests, and $784,000 from insurance.

The insurance sector money includes donations from all types of insurance company interests, including health insurance.

• Five of the top 10 specific donor sources for Baucus were drug companies, health insurers or health-related firms. For example, employees of Schering-Plough Corp., a major drug firm, gave him $92,000 over the period, more than any other single source.

• Grassley, the highest-ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, received 23.5 percent of his funds from health and insurance interests but a lesser dollar amount than Baucus ($2.3 million out of $9.8 million total funds).

• Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat and a longtime advocate of health care reforms, received only 7.5 percent of his funds from health and insurance interests, or about $1.2 million.

• Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., had minimal contributions from the health and insurance sectors.

• Obama, whose campaign raised a whopping $745 million in 2007 and 2008, received a relatively small share from health care interests ($19 million, or 2.5 percent) and insurance interests ($2 million, or 0.3 percent).

Baucus has been leading the charge on health care reform in the U.S. Senate since early 2008, holding numerous hearings and Finance Committee meetings on the issue. He released a lengthy "white paper" last November, outlining his reform ideas, and a major bill is expected to be introduced this month.

The general thrust of his proposals is to require all citizens to buy health insurance while also forcing the private insurance industry to stop practices that make coverage unaffordable for many. He supports subsidies to those who may have trouble affording insurance.

However, on a reform bitterly opposed by the insurance industry and most health care interests - a public, nonprofit insurance plan offered by the government - Baucus has been more ambivalent, saying he supports the idea but declining to specify in what form.

Baucus's office supplied nearly 20 examples of stances he has taken in direct opposition to drug, insurance and banking interests that have donated to his campaign funds.

He has supported importing lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada, allowing the government to negotiate for lower drug prices for Medicare recipients, funding research that would show when generic drugs are a better deal than brand-name drugs and reducing Medicare payments to private insurers by $13 billion over five years.

His office also points to an April 2007 Wall Street Journal article in which Baucus was quoted as telling medical industry contributors at a fundraiser, "You should worry about me coming after you."

Donnelly, the Campaign Money Watch director, says the proof on health care reform will be in the final product - and that he's not terribly optimistic.

Health and insurance interests are clearly targeting Baucus and his Finance Committee, which often have shown themselves to be receptive to their influence, he said.

"This debate on health care is a microcosm ... that even after a 'change' election, how much the special interests view (Washington) as their fiefdom," Donnelly said.

Supporters of national health insurance are even less optimistic, noting how Baucus, Obama and leaders in Congress won't even consider their proposal, which they believe would have broad public support.

"I can't think of any reason other than fidelity to your donors, to explain why they would keep us out of the debate," said Young of the physicians group. "Until we get campaign finance reform, it will be very difficult to do anything to challenge the status quo (in health care), and the status quo had better be challenged, because it's a very bad status quo."

Read more!

Voting Rights Activists Win Big Cases in Florida and Arizona

By Steven Rosenfeld
AlterNet

Friday 21 December 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/122107N.shtml

Go to Original

Arizona: Activists move closer to proving electronic vote count theft. Florida: A law disenfranchising thousands of new voters is blocked.

A series of court decisions this week supporting voting rights advocates in Florida and Arizona may bode well for more open and accountable elections in 2008.

That is because the cases involve major trend-setting aspects of elections: whether you can block new laws that disenfranchise thousands of new voters because of errors in state databases, and whether you can catch partisans who alter electronic vote counts. In both instances, courts sided with voting rights advocates against state and local officials.

The decisions are part of a pattern of recent rulings where draconian state election laws passed immediately after the 2004 election are being overturned. Those laws, passed by Republican-controlled legislatures to stop "voter fraud," or people impersonating other voters, affected voter registration drives and voter ID requirements. The other piece of this pattern is many states, and now a court in Arizona, are demanding new levels of accountability in paperless electronic voting systems.

"I'm optimistic," said Michael Slater of Project Vote, a national, nonpartisan voter registration and voting rights organization. "If you look at what's happening across the country, I see gains ... It's a story that's not being told."

In Florida, a federal judge blocked a law that prevented people from registering to vote if election officials could not match the person's Social Security or driver's license number to a state database. That ruling came after introducing evidence that as of October 2007, 14,000 applications were in danger of being rejected because of the law. A similar "no-match, no-vote" law was previously thrown out in Washington state.

"We think it is incredibly significant in that it is the second decision in the country that struck down a state statute that prevents the registration of applicants whose information in their application cannot be matched with either the Social Security database or Department of Motor Vehicle database," said Elizabeth Westfall, senior attorney with Advancement Project, a national voting rights law firm that worked with groups from Florida's African-American, Haitian-American and Latino communities.

"On the ground, we think this is really significant because the Florida statute that we were challenging was preventing Latino and African-American applicants from getting onto the voter roles," Westfall said. "The state presented no evidence that the statute was doing what it was designed to do. The state could not show it could prevent fraud in registration, but it was keeping applicants of color off the roll."

The voting rights groups successfully argued that the Social Security and driver's license databases contained errors - such as typos or a married name instead of a maiden name - when contrasted with voter registration applications, and those discrepancies should not be used to deny the right to vote. Other states have more permissive standards, allowing people to use bank statements, utility bills or other government documents to verify their identity when registering to vote.

Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning said he would appeal the ruling by U.S. District Judge Stephan Mickle. However Westfall said an appeal was not likely to be heard before the state's late January presidential primary. If upheld, she said the ruling could have a major impact on voter registration efforts before the 2008 presidential election.

"It will have a huge impact on 2008," she said.

That is because registration drives have been slowed in Florida because of another law passed after the 2004 election - which also was subsequently overturned in court - that imposed stiff new penalties and deadlines for voter registration drives. Florida's GOP-majority legislature passed those laws after grassroots groups successfully raised the state's minimum wage in a statewide ballot initiative campaign in 2004.

Thus, the 14,000 people who were being kept off Florida's voter roles as of October 2007 represent voter registration under a now-rejected tougher regime in an off-election year.

"Voter registration drives had been chilled prior to that injunction," Westfall said, referring to the voter drive restrictions. "Voter registration in 2008 will be much higher."

Electronic Voting Records to Be Released

In Arizona, whether Americans will be able to verify electronic vote counts in 2008's presidential election received a boost after a county judge ruled the local Democratic Party was entitled to see two electronic voting databases from the 2006 primary and general election. The ruling is in the county where the city of Tucson is located.

"It's very positive decision for us," said William Risner, attorney for the local Democrats and election integrity activists. "We certainly feel it is a victory. They made us fight and claw and stomped us to prevent us from getting where we've gotten, and we prevailed. And if we have to fight some more to get the rest of the way, we'll get there."

The ruling, by Pima County Superior Court Judge Michael Miller, is something of a mixed decision for the local Democrats and election integrity activists. That is because the party sued to get access to the electronic records of a 2006 transportation bond vote that it believed was electronically hacked - in order to win. Judge Miller, however, did not grant permission for the Democrats to look at the records in that race but instead granted permission for the party to examine the electronic records of two other votes. Thus, the judge affirmed that electronic voting records are public documents, but he delayed turning over the records in the controversial $2 billion transit bond vote.

"We still have a few wrinkles to work out," Risner said. "We need to get a finer point on when we can get the (transit bond) database in the future. But the judge specifically left it open for us to come back in and have a hearing, and the issues that will be looked at we will win on."

Still, John Brakey, co-founder of AUDIT-AZ, or Americans United for Democracy, Integrity, and Transparency in Elections, Arizona, said the 2006 primary election records that the court granted access to could reveal foul play - even though it was the not transit ballot measure that prompted the litigation.

In that primary, Brakey said county officials appear to have printed the "primary results" on the Saturday before Election Day and hours before a "robo-call," or computerized telephone campaign, attacked a Democratic state senate candidate, Ted Stevens, who opposed local developers. Stevens subsequently lost in the primary election.

"I would prefer to have the RTA, but I will take the primary of 2006," he said, referring to the $2 billion transit bond vote. "It will show us patterns ... We will get the primary. That is where they played some hanky panky."

Read more!

Stealing The Next Election Too

Here's a an interview of Mark Crispin Miller on the past years' stolen elections and the upcoming 2008 election. His recent book, Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform, is what motivated Bobby Kennedy Jr. to write his articles about Ohio's 2004 election fraud and other election fraud thoughout the country.

The interview starts in the first few minutes of this Gary Null radio program.

This program can be down loaded from iTunes - The Gary Null Show, The Gary Null Show - 12/19/07
or downloaded here:
http://media.podcastingmanager.com/86473-83093/Media/null121907.mp3

Here's more on the book, Fooled Again, from Amazon:

Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform (Paperback)
by Mark Crispin Miller, Professor, NY University

From Publishers Weekly
In this belated exposé—and clarion call for electoral reform—Miller (The Bush Dyslexicon) accuses George W. Bush and his "theocratic militants" of orchestrating electoral fraud to "hijack" the 2004 presidential race. Miller relies on original reporting, secondary sources and unadulterated outrage to make his case, marshaling evidence (much of it circumstantial) of Democratic voter disenfranchisement, mysterious computer snafus and discrepancies between exit poll results and official vote counts. He is especially critical of the press for what he describes as silence in the face of Bush's and Cheney's denials of fraud. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is another target of Miller's ire, for ignoring warnings of coordinated Republican plans to cheat and for doing nothing to contest the vote counts, especially in swing states Ohio and Florida. "Election-stealing" in Florida in particular presages a dark future for the entire nation: "a system built specifically to disenfranchise an aroused and even militant majority, and to do so without leaving any traces." Though Miller's sometimes unclear sourcing puts the burden on readers to separate fact from hearsay, he gathers enough well-documented evidence that anyone who cares about fair play should find this book revelatory. (Nov.)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Book Description
The story the national media refused to cover: the massive evidence of frauds and improprieties that swung the 2004 presidential election to George W. Bush and why it can happen again.

In Fooled Again, renowned media critic Mark Crispin Miller argues that it wasn't "moral values" that swung the 2004 presidential race-it was theft. A huge array of anomalies, improper practices, and blatant violations of the law in state after state all happened to swing in the Bush ticket's favor.

Fooled Again not only gives abundant evidence of theft, but also describes the mind-set among both the major parties and the media that could easily allow it to happen again in 2006 and 2008.

---

A Devastating Indictment of the American Electoral System, December 26, 2005
By Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fooled Again (Hardcover)
Andrew Gumbel opens his book, STEAL THIS VOTE, with a stunning indictment of the American electoral process from ex-President Jimmy Carter. Asked if the Carter Center's "widely respected international election monitoring team" would ever considering monitoring an American election, Carter bluntly declined. "Not only would the voting system be regarded as a failure, he said, but the shortcomings were so egregious [they] would never agree to monitor an [American] election in the first place....'The American political system wouldn't measure up to any sort of international standards...'"

In FOOLED AGAIN, Mark Crispin Miller analyzes the 2004 Presidential election and finds that President Carter was indeed correct in his assessment. Through his overview of the election results and his detailed analysis of the outcome in Florida and Ohio, he not only demonstrates how badly broken our national electoral system is, he provides more than enough evidence to suggest that our current President, George W. Bush, has in fact stolen two elections in the last five years. Why were reported election results so substantially at odds with the same day's exit polling (a first in American history)? Why were reported election results so substantially at odds with early voter returns in so many States, also a result without precedent? Why did Kerry's performance in key Democratic districts actually decline from Gore's, despite thousands of Democratic voter registrations and the relative absence of Ralph Nader from 2004's race? And what are we to make of Republican Congressman Peter King's assertion in the summer of 2003 that the 2004 election was already over? How did he know Bush would win? "It's all over but the counting," he answered. "And we'll take care of the counting." And so they did.

The examples are detailed, numerous, and specific: widespread and systematic pre-election disenfranchisement by local Republican election officials, failure to register Democratic voters, distributing absentee ballots late or incorrectly, spreading false and misleading information, refusing to register Democrats to vote, manipulating the availability of working voting machines to favor Republican precincts, intimidating voters on college campuses and at the polls, undersupplying provisional ballots in Democratic districts, throwing away Democratic votes, manipulating paperless electronic voting machines manufactured by Republican supporters, and virtually prohibiting millions of overseas absentee ballots from being counted. Miller points out that the Republican Party not only engaged in all of these vote suppression tactics and more, they simultaneously asserted repeatedly that the Democratic Party was in fact the one that was engaging in the same underhanded behaviors they were perpetrating!

Miller takes time out from his explication of events before and during the election to psychoanalyze the Republican Party's behavior. He contends that the more fanatical elements of the Party rationalize their own behaviors by projecting them onto the Democrats. By demonizing the dark forces of "the Other," they justify the absolute correctness of their own misdeeds. They see the election not as politics, but as an apocalyptic battle of dark and light, good and evil. Under such a "world view," any actions, no more how immoral, unethical, or outright illegal, are justifiable in the name of preserving Republican rule.

Mr. Miller also reserves much of his condemnation for the mainstream media. The major media organizations have underreported and underinvestigated, ignoring both small stories as well as the broader pattern. They have been too quick to cave to the blathering roar from the Right, cowed into acquiescence rather than serving the commonweal in their watchdog capacity. Why, for example, are Americans almost utterly ignorant of the January, 2005 Conyers Report ("Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio?") At the same time, the Republican Noise Machine agitates immediately against anyone who has the temerity to suggest the election was tainted in the slightest manner, labeling them as cranks, loonies, conspiracy nuts, sore losers, and the like. As Miller suggests, the citizens of Europe are better informed about the truth of our national elections than we are.

FOOLED AGAIN is a stunning indictment of the current, win-at-all-costs Republican Party, the American electoral process, and the blatant, couch potato indifference of American citizens that has made us the laughingstock of the Western world. What happened in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections is a national disgrace, an embarrassment of colossal magnitude that we are too blind to see. Miller's "true life incidents" from tiny Jacksonville, Oregon in his book's Appendix are eye-openers that everyone should read if they want to understand what's really taking place in this country today. It's enough to make you cry. Hopefully it will infuriate you to stand up and do something, because it will indeed happen again in 2006 and 2008, and on and on until we put a stop to it and take our country back from the right-wing fanatics who've hijacked it.

Read FOOLED AGAIN - it's your civic duty.

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Inside a GOP Effort to Rig the 2002 New Hampshire Elections

By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/122107C.shtml

Go to Original

Tuesday 18 December 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/122107C.shtml

Washington - A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state's tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.

Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will publish next month, also accused the Republican Party of trying to hang all the blame for a scandal on him as part of an "old-school cover-up."

Raymond's book, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative," offers a raw, inside glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all costs.

McClatchy obtained an advance copy of the book.

The 2002 New Hampshire Senate race, in which GOP Rep. John Sununu edged Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen by 19,000 votes, was among several targeted by Republicans seeking to win control of the U.S. Senate.

Raymond said those who've tried to make him the fall guy for the New Hampshire scheme failed to recognize that e-mails, phone records and other evidence documented the complicity of a top state GOP official and the Republican National Committee's northeast regional director.

Both men were later convicted of charges related to the phone harassment, along with Raymond and an Idaho phone bank operator. Defense lawyers have since won a retrial for James Tobin, the former regional director for both the RNC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

A lawyer for Tobin didn't respond to phone messages.

GOP committees have paid Washington law firms more than $6 million to defend Tobin and to fight a Democratic civil suit against the party. Raymond, himself a former RNC official, said in the book and an interview that he believes that the scandal reaches higher.

"Any tactic that didn't pass the smell test would never see the light of day without, - at the very least, the approval of an RNC attorney," he wrote.

Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the New Hampshire Democratic party, said that phone records obtained in the civil suit showed that Tobin made 22 calls to the White House political office in the 24 hours before and after the jamming.

Twomey said Tobin refused to testify about the calls, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Asked about Raymond's book, RNC spokesman Danny Diaz said that "it would be hard to find two less credible individuals" than Raymond and his co-author, Ian Spiegelman, who lost his job as a New York Post gossip columnist for sending a threatening e-mail accusing a source of trying to plant a fake story. The RNC also distributed material emphasizing that Raymond had a reputation for bare-knuckled politics and dirty tricks.

Raymond, 40, who served three months in jail last year, said he earned a graduate degree in political management at New York's Baruch University solely to make money off politics, and it made no difference to him whether he was a Republican or a Democrat.

He soon climbed the GOP ranks to get jobs with the RNC and the GOP's senatorial committee, before borrowing $250,000 from a group headed by former RNC chairman Haley Barbour in 2001 to set up a consulting firm specializing in phone bank services.

One of his tactics, Raymond said, was angering union households with calls in which people with Latin-sounding voices talked favorably about a rival candidate's support for the North American Free Trade Agreement. And he used the voice of an angry black man, posing as a Democrat, to stir up "fear, racism, bigotry" in white neighborhoods.

Shortly before the November election, New Hampshire Republicans hired his Alexandria, Va.-based consulting firm, GOP Marketplace, for $15,600 to barrage Democrats' phone lines on Election Day with 800 hang-up calls per hour amid the tight Senate race between Sununu and Shaheen.

The tactic was aimed at disrupting efforts by five Democratic offices and a firefighters' union in Manchester, N.H., to shuttle voters to the polls. The state Republican Party chairman, John Dowd, halted the calls after the first hour, saying he feared that the operation was illegal.

Raymond said it was Tobin who first phoned him 2 1/2 weeks before the election and asked if he could jam Democrats' phone lines, connecting him with Charles McGee, the executive director of the New Hampshire GOP.

However, he said, when he phoned Tobin after Sununu's 19,000-vote election victory to tell him that a Manchester, N.H., police officer was looking into the scheme, Tobin responded, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Raymond said he was seething with anger in the ensuing weeks as he read news reports of McGee denying knowledge of the scheme.

In early 2003, Raymond recalled, the state GOP wrote to demand its money back.

"They were going to throw me under the bus," Raymond wrote, "but first they wanted to check my pockets to see if there was any cash there."

Raymond and McGee pleaded guilty to harassment charges. Their cooperation with investigators led to Tobin's conviction.

Raymond predicted that political dirty tricks "will only get tougher, nastier, more brutal" in coming elections.

As for his three months in a Pennsylvania prison, he wrote: "After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn't really any great ordeal."

Read more!

Governor backs election overhaul in '08; critics say no way

Tuesday, December 18, 2007 3:14 AM

By Mark Niquette

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

The Hot Issue

Do you think Ohio should switch to all paper ballots to improve voting security?
Vote now

The votes are in

Key conclusions of a security assessment of Ohio voting systems by both corporate and academic computer experts conducting independent, parallel testing:

MicroSolved Inc.

• All three vendors (providing machines used in Ohio) have "failed to adopt, implement and follow industry-standard best practices in the development of the system."
• Experts were able to identify vulnerabilities in all voting systems that could allow attackers to introduce an infection or malicious programming (malware) into the system.
• Ohio election officials have failed to establish or implement clear and effective security policies and processes, and many counties do not have the resources to seek out security solutions on their own.

Academic teams

• All state voting systems "failed to adequately address important threats against election data and processes," including a "failure to adequately defend an election from insiders, to prevent virally infected software ... and to ensure cast votes are appropriately protected and accurately counted."
• They allow the "pervasive misapplication of security technology," including failure to follow "standard and well-known practices for the use of cryptography, key and password management, and security hardware."
• They exhibit "a visible lack of trustworthy auditing capability," resulting in difficulty discovering when a security attack occurs or how to isolate or recover from an attack when detected.
• Software maintenance practices are "deeply flawed," leading to "fragile software in which exploitable crashes, lockups, and failures are common in normal use."

Source: Ohio secretary of state

Ohio needs to make changes to its election system in time for the presidential election next fall, Gov. Ted Strickland says, even as some county elections officials and others worry it's impossible to do that and still have a smooth election.

Responding to a study last week that concluded all voting systems used in Ohio have critical security flaws, Strickland said yesterday that although there might not be enough time to address the findings before the March 4 primary, the state must act by the time voters go to the polls in the fall.

"This country has gone through two presidential elections where there have been, I believe, legitimate concerns raised about the fairness and the integrity of those elections," the governor said. "I don't think we should go through a third presidential election and have those questions out there."

When asked whether he thinks the current voting machines should be replaced, as Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has proposed, Strickland said, "Unless (the problems) can be corrected in a way that is verifiable by objective analyzers, I think they ought to go."

Brunner has proposed moving to a system in which all voters mark a paper ballot that is counted at a central location. She also recommends scrapping voting in precincts and establishing regional vote centers with five to 10 precincts each where voters can go to cast their ballots starting 15 days before an election.

But some county officials said although they want to improve elections long term, there realistically is not enough time to train poll workers, educate voters and take the other steps needed to incorporate major changes in the short term.

"The biggest thing we have to do is prepare for the election," said Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections and president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials.

Keith Cunningham, the Allen County elections chief and a past president of the association, was more blunt.

"It just strikes me as totally off the wall to suggest that between now and November, we change Ohio's voting system this dramatically," said Cunningham, who also sits on the board of advisers of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Some critics also disagree with Brunner's recommendations, saying they are the wrong moves to make in response to the report.

They're advocating a middle ground, possibly with stricter security policies that are consistent statewide, more recounts and other short-term measures as a way to address the security risks identified in the study.

Brunner said yesterday that her proposals were reviewed by a bipartisan panel of 12 county election officials. She thinks her recommendations to Strickland and the legislature need to be followed "if we want to have the best, most reliable election."

But she also said she is aware of the concerns and is "taking that into full account and keeping my mind open so that we proceed with the best interest of the voters in mind."

Brunner said she has spoken with Attorney General Marc Dann about having forensic scientists at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation analyze possible ways to adapt existing machines to address any flaws.

"I'm clearly open to different ways to do it and concerns of the public, the legislature, the election officials, the voting activists," Brunner said. "It has to be a collaborative effort."

Read more!

Wasserman: 2004 Election Was Stolen Confirmed By New Ohio Voting Report

Harvey Wasserman on New Ohio Voting Report: “The 2004 Election Was Stolen… Finally We Have Irrefutable Confirmation”

December 17, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/17/harvey_wasserman_on_new_ohio_voting

Ohio’s top election official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, announced Friday that the voting systems that decided the 2004 election in Ohio were rife with “critical security failures.” We speak with Harvey Wasserman, author of “What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election.” [includes rush transcript]

LISTEN WATCH - Real Video Stream, Real Audio Stream, MP3 Download, More...

Guest:

Harvey Wasserman, senior editor of the Ohio-based freepress.org and author of “What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election.”

AMY GOODMAN: Harvey Wasserman, I wanted to switch gears—

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —and ask you about voting. Ohio’s top election official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, announced on Friday the voting systems that decided the 2004 election in Ohio were rife with “critical security failures.” You and Bob Fitrakis have reported extensively on the 2004 presidential vote in Ohio, your most recent book, What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election. Your response to the report? What did you think was most important in her findings?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, our initial response was “Yippee!” I mean, they finally, after all these years of us banging our—you know, we’re local boys. We live in Ohio, in Columbus. And we saw the election of 2004 stolen right in front of our faces. And we reported it extensively, and everybody laughed at us. And they said, “Oh, this couldn’t happen in America.” And we documented it in How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008. We documented scores of ways that this election was stolen. And we pointed out a myriad flaws that we saw right in our own neighborhoods, of what was done to keep people of color and young people from voting and to rig the vote count.

I mean, the servers for the computation of the Ohio vote count were in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee that houses servers for the Republican National Committee. The programmers who did the stuff for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State, were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration. I mean, it’s amazing.

So, here we have—finally we have a Democratic Secretary of State, who took—spent $1.9 million of state money, hired Battelle, which is not exactly a progressive organization, to study it, and found that every single method of voting, pretty much, except for, you know, marking paper ballots, was corrupted in the 2004 election. They, you know—

AMY GOODMAN: Coming up with opposite results?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Any—basically what she says was, you could have manipulated the 2004 election results with a Blackberry. You know, the Conyers report basically said all you had to do was drive by with a Wi-Fi. And she comes up and says there are very simple ways the 2004 election could have been flipped just like that. And that’s what we said since 2004. Look, this election could have—

We are guaranteed certain that John Kerry won Ohio in 2004. The election—the exit polls showed him winning. There was a flip of 6.7% in the exit polls from the official vote count. You know, my favorite, in Youngstown and in Franklin County in Columbus, in the inner city, people went in, and they hit touch-screen machines, and they pushed “Kerry,” and “Bush” lit up. How do you invent that? How do you make that up? We had votes that were taken away in a county in southeastern Ohio. They proclaimed a Homeland Security alert. Nobody knows where this came from. The FBI, the Homeland Security agency, they never called a Homeland Security alert, but suddenly—

AMY GOODMAN: You mean, they locked down the place.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: They locked down. They kept out the media. Suddenly the ballots disappeared.

And most importantly—and this, Jennifer Brunner did not discuss—I am party to a lawsuit. We filed a civil rights lawsuit. We won. The federal election law says the ballots were supposed—had to be protected, under federal law. We got an overlapping decision from a federal judge to preserve, for our civil rights suit, the preservation of these ballots. Fifty-six of eighty-eight counties in Ohio destroyed their election ballots, destroyed all their election records, or most of them, making a pure recount impossible. This is in direct violation of a federal court injunction and standing federal law. So far, nobody has been prosecuted. What kind of country are we living in?

Now, the Secretary of State comes out with a $1.9 million report and says that all the electronic methods of counting the votes that were used in Ohio in 2004 were easily—“easily,” that was her word—flipped. Anybody with a simple electronic machine could have gone in there and turned the election, and we know it was done, because the Republican Secretary of State was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. How do you top that?

AMY GOODMAN: Ken Blackwell.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Ken Blackwell, who’s gone.

AMY GOODMAN: And what’s he doing now?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: He’s out running a multimillion-dollar media operation, which is about to benefit from the FCC here. But—

AMY GOODMAN: The vote of Kevin Martin tomorrow.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yes, which you’re going to talk about in a minute. But the fact is that he is not hurting, exactly, but he was defeated.

AMY GOODMAN: What company is he running?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: I’m not sure what company Ken Blackwell is with now. It could be Blackwater. But at any rate, everything we said has been confirmed. You know, it’s a sorry statement.

AMY GOODMAN: What does this mean for the 2008 elections?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: It means that Jennifer Brunner—and also Debra Bowen, you know, in California, has come to similar conclusions and disqualified the electronic voting machines used there. These secretaries of state, if we’re going to have an actual election in 2008 that’s going to be even reasonably fair, they’re going to have a lot of work to do. They have to throw out all the electronic voting machines that were bought with federal money under the Help America Vote Act—

AMY GOODMAN: Made by?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: You know, after the 2000 debacle, Congress comes in and they say we’re going to solve this problem. So Bob Ney, congressman from Ohio, now in federal prison, says, “OK, everybody has to buy touch-screen voting machines.” You know, and he gets money from the touch-screen voting machine companies, winds up in jail. And meanwhile, Ohio spent $100 million, taxpayer money, buying these voting machines. And now Jennifer Brunner—

AMY GOODMAN: From which company?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, from Diebold, from ES&S and Hart—

AMY GOODMAN: Diebold, an Ohio company.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yeah, Diebold has renamed themselves, but Hart InterCivic, all these guys through—who worked with Jack Abramoff, also in prison. And $100 million of our hard-earned tax money went to buy these machines, and now the Secretary of State says, hey, these can’t work. They can be flipped like that. And we knew this, and we reported this.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you saying our elections are being run from the prisons?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, they should—the guys who have been running the elections should be in prison, let’s put it that way. But we know—I will guarantee you right here—after all the—you know, I grew up in Columbus, and we saw this election stolen in 2004. And, you know, whether John Kerry should have been president or—well, he won. And Al Gore won in 2000. I mean, where were these guys to stand up for what we were—you know, we were viewed as fringe guys. We never got the slightest bit of help from the Democratic Party. They were apparently too embarrassed to point out that they—

AMY GOODMAN: They’re not talking about these issues now.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: No, they’re not at all. And, you know, Jennifer Brunner, we have to give her a lot of credit. The biggest opposition we got to pointing out that the 2004 election was stolen has come from the Democrats, because—who knows? I can’t even begin to psychoanalyze them.

But the 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was flawed.

AMY GOODMAN: Harvey Wasserman, I want to thank you very much for joining us.

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Author of a number of books, as well senior editor of the Ohio-based freepress.org and editor of nukefree.org.

Read more!

How They Could Steal the Election This Time

by RONNIE DUGGER
The Nation

[from the August 16, 2004 issue]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040816/dugger

On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.

The result could be the failure of an American presidential election and its collapse into suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the kitchen. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary, has written, "Automated voting machines will be easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses." Senator John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March, "I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted." Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP convention that "a million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election," Kerry says his campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes" [see Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes," May 17].

The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire.

About a third of the votes, 36 million, will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless, direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote directly on a touch-screen. Unlike receipted transactions at the neighborhood ATM, however, you get no paper record of your vote. Since, as a government expert says, "the ballot is embedded in the voting equipment," there is no voter-marked paper ballot to be counted or recounted. Voting on the DRE, you never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one can tell what a computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election official "can't watch the bits inside," says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International and a world authority on computer-based risks.

The four major election corporations count votes with voting-system source codes. These are kept strictly secret by contract with the local jurisdictions and states using the machines. That secrecy makes it next to impossible for a candidate to examine the source code used to tabulate his or her own contest. In computer jargon a "trapdoor" is an opening in the code through which the program can be corrupted. David Stutsman, an Indiana lawyer whose suits in the 1980s exposed a trapdoor that was being used by the nation's largest election company at that time, puts it well: "The secrecy of the ballot has been turned into the secrecy of the vote count."

According to Dr. David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford, all elections conducted on DREs "are open to question." Challenging those who belittle the danger of fraud, Dill says that with trillions of dollars at stake in the battle for control of Congress and the presidency, potential attackers who might seek to fix elections include "hackers, candidates, zealots, foreign governments and criminal organizations," and "local officials can't stop it."

Last fall during a public talk on "The Voting Machine War" for advanced computer-science students at Stanford, Dill asked, "Why am I always being asked to prove these systems aren't secure? The burden of proof ought to be on the vendor. You ask about the hardware. 'Secret.' The software? 'Secret.' What's the cryptography? 'Can't tell you because that'll compromise the secrecy of the machines.'... Federal testing procedures? 'Secret'! Results of the tests? 'Secret'! Basically we are required to have blind faith."

The integrity of the vote-counting inside DREs depends on audit logs and reports they print out, but as Neumann says, these are "not real audit trails" because they are themselves riggable. The DREs randomly store three to seven complete sets of alleged duplicates of each voter's ballot, and sets of these images can be printed out after the election and manually counted. The companies claim that satisfies the requirement in the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that "a manual audit capacity" must be available. But as informed computer scientists unanimously agree, if the first set of ballot images is corrupted, they all are. I asked Robert Boram, the chief engineer who invented a DRE sold by the RF Shoup voting-systems company, if he could rig his DRE's three sets of ballot images. "Give me a month," he replied.

The United States therefore faces the likelihood that about three out of ten of the votes in the national election this November will be unverifiable, unauditable and unrecountable. The private election companies and local and state election officials, when required to carry out recounts of elections conducted inside the DREs, will order the computers to spit out second printouts of the vote totals and the computers' wholly electronic, fakable "audit trail." The companies and most of the election officials will then tell the voters that the second printouts are "recounts" that prove the vote-counting was "100 percent accurate," even though a second printout is not a recount.

HAVA was supposed to solve election problems revealed in 2000; instead, it has made the situation worse. Under the act the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), appointed by President Bush, is supposed to set standards for the vote-counting process, but four months before the election the new agency had only seven full-time staff members. On June 17 the EAC sent $861 million to twenty-five states, mainly to buy computerized machines for which no new technical standards have been set. Its just-appointed fifteen-member technical standards committee does not include more than one leading critic of computerized vote-counting.

Rather than completely testing the vote-counting codes, there is some secretive testing of systems by three private companies that are chosen by the pro-voting-business National Association of State Election Directors. The companies consult obsolete pro-company and completely voluntary standards promulgated by the Federal Election Commission and get paid by the very companies whose equipment is being tested. The three private companies, speciously called Independent Testing Authorities, together constitute a Potemkin village to falsely assure the states and the voters of the security of the systems. Often their work is misrepresented as "federal testing." The states then test and "certify" the systems, and the local jurisdictions put on dog-and-pony-show "logic and accuracy tests," which are not capable of discovering hidden codes that would change vote totals.

"The system is much more out of control than anyone here may be willing to admit," Dr. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University and for many years an examiner of voting machines for Texas and Pennsylvania, told a House panel on June 24. "There's virtually no control over how software enters a voting machine." Shamos told another House panel on July 20, "There are no adequate standards for voting machines, nor any effective testing protocols."

Hackable computer codes control vote-counting in all three kinds of computerized systems that will be used again in the 2004 elections: the ballotless DREs, on which some 36 million will vote; optical-scan systems that electronically tally paper ballots marked by the voters, on which 40 million people will vote; and punch-card ballots, also tabulated by computerized card-readers, which gained notoriety in 2000 and are still used by 22 million voters. (Another 16 million still vote on the old lever machines, about a million on hand-counted paper ballots.)

Florida 2000 was universally misunderstood and mischaracterized in the press as a crisis of hanging chads on the punch-card ballots. The serious issue, then as now, was embodied in the explicit though all but unreported position that James Baker, George W. Bush's field commander in Florida, staked out to stop the recounting of votes. The computerized vote-counting systems, Baker declared, are "precision machinery" that both count and recount votes more accurately than people do. Now, with Senator Kerry demanding recountability, an ominously intensifying partisan split has developed in Washington over whether to have a voter-verified paper trail and, when necessary, to conduct recounts with it.

Torment in Washington

Though no broad citizens' movement has formed against computerized vote-counting, a nationwide backlash against unverifiable paperless voting has. The paper ballots used in the op-scan and punch-card systems already provide a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). The principal proposed security safeguard for the DRE system was invented, but not patented, ten years ago by computer scientist Rebecca Mercuri, now a research fellow at Harvard. In her solution, after voters record their choices on the touch-screen, they confirm them on a paper ballot that appears under glass and then push a button to cast the vote, causing the machine to deposit the paper ballot in a box that will hold it for recounting if that is ordered. The printer for the paper ballots for each voting machine should cost about $50; the total add-on could be $300-$600. Many jurisdictions also have the alternative of expanding or acquiring the relatively inexpensive optical-scan systems or other systems already in place that create paper trails.

In the US Senate seven Democrats and the one Independent are co-sponsoring a bill by Senators Bob Graham and Hillary Clinton to require paper trails on DREs by November, with a loophole for jurisdictions whose officials deem it to be technologically impossible. Clinton told the press that without a voter-verified paper trail GOP-leaning corporations might program voting machines to help Republicans steal elections [see sidebar, page 16]. In an interview in his hideaway office in the Capitol, Graham told me that he regards his and Clinton's bill as so obviously needed that it's "a no-brainer." The absence of a paper trail on the DREs could endanger "the legitimacy" of November's election, Graham said.

New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt introduced a House bill more than a year ago requiring a paper trail on DREs. It has 149 co-sponsors, including a few prominent Republicans. Holt says, "The verification has to be something that the voter herself or himself has to do"; without that, "we will never have a truly secure election." Holt's bill has opened up a partisan divide in the House. The chairman of the committee to which his bill is assigned, Ohio Republican Bob Ney, informed Holt that he is against the bill and would not allow a hearing on it. A few days later Graham and Holt wrote their fellow members of Congress that "without an independent, voter-verified paper trail, we will be able only to guess whether votes are accurately counted." Last month Ney relented and scheduled two hearings. Holt plans to offer his bill as an amendment to the Treasury appropriation after Congress returns from its August recess. Graham is still mulling his strategy.

The principal stated objection to a DRE paper trail comes from some spokespersons for the disabled, who characterize it as a step back from the touch-screen's improved accessibility and privacy. Many election officials, whose work paper ballots make both auditable and much more extensive, object variously that the attachment will add costs, that the printers might fail and that paper ballots can be stolen or counterfeited and sometimes produce somewhat different totals.

Leading citizen organizations have been split. Initially the League of Women Voters, concerned to minimize invalidly cast ballots, opposed the paper trail, but there was a revolt in the chapters and a petition for the paper trail was signed by 800 members. At the league's June convention, after a fight led by Barbara Simons, past president of the Association of Computer Machinery, the league switched sides, endorsing voting systems that are "recountable." Common Cause, placing the highest value on insuring that every vote is counted and can be recounted if necessary, has been among the leaders of the fight for the paper trail.

Around the States

Not surprisingly, the starkest resistance to the voter-verified paper trail comes from Florida, where more than half the citizens will have to vote on touch-screen systems in November. The President's brother, Governor Jeb Bush, and Jeb's Secretary of State, Glenda Hood, express unqualified confidence in the trustworthiness of the DRE systems and militantly oppose providing a paper-ballot trail for them. Hood has denied that the electronic voting machines can be tampered with in the software, saying: "The touch-screen machines are not computers. You'd have to go machine by machine, all over the state." A spokeswoman for her says flatly that "a manual recount is unnecessary."

This past spring a powerful state senator proposed to make it illegal to recount votes in the DRE systems, but she backed down when called on it by activists. Then Ed Kast, director of Hood's division of elections, who has since resigned, sought to achieve the same purpose by diktat, issuing a formal ruling that, despite the extant state law requiring recounts under certain circumstances, supervisors of elections do not need to recount DRE ballots. The ACLU and other groups have sued to invalidate that ruling; a spokesperson for the state Republican Party excoriates the suit as a left-wingers' "ploy to undermine voters' confidence."

Representative Robert Wexler, a Democrat from the southern tier of the three big counties on the Atlantic, which for election scandals is to Florida what Cook County is to Illinois, sued state and county election officials in state and federal court to require the VVPAT on DREs. He argues that allowing some voters to have manual recounts but not others violates the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore compelling equal treatment of voters (although the majority specified it was only for that election). To date his suits, opposed at every step by the Bush Administration in Tallahassee, have gotten nowhere. If he loses, half the voters in Florida, those voting on DREs, will be denied the manual recounts that the other half can have.

The Bush forces in Florida geared up for another purge of released felons from the voter rolls. Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections for Leon County, admits with shame that the state's felon purge in 2000 resulted in more than 50,000 legal voters being disenfranchised. The state elections division identified 47,000 more suspected felons, a list disproportionately heavy with blacks, and asked that local election supervisors purge them. The Bush people refused to make the list public, but were ordered to do so by a judge. Only then was it discovered that the list excluded felons who are Hispanic. In Florida Hispanics tend to vote Republican. This dandy error was "absolutely unintentional," the Bush people said--while abandoning the then indefensible list. Miami Herald columnist Jim Defede wrote that Hood--an "amazing incompetent or the leader of a frightening conspiracy"--must resign.

"What are we going to do if there's a close race?" Wexler asked in the Orlando Sentinel. "The voting records of these machines will have disappeared in cyberspace." He told me angrily: "Apparently their motives are to suppress the vote in Florida in a number of different ways. They are refusing a paper trail on a computerized voting machine. They are again preparing on the felons--they've got a new and improved process. I don't trust 'em to do the right thing." This summer, Representative Alcee Hastings, whose district includes Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, exclaimed, "Any way we cut it, these people are going to try to steal this election."

The Miami-Dade Reform Coalition asked Jeb Bush to audit the touch-screen machines this summer. Bush's spokesperson rebuffed that as "an accusation du jour." Undeterred, Democratic US Senator Bill Nelson of Florida demanded, "Why not do an audit when so much is at stake?... The national election for President could ride on the results coming out of Florida." Senator Nelson even sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft asking that the federal government audit the machines.

This past spring in California, Diebold systems malfunctioned in two counties, disenfranchising thousands of voters. Secretary of State Kevin Shelley discovered that the voting systems in seventeen counties in the state had not been certified, as required by law. After two days of tumultuous hearings in Sacramento, during which high-level election officials called the company's behavior "despicable" and accused its officials of lying, Shelley prohibited the use of Diebold's systems in four counties, the first time this has happened in the United States. Shelley, who has said to the Los Angeles Times that he doesn't want to be "the Katherine Harris of the West Coast," also made the certification of voting systems in ten more counties dependent on their adoption of twenty-three security improvements that he specified. One of these requires those counties to let citizens vote on paper if they want to, but Shelley flinched at requiring a DRE paper trail this year. Four counties and advocates of the disabled sued Shelley to block his actions, but a federal judge ruled he had the authority and had used it reasonably.

Two secretaries of state, Republicans Dean Heller in Nevada and Matt Blunt in Missouri, have required that DREs in their states have a voter-verified paper ballot for the November election. Sequoia is producing the Mercuri VVPAT on demand for Nevada, and several small election companies, including Avante and AccuPoll, have built Mercuri attachments, won their certification and are ready to sell them to local jurisdictions now. Among the thirty-one other states with DRE voting systems in some of their jurisdictions, as of early summer legislatures in five had rejected requiring the paper trail, another nine were considering such a requirement and seventeen had no such proposal before them.

In swing-state Ohio, under procedures approved by Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, thirty-one counties decided they would not use paperless DREs in November, and three said they would. Blackwell then ruled that because of unsolved security problems, none of them will. In Maryland, which imposed Diebold DREs statewide in 2002, the Board of Elections ruled that paper ballots cast in the March primary by citizens who did not want to vote on the DREs would not be counted. That's now in the courts. The Campaign for Verifiable Voting presented 13,000 signatures for a paper trail and called for the resignation of the state elections chief, Linda Lamone, who, sitting tight, said, "I think everything is going to be just fine." In Texas, Representative Ciro Rodriguez, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was renominated by 150 votes until 419 "found votes" made challenger Henry Cuellar the winner. Rodriguez is contesting the outcome, but since the voting in Bexar County (San Antonio) was conducted on DREs, the votes there can't be recounted. "There's no paper trail to verify what was put in," Cuellar said.

A paper trail will not assure that elections won't be stolen in the DREs. "The only thing the VVPAT will do is give us the ability to prove that it happened," says Roxanne Jekot of Cumming, Georgia, a self-taught computer specialist who has become one of the most effective activists against paperless computerized voting. "There is nothing to deter that single outsourced information-technology worker [from manipulating the machine]. Nobody can prove that he did it."

Many states require recounts if an outcome in a computer-counted race is within a margin of less than 1 percent or a half or quarter percent, but that invites crooked programmers, if any such be at work, to jimmy their rigged outcomes to fall outside the recount-triggering spreads.

Furthermore, a paper trail isn't an audit unless the ballots are recounted. Even before the advent of touch-screen systems, obtaining actual recounts of elections was becoming more difficult. Election officials, election companies and state laws have often combined to block recounts or discourage narrowly losing candidates from getting them. Incredibly, in 2002 the legislature in Nebraska, the home state of Election Systems & Software, outlawed recounts of the paper ballots in the ES&S optical-scan computerized ballot-counting systems that tally 85 percent or so of the votes in that state. Colorado requires that for elections conducted on DRE machines, recounts must be conducted on the very same machines.

In Alabama two years ago, during a controversy over an election for governor conducted mostly on op-scan machines, Attorney General Bill Pryor, backing up the sheriff in one questioned county, ruled officially that under state law anyone recounting the ballots would be subject to arrest. This year President Bush, circumventing Senate hearings, elevated Pryor to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in a recess appointment.

'It's Really a Matter of Trust'

Confident, friendly, but officious, Jesse Durazo, the registrar of voters of Santa Clara County in the heart of the Silicon Valley, is typical of hundreds of local election officials who berate "the academics." This past spring, despite dire warnings from Professors Neumann of SRI and Dill of Stanford, Durazo led his county into buying 5,500 of the Sequoia AVC Edge DREs at $3,000 each ($20 million, figuring in everything). The anteroom of his county election headquarters is festooned with cheery signs such as one saying Voting Just Got Easier. He is delighted that DREs will facilitate voting by those who speak a foreign language (including Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese).

Durazo said that the AVC had first been approved by the federal government (which is not correct) and then certified by the California secretary of state. He said that providing a voter-verified ballot would open the way to "unlimited error," while computer error, in contrast, can be "quantified." As for Trojan horses smuggling in corrupt instructions, he said in a confident tone, "I don't have those fears." Stealing votes in the computers is next to impossible, he insisted, because local ballots are set up at the last minute, there are a large number of races and ballot initiatives in any one election, and the order of the candidates' positions on the ballots is rotated in different precincts.

The three sets of all the votes, kept in the computer, provide the recount, he said. Are those not just copies of each other, automatically made? Durazo exclaimed in high dudgeon: "It's a redundant perfection!... It starts with the premise that the information in the system is correct."

Alfred Gonzales, Durazo's Filipino outreach specialist for voters who speak Tagalog, demonstrated the AVC, a sign on the top of which said Try It Out Today. No More Punchcards! I voted on it and asked Gonzales how I knew for sure that my vote would be counted. "Because it will be registered in the machine, saved in the hard drive, and put on a cartridge," he said. "At the end of the day it will be in the printout of the total." How did he know the machine would do that? "Because it has been federally certified!" he said. "There is fool-proof security." Well, one more thing, I asked. There's no ballot--what if you need a recount? "It's really a matter of trusting the machine," Gonzales said. Patting the AVC gently, he intoned with pride, "It's really a matter of trust."

"These companies are basically saying 'trust us,'" Rebecca Mercuri told the New York Times. "Why should anybody trust them? That's not the way democracy is supposed to work." Douglas Kellner, a leader on the New York City Board of Elections, exclaimed at a meeting of computer specialists in Berkeley this past spring, "I think the word 'trust' ought to be banned from election administration!" Dr. Avi Rubin, computer science professor and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, recently testified before the federal Election Assistance Commission, "The vendors, and many election officials, such as those in Maryland and Georgia, continue to insist that the machines are perfectly secure. I cannot fathom the basis for their claims. I do not know of a single computer security expert who would testify that these machines are secure."

Mercuri wrote in her dissertation on vote-counting in 2001 that "security flaws (such as Trojan horse attacks)...are possible in all of the computer-based voting systems" and that providing thorough examinations of source code and other circuits for DREs that vary from municipality to municipality "is a Herculean task--one that is likely not to be affordable, even if it were accomplishable."

Not all the scientists agree. Michael Shamos of Carnegie-Mellon, who once warned that computerized vote-counting is highly vulnerable to fraud, now takes the position that "the issue is not whether voting systems are absolutely secure, but whether they present barriers sufficiently formidable to give us confidence in the integrity of our elections."

Voting Machines Stolen in Georgia

In 2000 five out of six Georgians cast a paper ballot that could be recounted on ES&S systems. In January 2001, in a speech to the Democratic-controlled legislature, Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox, a Democrat who is expected to run for governor in 2006, declared that considering all the recent problems down in Florida, Georgia should adopt one "uniform electronic voting system by November 2004." Upon Cox's fervent recommendation of the just-born Diebold Election Systems, in May 2002 Georgia agreed to pay Diebold $54 million for 19,000 DRE voting systems. The counties and cities of Georgia had chosen their own voting machines for the last time, and, less obviously, Georgians had lost their ability to recount their votes in contested elections.

At once Diebold set to manufacturing 282 of its AccuVote TS voting systems a day. Some of the earliest ones arriving in Georgia, sent out for use in the training of election workers, were left in a hotel conference room overnight, stolen and never recovered. Late that June the secret vote-counting codes inside nine to fourteen more of the Diebold machines were stolen. Diebold made an uncounted number of apparently illegal changes in the election-conducting code between June and November. The memory cards on which the votes on each of the computers were recorded on election day all over Georgia had no encryption. According to Rob Behler, who served as Diebold's production deployment manager in Georgia during the first half of that summer, those cards could be used to change the results manually, precinct by precinct.

Incumbent US Senator Max Cleland and incumbent Governor Roy Barnes, both Democrats, were odds-on favorites to win re-election. A week before the voting an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll showed Cleland ahead by five points, 49-44, but on election day he lost to his Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss, by seven points, 53-46, a twelve-point swing. The loss of Governor Barnes to Sonny Perdue was even more remarkable: a one-week switch of fourteen percentage points. These were suspicious anomalies, and subsequently in a Peach State Poll one in eight Georgia voters were "not very confident" or "not at all confident" that the DREs had produced accurate results; another 32 percent were only "somewhat confident."

In his front parlor at home in Georgia, Rob Behler told me that just before or just as he took over the Atlanta warehouse for Diebold, some of the voting machines had been sent out to "do demos," and in one southern county "somebody broke in and stole...[nine or] fourteen of the machines and, I think, one of the servers." He says the vote-counting programs in the stolen computers could have been completely reconstructed by reverse engineering and employed to jimmy the election.

"Quality-checking" the AccuVote machines as they arrived from Diebold at a warehouse in Atlanta, Behler and his crew found problems, he says, with "every single one" of them and about a fifth of them were shoved aside as unusable. When Diebold's programmers wanted "patches," that is, changes, inserted into the voting-system software, Behler says, they sent them to him via the company's open, insecure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site in cyberspace. On his own unsecured laptop (resting on his desk as he spoke), Behler made twenty-two or twenty-three of the cards that were used to change the programs in the machines.

The night of the November 2002 election, sixty-seven of the memory cards used in Fulton County (Atlanta) disappeared. Running his laptop with a dual battery, Behler says, in six or seven hours he could have changed the totals on those sixty-seven cards. "There's no technical problem. There was absolutely zero protection on the card itself. You throw the card in, you just drill down into its files."

Brit Williams, a computer consultant at Kennesaw State University who runs Georgia's testing of voting systems, confirmed to me that the memory cards were not encrypted and all had the same password (1111), but each one, he contended, was "unique to its machine." He snapped, "We had 22,000 voting stations. How would you like to be in charge of 22,000 passwords?" Williams said the sixty-seven missing memory cards in Atlanta had been left in the machines by forgetful workers and were recovered.

The Georgia election of 2002 illustrates how serious risks of technical malfunctions and malicious tampering can occur without anyone outside the voting business finding out about them. No doubt in part because of the hasty start-up, Diebold's "security," though approved by the independent testing authorities and the state, was in fact farcical. Both of the losing Democrats had backed installation of the DRE systems statewide, so they could hardly call for recounts that their own state party had made literally impossible.

The Kids Prick Open a Scandal

Some kids who are "really interested in computers" were playing around last year, spidering through the links on various websites, when they discovered that Diebold had an unsecured FTP site (the same one Behler had used). One of the boys noted the fact on his website. Some other material on that site--not the stuff about Diebold--attracted a lot of hits, and that automatically led Google, the cyberspace search engine, to position it among the early-listed sites for many searches. One day Bev Harris, a literary publicist in Washington who was doing research for a book on vote-counting in computers, fed Google the right search words and the FTP site itself popped up. Knowing little about computers, she turned to David Allen, who was publishing her book, and he recognized the openly posted source codes and much other data concerning Diebold voting machines.

A small group of activists in Georgia worked with Harris. One of them, Roxanne Jekot, who runs a software consulting firm, analyzed "almost every line" of the Diebold source code and found many ways to change vote totals there and also in the Microsoft operating code. "The software is totally junk," she says. "They sold vaporware." Determined to get peer review of what she was finding, Jekot approached David Dill, the Stanford computer science professor.

"Both Roxanne and Bev were very courageous and determined to lift the veil of secrecy on the code," Dill says. "I think most academics would be much more cautious, especially about publishing the fact that they looked at the code. I certainly was, and I wasn't about to get other people in trouble by asking them to help me. A number of us would be inclined to talk to lawyers before doing anything too bold. So it made a huge difference that Bev posted the code in New Zealand for everyone to download. That reduced but didn't eliminate the legal risks of the Johns Hopkins/Rice University people looking at the code. If Bev and whoever else was involved in releasing this code had not been so brave, people [with strong professional reputations] might not have been able to speak out so freely."

After some agreements on a division of roles, Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins and three other scientists produced a devastating twenty-three-page exposure of the Diebold software. That was followed by two more damaging technical studies in Ohio. Then a "Red Team" exercise to break the Diebold code was staged at RABA Technologies' headquarters in Maryland. Four of the eight computer scientists on the team had worked at the National Security Agency, and the team director had been the senior technical director for the NSA. The team concluded, "A voter can be deceived into thinking he is voting for one candidate when, in fact, the software is recording the vote for another candidate." A security vulnerability "allows a remote attacker to get complete control of the machine." And one can "automatically upload malicious software" that will "modify or delete elections." Some kids sniffing around in cyberspace had led, step by step, to the dawning national realization that computerized vote-counting puts democracy in grave danger.

What You Can Do

Public interest groups are mobilizing to head off another Florida. Petitions calling for a paper trail for DREs have attracted something approaching half a million signatures. Lou Dobbs's quick poll on CNN on "paper receipts of electronic votes" was running 5,735 to 85 for them on July 20. Greg Palast and Martin Luther King III have more than 80,000 signatures on their petition against paperless touch-screens and the purging of voter rolls. Global Exchange, the San Francisco-based organization, is inviting twenty-eight nonpartisan foreign observers to monitor the US election. Eleven members of Congress asked Kofi Annan to send UN monitors. Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is organizing attorneys for litigation against paperless electronic voting.

In mid-June the California secretary of state approved the nation's first set of standards for a verified paper trail for touch-screen machines. A recent "Voting, Vote Capture and Vote Counting" symposium at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has produced an "Annotated Best Practices," available at www.ljean.com/files/ABPractices.pdf. On June 29 the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Brennan Center for Justice, with the endorsement of Common Cause, the NAACP, People for the American Way and most of the leading scientific critics of paperless touch-screen voting, sent the nation's local election officials a "call for new security measures for electronic voting machines," including local retention of independent security experts; the full report is available at www.civilrights.org/issues/voting/lccr_brennan_report.pdf.

Douglas Kellner, the New York City election expert, believes the best practical remedy for the dangers of computerized vote-counting is voting on optical-scan systems, posting the election results in the precincts and keeping the ballots with the machines in which they were counted. In all computerized vote-counting situations the precinct results should be publicly distributed and posted in the precincts before they are transmitted to the center for final counting, Kellner says. Once they are sent from the precinct the audit trail is lost.

Citizens can stay current on election developments via several websites: electionline.org, a reliable and up-to-date source; VerifiedVoting.org, Dill's group; notablesoftware.com, Mercuri's site; blackboxvoting.org, Bev Harris's site; countthevote.org, the site of the Georgia group led by Jekot; and these will key into many others. For a steady flow of news stories on this subject (and a few others) from around the country, get on the e-mail list of resist@best.com. Official information concerning each state is available online at each state's website for its secretary of state.

People should go down to their local election departments and ask their supervisor of elections how they are going to know that their votes are counted--and refuse to take "Trust us," or "Trust the machines," for an answer. They can be poll watchers. Many organizations are fostering poll watching, including People for the American Way's Election Protection 2004 project. Common Cause "has made election monitoring a major project," a spokesperson says. VerifiedVoting.org is concentrating on having people watch election technology, including pre-election testing as well as the procedures on election day. Bev Harris is organizing people to do such work (see her website).

Rebecca Mercuri says that if you believe an election has been corrupted through voting equipment, you should collect affidavits from voters; get the results from every voting machine for all precincts; get the names and titles of everyone involved; inventory the equipment, including the software, and try to have it impounded; demand a recount; and go to the press. Noting that all counties that have rushed to purchase DRE voting systems also have paper-ballot systems in place to handle absentee voters, motor-voters and emergency ballots for when the system breaks down, she suggests mothballing the DREs and using paper ballots. "Counties are saying there's nothing they can do but use the DREs in November, and that is simply untrue," Mercuri declares.

Much of this would be unnecessary if Congress enacted either the Graham-Clinton or the Holt bill, which would empower voters to verify their own votes and create a paper trail.

The computerized voting companies have precipitated a crisis for the integrity of democracy. Three months to go.

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