RFK, Jr.: Hacking the Next Election

In a major article in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., warns that the democracy may very soon go out the window altogether. He writes:

In a major article in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., warns that the democracy may very soon go out the window altogether.

He writes:

“The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation’s election systems - with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America’s 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for unsupervised ’sleepovers’ before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering. And in Ohio - where, as I recently reported in ‘Was the 2004 Election Stolen?’ [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the presidency - a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County.

Even worse, many electronic machines don’t produce a paper record that can be recounted when equipment malfunctions - an omission that practically invites malicious tampering. ‘Every board of election has staff members with the technological ability to fix an election,’ Ion Sancho, an election supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me. ‘Even one corrupt staffer can throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no way I’d ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential election.’

Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia. An African-American whose parents fought for voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to be working as a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company promote its new electronic voting machines. During the presidential election two years earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in Georgia - almost double the national average - and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly.

Hood had been present in May 2002, when officials with Cox’s office signed a contract with Diebold - paying the company a record $54 million to install 19,000 electronic voting machines across the state. At a restaurant inside Atlanta’s Marriott Hotel, he noticed the firm’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, checking Diebold’s stock price on a laptop computer every five minutes, waiting for a bounce from the announcement.

Hood wondered why Diebold, the world’s third-largest seller of ATMs, had been awarded the contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in.

‘The Diebold executives had a news conference planned on the day of the award,’ Hood recalls, ‘and we were instructed to stay in our hotel rooms until just hours before the announcement. They didn’t want the competitors to know and possibly file a protest’ about the lack of a fair bidding process. It certainly didn’t hurt that Diebold had political clout: Cox’s predecessor as secretary of state, Lewis Massey, was now a lobbyist for the company.

The problem was, Diebold had only five months to install the new machines - a ‘very narrow window of time to do such a big deployment,’ Hood notes. The old systems stored in warehouses had to be replaced with new equipment; dozens of state officials and poll workers had to be trained in how to use the touch-screen machines. ‘It was pretty much an impossible task,’ Hood recalls. There was only one way, he adds, that the job could be done in time - if ‘the vendor had control over the entire environment.’ That is precisely what happened. In late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized Georgia’s entire electoral system. The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state - all without any official supervision. ‘We ran the election,’ says Hood. ‘We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it.’

Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold’s election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a ‘patch,’ a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. ‘We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn’t do,’ Hood says. ‘The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done.’

Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by the state. But thanks to Cox’s agreement with Diebold, the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. ‘It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state,’ Hood told me. ‘We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level.’

According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties - the state’s largest Democratic strongholds.

To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. ‘We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11,’ Hood says. ‘There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it’s easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way.’ Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch being applied to more than 1,200 others.

The patch comes on a memory card that is inserted into a machine.Eventually, all the memory cards end up on a server that tabulates the votes- where the patch can be programmed to alter the outcome of an election.’There could be a hidden program on a memory card that adjusts everything to the preferred election results,’ Hood says. ‘Your program says, “I want my candidate to stay ahead by three or four percent or whatever.” Those programs can include a built-in delete that erases itself after it’s done.’ It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the election in Georgia: Diebold’s machines provided no paper trail, making a recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote, polls showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent, leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss - darling of the Christian Coalition - by five percentage points. In the governor’s race, Democrat Roy Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican Sonny Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three percent of the vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent.

Diebold insists that the patch was installed ‘with the approval and oversight of the state.’ But after the election, the Georgia secretary of state’s office submitted a ‘punch list’ to Bob Urosevich of ‘issues and concerns related to the statewide voting system that we would like Diebold to address.’ One of the items referenced was ‘Application/Implication of “0808″ Patch.’ The state was seeking confirmation that the patch did not require that the system ‘be recertified at national and state level’ as well as ‘verifiable analysis of overall impact of patch to the voting system.’ In a separate letter, Secretary Cox asked Urosevich about Diebold’s use of substitute memory cards and defective equipment as well as widespread problems that caused machines to freeze up and improperly record votes. The state threatened to delay further payments to Diebold until ‘these punch list items will be corrected and completed.’

Diebold’s response has not been made public - but its machines remain in place for Georgia’s election this fall. Hood says it was ‘common knowledge’ within the company that Diebold also illegally installed uncertified software in machines used in the 2004 presidential primaries - a charge the company denies. Disturbed to see the promise of electronic machines subverted by private companies, Hood left the election consulting business and became a whistle-blower. ‘What I saw,’ he says, ‘was basically a corporate takeover of our voting system.’ The United States is one of only a handful of major democracies that allow private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes using their own proprietary software. Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. In 2004, 36 million votes were cast on their touch-screen systems, and millions more were recorded by optical-scan machines owned by the same companies that use electronic technology to tabulate paper ballots. The simple fact is, these machines not only break down with regularity, they are easily compromised - by people inside, and outside, the companies.

Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company’s then-CEO Walden O’Dell promised to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush in 2004. That year, Diebold would count the votes in half of Ohio’s counties.

The voting-machine companies bear heavy blame for the 2000 presidential-election disaster. Fox News’ fateful decision to call Florida for Bush - followed minutes later by CBS and NBC - came after electronic machines in Volusia County erroneously subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Al Gore’s total. Later, after an internal investigation, CBS described the mistake as ‘critical’ in the network’s decision. Seeing what was an apparent spike for Bush, Gore conceded the election - then reversed his decision after a campaign staffer investigated and discovered that Gore was actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes.

Investigators traced the mistake to Global Election Systems, the firm later acquired by Diebold. Two months after the election, an internal memo from Talbot Iredale, the company’s master programmer, blamed the problem on a memory card that had been improperly - and unnecessarily - uploaded. ‘There is always the possibility,’ Iredale conceded, ‘that the “second memory card” or “second upload” came from an unauthorized source.’”

Read the full article in the October 5, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone.

From http://www.americasdemocrats.org/straighttalk.cfm