Controlling the Voting Machines

NOTICE: Please Read!

 December 17, 2003

Convicted felons worked for electronic voting companies

November 9, 2003
Indiana Computerized Election shows 144,000 total votes where only 19,000 are registered and 5352 actually voted. Some would call it democracy.

10/24/2003
Targeting Diebold with Electronic Civil Disobedience: Trying to HIde behind Copyrights, Manufacturer Draws More Attention to Anti-democratic Voter Fraud

How to get the files: Note that the location of the documents may change, but this page will always have the current links - if nothing else, you can read some excerpts.

Browse the documents: http://why-war.com/readmemos
Search the documents: http://why-war.com/searchmemos 

.EDU Hosts for Archive: USC, MIT, Purdue, University of Texas-Pan American
Please e-mail info@why-war.com  if you are willing to publicly mirror the files (either the archive or the full text); contact web@why-war.com  to report broken links. We are especially interested in hearing from individuals at other educational institutions. Please note that due to overwhelming volume, we will attempt to keep the links up to date but may not respond to specific e-mails of this type.

Subject: HR 2239, Paper Trails for Voting...dying in Congress.

Here is the actual bill, HR 2239, which requires a paper trail for all electronic voting. Thus far, the support is weak from all sides, yet it is the only hope for American voters to have fair and honest elections.

http://www.acm.org/usacm/PDF/HR2239_Holt_Bill.pdf

Please call, fax and write to your congress-critters and demand support for this bill. Write letters to the editors of your local papers and demand action by Congress on this bill.

The accuracy of the electronic voting systems is rotten. Even if it's not corrupt, it's rotten, much worse than even Florida in 2000. There are verified cases where candidates got exactly the same number of votes in every precinct.  There is one case where a candidate got exactly 33.3% of the votes in every precinct. There are 6 verified cases where the vote distribution changed overnight, while the computers were sitting alone in a dark office the day after the polls closed. There have been three cases where Federal judges ruled the vote protest invalid simply because there was no way to recount the votes.
There is one case where the winner was the owner of the voting machines. There is one case where the candidate had an 85% approval rating and exit poll numbers and lost by a landslide .

If this bill isn't passed it's the end of honest voting in America.

"IF YOU WANT TO WIN AN ELECTION, JUST CONTROL THE VOTING MACHINES" By Thom Hartmann CommonDreams.org Friday, January 31, 2003

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government -- answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders -- would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.

You'd be wrong.

The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill

http://www.thehill.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx  has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.

Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post

(1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election."  According to Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican.  Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide.  As his hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."

What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel.  Built by that company. Programmed by that company.

"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka

http://www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm.  "They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me."

Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft?

In Georgia, Democratic incumbent and war-hero Max Cleland was defeated by Saxby Chambliss, who'd avoided service in Vietnam with a "medical deferment" but ran his campaign on the theme that he was more patriotic than Cleland. While many in Georgia expected a big win by Cleland, the computerized voting machines said that Chambliss had won.

The BBC summed up Georgia voters' reaction in a 6 November 2002 headline: "GEORGIA UPSET STUNS DEMOCRATS."  The BBC echoed the confusion of many Georgia voters when they wrote, "Mr. Cleland -- an army veteran who lost three limbs in a grenade explosion during the Vietnam War -- had long been considered 'untouchable' on questions of defense and national security."

Between them, Hagel and Chambliss' victories sealed Republican control of the Senate.  Odds are both won fair and square, the American way, using huge piles of corporate money to carpet-bomb voters with television advertising. But either the appearance or the possibility of impropriety in an election casts a shadow over American democracy.

"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected," wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years ago.  "To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."

That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at our doorstep.

"They can take over our country without firing a shot," Matulka said, "just by taking over our election systems."

Taking over our election systems?  Is that really possible in the USA?

Bev Harris of http://www.talion.com  and

http://www.blackboxvoting.com  has looked into the situation in depth and thinks Matulka may be on to something. The company tied to Hagel even threatened her with legal action when she went public about his company having built the machines that counted his landslide votes.  (Her response was to put the law firm's threat letter on her website and send a press release to 4000 editors, inviting them to check it out:

http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=11 

"I suspect they're getting ready to do this all across all the states," Matulka said in a January 30, 2003 interview.  "God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the country," he added, "because they leave no paper trail.  These corporations are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting machines."

In the meantime, exit-polling organizations have quietly gone out of business, and the news arms of the huge multinational corporations that own our networks are suggesting the days of exit polls are over. Virtually none were reported in 2002, creating an odd and unsettling silence that caused unease for the many American voters who had come to view exit polls as proof of the integrity of their election systems.

As all this comes to light, many citizens and even a few politicians are wondering if it's a good idea for corporations to be so involved in the guts of our voting systems.  The whole idea of a democratic republic was to create a common institution (the government itself) owned by its citizens, answerable to its citizens, and authorized to exist and continue existing solely "by the consent of the governed."

Prior to 1886 -- when, law schools incorrectly tell law students, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations are "persons" with equal protection and other "human rights" -- it was illegal in most states for corporations to involve themselves in politics at all, much less to service the core mechanism of politics.  And during the era of Teddy Roosevelt, who said, "There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains," numerous additional laws were passed to restrain corporations from involvement in politics.

Wisconsin, for example, had a law that explicitly stated:

"No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office."

The penalty for violating that law was dissolution of the corporation, and "any officer, employee, agent or attorney or other representative of any corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation" would be subject to "imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years" and a substantial fine.

However, the recent political trend has moved us in the opposite direction, with governments answerable to "We, The People" turning over administration of our commons to corporations answerable only to CEOs, boards, and stockholders.  The result is the enrichment of corporations and the appearance that democracy in America has started to resemble its parody in banana republics.

But if America still is a democratic republic, then We, The People still own our government.  And the way our ownership and management of our common government (and its assets) is asserted is through the vote.

On most levels, privatization is only a "small sin" against democracy. Turning a nation's or community's water, septic, roadway, prisons, airwaves, or health care commons over to private corporations has so far demonstrably degraded the quality of life for average citizens and enriched a few of the most powerful campaign contributors. But it hasn't been the end of democracy

(although some wonder about what the FCC is preparing to do -- but that's a separate story).

Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and maintenance of voting over to private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their owners, officers, and stockholders, puts democracy itself at peril.

And, argues Charlie Matulka, for a former officer of one of those corporations to then place himself into an election without disclosing such an apparent conflict of interest is to create a parody of democracy.

Perhaps Matulka's been reading too many conspiracy theory tracts.  Or maybe he's on to something.  We won't know until a truly independent government agency looks into the matter.

When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, the man responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete, asking him why he'd not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003.  After the second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job.

Meanwhile, back in Nebraska, Charlie Matulka had requested a hand count of the vote in the election he lost to Hagel.  He just learned his request was denied because, he said, Nebraska has a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount.  The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel.

Matulka shared his news with me, then sighed loud and long on the phone, as if he were watching his children's future evaporate.

"If you want to win the election," he finally said, "just control the machines."

Thom Hartmann is the author of "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights."

http://www.unequalprotection.com   This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann

see also: The Theft of Your Vote Is Just a Chip Away at http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16474

From Xymphora Tuesday, August 26, 2003

I recently mentioned the fact that SAIC had been engaged by the State of Maryland to do an independent audit of the Diebold voting machines. It now turns out that one of the authors of a Johns Hopkins University study (see it here, Diebold's comments, and a rebuttal to Diebold's comments) which was highly critical of the security of the Diebold voting terminals, Avi Rubin, actually had an interest in a potential voting machine competitor of Diebold, VoteHere. He has apologized backwards and forwards for what he claims was a technical oversight, and has terminated his connection with the competitor, but his conflict, however inadvertent, was i-n-c-r-e-d-i-b-l-y stupid. It will damage this computer scientist's credibility on any subject for the rest of his life, and is already being used to criticize the study in order to support the continued use of the questionable machines in Georgia. Rubin has allowed Diebold to characterize the criticism of their system as motivated by a financial conflict of interest in a competitor, and has handed them a golden weapon in the propaganda war.

But SAIC appears to have its own serious conflict of interest problems. The Chairman of the Board for VoteHere is Admiral Bill Owens (or here), a former President, Chief Operating Officer, and Vice Chairman of SAIC. Another former SAIC board member, ex-CIA director Robert Gates, is also on the board of VoteHere. It appears you can't throw a dead cat around the world of voting machines without hitting a conflict of interest. You have to wonder why Diebold made such a fuss about Rubin's connections to VoteHere, but doesn't seem to care about the potential conflicts between its competitor VoteHere, and the company that is going to audit its voting machines, SAIC. If we delve deeper, we can see the outlines of the game that SAIC and Diebold are playing here. It turns out that there is a lobbying group called the Enterprise Solutions Division of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). This group is currently proposing that it be hired to spin the PR to advocate the adoption of these questionable voting machines. On the board of directors of the Enterprise Solutions Division of ITAA is Ronald J. Knecht, a Senior Vice President of SAIC, and SAIC is listed as a 'member' of the Division! So the company providing an independent audit of the security of Diebold's voting machines is connected to a lobby group that wants to be hired to convince the public and politicians that electronic voting is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

There may also be mysterious connections to a nonprofit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization called "The Election Center" (on the main page, click on the link 'About Election Center'), whose members are government employees whose profession is to serve in voter registration and elections administration, and which, amongst other things, selects the certifiers of voting machines (all this excellent sleuthing is by Bev Harris of the most important website in the United States, Black Box Voting; in particular, read the comment on the first page of the site called 'Secret Meetings of the Black Box Yakuza').

Obviously, the main impediment to the rosy view of electronic voting is the Johns Hopkins report and the perception that there are security flaws in the Diebold system, and thus problems in any such voting system. How can SAIC be trusted to audit Diebold's system when SAIC is tied to a group which intends to lobby for just this kind of system to be used in the voting of the future? Diebold's selective concern about conflict of interest betrays the fact that SAIC and Diebold are on exactly the same side of this issue.

This isn't just a technical issue: the use of these systems is how Bush intends to get reelected so he can continue to destroy the United States and much of the rest of the world. If these crooked machines are used, he will be reelected, along with a Republican Congress. There is only one way to stop this: paper ballots, counted by hand.

CALLING COMPUTER SECURITY EXPERTS & SUPPORTERS OF DEMOCRACY EVERYWHERE

For democracy to work anywhere the ballot must not be rigged. Unfortunately it is an established fact that every form of ballot counting and management used over the past 200 years in the United States has been gamed and rigged.

With the introduction of touch-screen electronic voting machines that produce no paper trail the opportunity to rig elections has reached new heights. Add in the fact that $4 billion of federal funding is being offered to purchase these new machines, and there is a serious threat to democracy as we know it.

The files on this site were copied from an open anonymous and open FTP site run by Diebold election systems.

Diebold - the board of which is made up of nine Republican donors - ran the election in Georgia in November 2002 during which sitting Democrat senatorial and gubernatorial candidates were unseated in a huge swing not shown up in pre election polling.

The Diebold website is no longer up and running, but it was open to the public and operating at the time of the mid-term US elections in November 2002. Several stories about this peculiar and insecure website can be found at:

http://www.blackboxvoting.com 

As can be seen in the stories at the above website. There appears to have been very little scrutiny of the source code for this particular electronic voting system.

The files have therefore been copied here in order to enable an online citizens forensic inquiry into how secure the U.S. electronic voting system is. And we want your help to enable us to do this.

WHAT WE WANT YOU TO DO

Firstly. We want people who are able to do so to CREATE MIRROR COPIES of this data source. We especially want mirrors to be created in non-U.S. jurisdictions in order to enable this inquiry to remain ongoing. 

When copies and mirrors are made please post notification about the location to.

http://www.liberalisnotadirtyword.com/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi

Secondly We want people who are able to do so to EXAMINE THESE FILES AND DISCOVER WHAT THEY CONTAIN. Amongst the four gigs of files here are source code, data and documentation related to the Diebold accuvote electronic voting system, and the testing thereof.

We want to know in particular:
- how the software works?
- how secure the software is?
- whether there are any intentionally created trapdoors?
- how difficult it would be to tamper with the software?

And anything else which you think is relevant to this discussion.

MORE INFORMATION ON THE ISSUE OF ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES

For more information see...

- Comprehensive Set Of Links & Articles -
  http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingSecurity.htm

- Reporting Site -
  http://www.votewatch.us

- Bev Harris's Investigation -
  http://www.talion.com

- Lots of Links & Views -
  http://www.linkcrusader.com

- Slashdot discussion -
  http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/02/14/1948247.shtml?tid=103

- Lots of articles -
  http://scoop.co.nz/mason/features/?s=usacoup

- Website for academic campaign seeking reliable voting machines -
  http://verify.stanford.edu/evote.html

COMMUNICATING WITH US

For queries regarding this material or to send advice on work - please email

http://www.liberalisnotadirtyword.com/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi

For group communication among people wishing to contribute to an online discussion into these files...
(Note this group is for public discussion, it is not intended for secure communications regarding the subject matter. Meanwhile we are working on establishing a more secure setup for the core inquiry work discussions.)

** Set aside election? **

The entire source code tree is completely unpassworded, no protection at all. He says this in and of itself should qualify to set aside  the election, not only in Georgia but everywhere that
used these machines. And I have a list of everywhere these machines were used (includes both touchscreen and optical scan).

** Apparently complete source code available without password **

Democracy in America: a multi-level fraud. http://911-strike.com/strike.htm 

The elections of 2002 proved that democracy in America, at the Federal level, is stone dead. Those who are praying for a miraculous resurrection, will be disappointed. Non-violent direct action is the only remaining avenue to save ourselves.

Election results in many states are being tallied by electronic systems which leave no paper audit trail. Software for these systems is secret and proprietary. From www.blackboxvoting.com  comes this report:

On October, 10, 2002 Bev Harris, author of the upcoming Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century, revealed that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has ties to the largest voting machine company, Election Systems & Software (ES&S). She reported that he was an owner, Chairman and CEO of Election Systems & Software (called American Information Systems until name change filed in 1997). ES&S was the ONLY company whose machines counted Hagel's votes when he ran for election in 1996 and 2002. The Hill, a Washington D.C. newspaper that covers the U.S. national political scene, confirmed her findings on January 29, 2003 and uncovered more details.

While the potential for tampering should be obvious, the proof of fraud is statistical. Public-opinion polls conducted with proper controls are known to be accurate within limited error bounds. Yet in many cases the polls were stunningly different from the election results in November 2002. Bartcop's summary notes differences of up to 16% between the pre-election polls and the reported election results. The odds of this happening by chance, are so miniscule that I'm not interested in discussing them. http://www.bartcop.com/111102fraud.htm 

A more fundamental problem: we have hardly any authentic candidates to vote for, even if our votes were counted. The Democratic and Republican parties are almost equivalently corrupt, as shown by the bi-partisan support for repressive measures such as Patriot Act and Homeland Security, and for the war in Iraq.

For a thoughtful look at all the reasons democracy has died, look at Richard Heinberg's "Remember when we had elections?" http://www.museletter.com/archive/129.html And here is a technical website out of Stanford University dealing specifically with voting machine problems. http://verify.stanford.edu/evote.html

If there is one issue that is even more important than the truth about September 11, this would be it.

ON ELECTION DAY 2004, HOW WILL YOU KNOW IF YOUR VOTE IS PROPERLY COUNTED? ANSWER: YOU WON'T--Rep. Rush Holt Introduces Legislation to Require All Voting Machines To Produce A Voter-Verified Paper Trail

Washington, DC - Rep. Rush Holt today responded to the growing chorus of concern from election reform specialists and computer security experts about the integrity of future elections by introducing reform legislation, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003. The measure would require all voting machines to produce an actual paper record by 2004 that voters can view to check the accuracy of their votes and that election officials can use to verify votes in the event of a computer malfunction, hacking, or other irregularity. Experts often refer to this paper record as a "voter-verified paper trail."

"We cannot afford nor can we permit another major assault on the integrity of the American electoral process," said Rep. Rush Holt. "Imagine it's Election Day 2004. You enter your local polling place and go to cast your vote on a brand new "touch screen" voting machine. The screen says your vote has been counted. As you exit the voting booth, however, you begin to wonder. How do I know if the machine actually recorded my vote? The fact is, you don't."

Last October, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), groundbreaking election reform legislation that is currently helping states throughout the country replace antiquated and unreliable punch card and butterfly ballot voting systems. HAVA, however, is having an unintended consequence. It is fueling a rush by states and localities to purchase computer-voting systems that suffer from a serious flaw; voters and election officials have no way of knowing whether the computers are counting votes properly. Hundreds of nationally renowned computer scientists, including internationally renowned expert David Dill of Stanford University, consider a voter-verified paper trial to be a critical safeguard for the accuracy, integrity and security of computer-assisted elections.

Analysis of an Electronic Voting System  This unique opportunity for independent scientific analysis of voting system source code demonstrates the fallacy of the closed-source argument for such a critical system. Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite considerable. We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk.

HR 2239, Paper Trails for Voting...dying in Congress.
Here is the actual bill, HR 2239, which requires a paper trail for all electronic voting. Thus far, the support is weak from all sides, yet it is the only hope for American voters to have fair and honest elections.

http://www.acm.org/usacm/PDF/HR2239_Holt_Bill.pdf

Please call, fax and write to your congress-critters and demand support for this bill. Write letters to the editors of your local papers and demand action by Congress on this bill. See ACTION NOW!

The accuracy of the electronic voting systems is rotten. Even if it's not corrupt, it's rotten, much worse than even Florida in 2000. There are verified cases where candidates got exactly the same number of votes in every precinct. There is one case where a candidate got exactly 33.3% of the votes in every precinct. There are 6 verified cases where the vote distribution changed overnight, while the computers were sitting alone in a dark office the day after the polls closed. There have been three cases where Federal judges ruled the vote protest invalid simply because there was no way to recount the votes. There is one case where the winner was the owner of the voting machines. There is one case where the candidate had an 85% approval rating and exit poll numbers and lost by a landslide .

If this bill isn't passed it's the end of honest voting in America.

VOTING MACHINE CEO committed to helping Ohio deliver votes to Bush August 28, 2003

Columbus - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.