Krugman – Hack the Vote
Folks,
It’s good to see
Krugman take up the issue of flawed voting machines and potential voter fraud.
The most important fix is simple: just make the machines give out a paper record
of each vote. But noises have already been made that this “enhancement” will
cost too much, or be too technically difficult, or any of a half-dozen other bad
excuses. As if a printer hooked up to a computer were some great technical feat.
As if any of those reasons should ever be permitted to take precedence over the
sanctity of a vote. Let’s hope Krugman’s attention to this issue causes some
tangible changes to be made, so we can all continue to believe, at least, in the
utility of voting.
–C
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Hack the Vote
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published:
December 2, 2003
Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host
wrote, “I am committed
to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the
president next year.” No
surprise there. But Walden O’Dell — who says that he
wasn’t talking about
his business operations — happens to be the chief
executive of Diebold Inc.,
whose touch-screen voting machines are in
increasingly widespread use across
the United States.
For example,
Georgia — where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories
in the 2002
midterm elections — relies exclusively on Diebold machines. To
be clear,
though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no
evidence that
the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that
the machines
counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no
paper
trail.
Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has
introduced a bill requiring
that digital voting machines leave a paper trail
and that their software be
available for public inspection, is occasionally
told that systems lacking
these safeguards haven’t caused problems. “How do
you know?” he asks.
What we do know about Diebold does not inspire
confidence. The details are
technical, but they add up to a picture of a
company that was, at the very
least, extremely sloppy about security, and may
have been trying to cover up
product defects.
Early this year Bev
Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, found
Diebold software —
which the company refuses to make available for public
inspection, on the
grounds that it’s proprietary — on an unprotected server,
where anyone could
download it. (The software was in a folder titled
“rob-Georgia.zip.”) The
server was used by employees of Diebold Election
Systems to update software
on its machines. This in itself was an incredible
breach of security,
offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines
both the information
and the opportunity to do so.
An analysis of Diebold software by
researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice
Universities found it both unreliable
and subject to abuse. A later report
commissioned by the state of Maryland
apparently reached similar
conclusions. (It’s hard to be sure because the
state released only a heavily
redacted version.)
Meanwhile, leaked
internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate officials
knew their system
was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have
revealed these problems.
The company hasn’t contested the authenticity of
these documents; instead, it
has engaged in legal actions to prevent their
dissemination.
Why isn’t
this front-page news? In October, a British newspaper, The
Independent, ran a
hair-raising investigative report on U.S. touch-screen
voting. But while the
mainstream press has reported the basics, the Diebold
affair has been treated
as a technology or business story — not as a
potential political
scandal.
This diffidence recalls the treatment of other voting issues,
like the
Florida “felon purge” that inappropriately prevented many citizens
from
voting in the 2000 presidential election. The attitude seems to be
that
questions about the integrity of vote counts are divisive at best,
paranoid
at worst. Even reform advocates like Mr. Holt make a point of
dissociating
themselves from “conspiracy theories.” Instead, they focus on
legislation to
prevent future abuses.
But there’s nothing paranoid
about suggesting that political operatives,
given the opportunity, might
engage in dirty tricks. Indeed, given the
intensity of partisanship these
days, one suspects that small dirty tricks
are common. For example, Orrin
Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, recently announced
that one of his aides had improperly accessed
sensitive Democratic computer
files that were leaked to the press.
This admission — contradicting an
earlier declaration by Senator Hatch that
his staff had been cleared of
culpability — came on the same day that the
Senate police announced that they
were hiring a counterespionage expert to
investigate the theft. Republican
members of the committee have demanded
that the expert investigate only how
those specific documents were leaked,
not whether any other breaches took
place. I wonder why.
The point is that you don’t have to believe in a
central conspiracy to worry
that partisans will take advantage of an
insecure, unverifiable voting
system to manipulate election results. Why
expose them to temptation?
I’ll discuss what to do in a future column.
But let’s be clear: the
credibility of U.S. democracy may be at
stake.