Diebold Disaster Redux?
News: Maryland's primary went so badly, the governor pleaded with residents to vote absentee. On Election Day, officials are cheery—not so the voters.
November 7, 2006
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Sharon Conn was at her polling place early, hoping to vote before heading into Washington, D.C., for her job as a school administrator. She stepped up to the shiny new Diebold voting machine and inserted her access card. Big red letters appeared on the touch screen: "Deactivated." An hour and a half later, after three unsuccessful attempts, Conn was still there, surrounded by confused election officials and fellow voters. "People kept coming back to the front, saying, 'My card doesn't work,'" Conn says. "It wasn't a few people, it was quite a few people going through that." Conn was eventually forced, along with other voters, to cast a provisional ballot. Now, she says, "I'm worried whether it will be counted."
It's not as if no one saw it coming. After Maryland's disastrous September primary—a hit parade of technical and human errors and a PR nightmare for Diebold—election watchdog groups were anticipating trouble at the ballot box. So was Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich Jr.: A week before Election Day, Ehrlich cast the ultimate vote of no confidence in his state's $106 million balloting system, announcing that he would be voting by absentee ballot and urging his constituents to do the same. By Election Day, Maryland election officials had received nearly 200,000 requests for absentee ballots, a record.
Linda Schade, the cofounder of the Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland, a nonpartisan election watchdog group, says the Election Day hotline at her organization's Takoma Park headquarters has been ringing all day with voters reporting all manner of incidents – "glitches, crashes, screen weirdness," as well as a few machines whose "tamper tape" (a security device intended to protect the machines' memory cards from meddling) had been removed.
Concerns over voting machine security got a boost recently by researchers at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy who had managed to obtain a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, the variety used in Maryland and many other states. The researchers found the device to be "vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates." Opening the machines was as easy as inserting a hotel minibar key.
Spot-checking polling places throughout western Maryland this morning, I encountered election officials eager to point out that everything was running smoothly. "None of the things we had problems with in the primary have reoccurred," one election judge in Silver Spring assured me. "Be kind to the technology," another, in Potomac, implored.
Voters, though, seemed less at ease with the paperless system. One told me that he'd have to "take it on faith" that his vote would count. Zena Carmel-Jessup, a 32-year-old social worker who had her three-year-old daughter, Lyla, in tow, said, "Elections are always tampered with, but with a computer they can be tampered with on a larger scale."
Later, outside the Davis Library in Bethesda, I met Philip Irwin and Nate Brown, two volunteers for Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, who's in a tight race against Ehrlich for the governor's mansion. They'd been dispatched to investigate reports of "vote flipping"—instances of machines recording votes for Republican candidates when voters attempted to cast a vote for a Democrat. (Schade told me that her organization received similar reports.) Brown said that five voters had reported this occurring at two Bethesda precincts, though election officials at both locations said they were unaware of this problem. Gesturing to the 14 Diebold machines crammed into a small back room in the library, Ralph Schofer, an election judge, said, "They're all working." He gazed down a hallway, where voters were lined up at least 50 people deep to cast their ballots. "It's miraculous. Who knows how long it's going to last."
Time will tell whether the machines held out, or whether Sharon Conn's nightmare was more common for voters in Maryland and nationwide. Either way, cautions Schade of the Campaign for Verifiable Voting, obvious troubles may not be the best way to determine how well things are going: "The smoothest election could be the most tampered with," she says. "It's so hard to convey that reality. On the one hand visible malfunctions show the reality, but in some ways it's not the most important."
Daniel Schulman is an Investigative Fellow at Mother Jones.
