Salon: Will the Election Be Hacked?

[kskiska]

A Salon special report reveals how new voting machines could result in a rigged presidential race -- and we'd never know.

A few weeks after Election Night 2002, Roxanne Jekot, a computer programmer who lives in Cumming, Ga., began fearing demons lingering in the state's voting machines. The midterm election had been a historic one: Georgia became the first state to use electronic touch-screen voting machines in every one of its precincts. The 51-year-old Jekot, who has a grandmotherly bearing but describes herself as a "typical computer geek," was initially excited about the new system.

"I thought it was the coolest thing we could have done," she says.

But the election also brought sweeping victories for Republicans, including, most stunningly, one for Sonny Perdue, who defeated Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democrat, to become Georgia's first Republican governor in 135 years, while Rep. Saxby Chambliss upset Vietnam veteran Sen. Max Cleland. The convergence of these two developments -- the introduction of new voting machines and the surprising GOP wins -- began to eat away at Roxanne Jekot. Like many of her fellow angry Democrats on the Internet discussion forums she frequented, she had a hard time believing the Republicans won legitimately. Instead, Jekot began searching for her explanation in the source code used in the new voting machines.

What she found alarmed her. The machines were state-of-the-art products from an Ohio company called Diebold. But the code -- which a friend of Jekot's had found on the Internet -- was anything but flawless, Jekot says. It was amateurish and pocked with security problems. "I expected sophistication and some fairly difficult to understand advanced coding," Jekot said one evening this fall at a restaurant near her home. But she saw "a hodgepodge of commands thrown all over the source code," an indication, she said, that the programmers were careless. Along with technical commands, Diebold's engineers had written English comments documenting the various functions their software performed -- and these comments "made my hair stand on end," Jekot said. The programmers would say things like "this doesn't work because that doesn't work and neither one of them work together." They seemed to know that their software was flawed.

(snip)

Jekot was particularly alarmed -- and outraged -- to learn that company CEO Walden O'Dell is one of the GOP's biggest fundraisers in his home state of Ohio and nationally. Right after the Georgia elections, an O'Dell e-mail began making the rounds of Web logs and other Internet sites that were tracking the Diebold security flaws, in which the CEO bragged that he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." What better way to deliver electoral votes for President Bush, some reasoned, than to control the equipment Americans use to cast their ballots?

more…
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2004/02/09/voting_machines/index.html

[fearnobush]

1. This is why our elections look like a formality.

It's why the Russians held a session on preventing American Style voting fraud in their country.