A brave new world of voting

Humanist, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Michael I. Niman

Diebold's biggest commercial success to date has been in the state of Georgia where it won the contract to supply voting machines and tally votes, making Georgia the first state to outsource an entire statewide election to a company using the new touch screen technology.

Shortly after Diebold took over the Georgia elections infrastructure, the Republican Party scored a series of historic upset victories in that state's 2002 elections. Foremost was the surprise defeat of Georgia's popular incumbent Democratic senator, Max Cleland. The race drew national attention since Cleland's Republican opponent, a pro-Iraq invasion activist who avoided military service in Vietnam, accused Cleland, a Vietnam veteran disabled in combat, of being unpatriotic. Election eve polls predicted that Cleland would beat his tasteless Republican rival, Saxby Chambliss, by between two and six percentage points. On election day, however, Cleland lost by seven percentage points, giving Chambliss what the national press called an "upset victory." That election, along with the earlier Nebraska race, gave Republicans control of the Senate.

For Georgians, Cleland's loss was just one act in a bizarre Election Day play. Also deposed in the same election was Georgia's Democratic governor, Roy Barnes. Pollsters predicted he'd easily trounce his Republican rival, Sonny Purdue, by a margin of as many as 11 percentage points. On Election Day, however, Purdue went on to beat Barnes by five points, making him the first Republican governor elected in Georgia in 134 years.

The upset victories also upset political pollsters, all of whom miscalled the Georgia races by embarrassing margins of as much as 16 percentage points. Pundits quickly explained away Barnes' loss, arguing that it was due to a surge of "angry" white male voters, upset with Barnes' decision to remove the slavery-era Confederate emblem from Georgia's state flag. According to the British Independent, however, there was no such demographic surge. To the contrary, black women were the only demographic group in the state showing an increase in voter participation in that election.

The election software in Georgia, as in Nebraska, is shielded from public scrutiny by a clause in the state's contract with Diebold. Following the election, however, Harris learned that Diebold software engineers changed the programming in the state's machines at least seven times leading up to the election. After the election, Diebold workers formatted the memory flash cards from the state's voting machines, making any examination of the electoral record, no matter how limited, impossible.

In the months following the Georgia elections, critics obtained copies of the software Diebold used in that state--passing it on to software analysts for examination. According to the Independent one analyst, Roxanne Jekot, found the software to be ridden with security holes. The programming was also riddled with embedded comments written by Diebold's programmers saying things like, "This doesn't really work" and "Not a confidence builder." Jekot was also worried by strange commands in the program to do things such as divide a category of votes by one. The command shows how easily code can be introduced to divide or multiply votes for specific candidates.