Hackingville, Ohio

There’s a lot of credulity in this country, and I noticed it when we saw Hillary break down before the New Hampshire primary. News reporters took it to be the real thing. Supposedly this led to a surge of votes for her in that primary, but the truth is that we’ll never know. The Kucinich recount in that state was halted when he dropped out of the race, and the whole process has been so sloppy and compromised that it’s just a black hole.

It’s credulity that leads us to trust e-voting without paper ballots. The very idea that a vote can be cast and counted in a black hole without chance of audit is supremely stupid. Turning our elections over to private corporations using proprietary software is a monumental violation of public trust. Those officials that have done this need to find other work.

Here’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., writing in the 2/7/09 issue of Rolling Stone, on an audit done of Ohio’s voting system:

When Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner ordered an audit of electronic voting machines in her state last year, she fully expected to uncover a host of security flaws. As I reported in “Was the 2004 Election Stolen” (Rolling Stone 1002), Ohio’s touch-screen machines were open to hacking, flipped votes from John Kerry to George Bush, and on one case spontaneously cast 3,893 votes for the president.

But even this dismal track record didn’t prepare Brunner for the verdict returned by two teams of independent researchers in December. “I was shocked and dismayed,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep for days after I first read these reports. All of the systems failed miserably.”

The Ohio audit is the most exhaustive study of e-voting machines in the nation. Two teams of nonpartisan researchers – one composed of corporate-security experts, the other of academics – found that the terminals are so insecure they simply cannot be trusted. “There is the ability,” concludes Brunner, “to mount a wholesale attack on our voting system.”

Researchers were able to alter election results using only a magnet and a personal digital assistant. Forty percent of touch-screen machines manufactured by Diebold – now known as Premier – flipped votes, and one of the company’s machines erased votes without warning once its memory card was full. Even more alarming, electronic ballot counters could be rigged by poll workers to disregard votes without anyone knowing. “If that were done for just a few minutes every hour, you will have a final vote total that doesn’t look too far off,” says Brunner. “Unless you did a hand count of every ballot, you’d never know it.”

Brunner is urging state lawmakers to replace touch-screen equipment with paper ballots that can be electronically scanned and tabulated by bipartisan election boards. But the danger posed by touch-screen machines, she warns, isn’t confined to Ohio – her audit confirmed flaws that have been uncovered from California to Connecticut.

“Systems used across the country have critical security flaws,” she says. “Public officials have an obligation to act on this.

When we have to rely on paperless e-voting to count our votes, our only audit check is pre-election and exit polls. They’ve been widely variant since the advent of gadgetry, leading trusting souls to speculate that polling is no longer a respected science.

Is there some kind of award for that kind of naiveté?