Diebold — The Face Of Modern Ballot Tampering by Faun Otter

Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.

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You can't vote them out if...you never voted them in.

The lack of any exit polling on November 5, 2002, has been oddly ignored by the media. Those pesky tracking polls leading up to the elections have been explained away by a late surge to the Republicans caused by....hmmmm, how about sun spot activity? With no exit polls, there was no other feedback to conflict with the "official" results, this allowed the Diebold touch screen machines to change the way election fraud is carried out.

Previously, election cheating was a complex matter of ballot tampering combined with sample skewing. That is to say, you screwed up ballots for your opponent with under or over votes, made sure that people likely to vote against you wouldn't even get that chance (the program of voter disenfranchisement in Florida) and padded your own vote total with such things as falsified absentee ballots.

In the much more high-tech world of Diebold electronics we are seeing a wonderfully efficient vote rigging system, the long proposed "black box" ' technology. Imagine a black box in which you cannot see the workings. The only things you can discern are an input and an output; in this case votes go in and collated totals come out. There is no paper record of each individual vote cast to enable any cross check of the collated output. The only information you can know for sure is the total number of votes cast on the machine. Each vote is stripped of any information as to who cast that ballot to guarantee anonymity for the voters. You now have a system in which you have no way to check vote recording, vote collation and transmission of the collated totals out of the black box.

The perfect crime?

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Not quite.

Let me suggest an experiment. We take two markets with similar socioeconomic mixtures and a well established record of moving in the same political direction. We provide them with candidates from party X and party Y. We then expose them to similar news stories, we spill TV and radio ads over between the markets to make the effects less local and give them identical weather on election day. The differences between the markets are 1. the candidates and 2. the method of casting and counting the votes. We then take a series of tracking polls on the gap between the candidates leading up to election day.

If we express the tracking poll data as the relative preference for the candidates (12 point lead by X, down one point from last week etc.), any substantial discrepancy between the forecast and actual election outcomes should arise from major news changes, the weather effects on turnout, or a a social tendency to misrepresent voting intent. Since both groups get the same news, the same weather and have the same social tendencies, any difference between tracking poll and actual poll data should be in the same direction and of a similar magnitude.

Sooooo...how come the South Carolina elections had the Democrats doing much better than the tracking poll data showed and the Georgia elections, in an area with the same weather, same news and same social values, had a massive swing in a single day in the opposite direction after the last tracking poll? Could it be the Diebold touch screen machines in use across the entire state of Georgia but not used at all in South Carolina?

Of course, such a perfect method of mischief has been attempted before (see VoteScam — Go to the link marked "Chapters" and read all about it.)

You can trim the wheels in mechanical voting machines but that is easier to spot than a computer program set up to be date sensitive so it causes only to misfunction on November 5. The current problem with virtual ballot tampering was apparent as long ago as 1989. Jonathan Vankin made this warning in Metro: Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper of Sept. 28, 1989

"A single, Berkeley-based firm manufactures the software used in the machines that compile more than two-thirds of the nation's electronically-counted votes. Analysts describe the software as 'spaghetti code,' tangled strands of instructions indecipherable to outsiders. The experts say the code could be manipulated without detection. In fact, that may have happened already."

After systematic punch card fraud was revealed in the 2000 election, touch screens were proposed as a panacea and have been rapidly adopted against the warning of experts,

Critics warn local election officials could be trading one set of problems for another potentially as bad, or worse, than last year's election debacle. They vigorously argue that fully electronic systems pose data-security problems and lack a paper trail. "There's no way to independently verify that the voter's ballot as cast was actually the ballot being recorded by the machine," said Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist and visiting lecturer at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

It would be interesting to impound a few machines from the heaviest-leaning Democratic areas in Georgia and reset the date in the machine to November 5, 2002. A hand counted series of inputs could be made to the machines. Note to James Baker: hand counting is the gold standard against which we check machine counting efficiency. An input of 500 or so dummy votes could then be tabulated and the outcome checked against the inputs. Of course, you could just check the software code. Except for one problem; the company refuses to let anyone see their code on the grounds that is a trade secret.

Oddly enough, Diebold are not the only Republican partisans who helped select our candidates for office yesterday:

According to his press office, in 1995 Chuck Hagel resigned as CEO of American Information Systems (AIS), the voting machine company that counted the votes in his first Senatorial election in 1996. In January 1996 Hagel resigned as president of McCarthy & Company, part of the McCarthy Group that are one of the current owners of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), which itself resulted from the merger of AIS and Business Records Corporation. According to publicist/writer Bev Harris, Hagel is still an investor in the McCarthy Group. ES&S is now the largest voting machine company in America. One of its largest owners is the ultra-conservative Omaha World-Herald Company.

For more background reading on who gets to play with your ballot, see voting equipment manufacturers on this site.

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| Chapter 3 — Direct Recording Electronic Voting |

| Next — Bald-Faced Lies About Black Box Voting Machines And The Truth About The Diebold Rob-Georgia File |

Last modified 6/14/09