Dear Seven Days,
I would like to thank you for discussing the electronic voting controversy in your last issue. As the main source for the article, I would like to clarify and respond to a few important points. First, the article intertwined the issue of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) in the Burlington local election with the statewide elections that occur every year. These are two completely separate issues and should not be confused.
The concern about the Diebold systems we use is primarily about the larger statewide elections. As the articled stated, it is possible for anyone who has contact with the removable memory cards used in our elections to alter the results without leaving any trace whatsoever. Our state's Director of Elections Kathy DeWolfe remarked that the "hack test" which proved this vulnerability took place under conditions that do not exist in Vermont, because the hacker was given access to a memory card. Since the cards are kept under lock and key, she says, the hack is impossible. However she fails to acknowledge that before our state election officials receive the memory cards, any number of employees at Diebold and LHS have full access to the memory cards. The point is, that the memory cards could come to the state, already programmed to alter the results, and it would be undetectable. That is my main concern - Diebold and LHS, not local election officials. My concern is not based merely on the fact that the virtually all the top executives at Diebold contributed the maximum allowable amount to the GOP, it's also that they employ convicted criminals to write their software code. In fact, one of the main programmers at Diebold who wrote the code that counts many of the votes nationwide, was previously convicted of 23 felonies involving computer fraud and served 4 years in prison.
Ms. DeWolfe assures us that if election was rigged, it would be detected by a test that is done by local elections officials before the election. Rather than asking you to take my word for it, I will quote a recent Berkeley University report, commissioned by the California Secretary of State, in which a consortium of experts were asked to review the Diebold software code and concluded: "We determined that anyone who has access to a memory card ... can indeed modify the election results, and change vote totals ... There would be no way to know that any of these attacks occurred."
I wondered who is right -- the computer experts in Berkeley, or our Director of Elections? So I called my Town Clerk and asked her to describe the test that she does before every election. Then, I described the test (through an associate) to Harri Hursti, the person who performed the infamous "Hursti Hack" test. Sadly, he assured me that Kathy DeWolfe is incorrect - her test would definitely not detect what he did.
As a result of the Hursti Hack, several states and municipalities have taken action. Two counties in Florida and the entire state of Pennsylvania banned the exact machines we are using. Colorado put certification on hold. California decertified the machines and ordered the software code to be reviewed by an independent testing agency, which confirmed the vulnerability. The Governor of Maryland wrote a scathing letter to the state's board of elections saying he no longer has confidence in Diebold election systems.
While other states have taken appropriate action, our Director of Elections, whose job it is to ensure the security and integrity of our elections, has done absolutely nothing. In fact, when numerous people have contacted her office for an explanation, she repeatedly and inexplicably defends Diebold and supplies inaccurate information in her reply, assuring that anything like the Hursti Hack would be detected by the testing procedure. We now know that is not true. And when asked if our system complies with the 2002 Voting System Standards which clearly forbid the type of code used on the Diebold optical scan systems, her only reply is that the Standards, which are written by the Federal Election Commission, are not law.
The bottom line is this: I am not necessarily accusing Diebold or LHS of rigging an election. What bothers me is that they can. Elections are supposed to be transparent and they are not.
It is imperative that Ms. DeWolfe (and her boss, the Secretary of State) respond to the fact that significant vulnerabilities have been found in our election system and they do not comply with the Standards that were written to ensure the systems are secure. If she continues to ignore this problem, the people of Vermont should take her to task for not performing her responsibilities as our state's Director of Elections. We should also work to reform our laws to require open software code and random auditing of the system - two essential steps that would help ensure the integrity of our elections. I invite those concerned to learn more and join our efforts by contacting me at
[email protected], or visiting the website: election.solarbus.org.