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By Mark Lewellen-Biddle | 12.11.03
Voting Machines Gone Wild!
As the federally mandated deadline nears for state election officials
to replace lever and punch-card voting machines with electronic
systems, disturbing and systemic problems are emerging.
E-voting has obvious downsidesno ability to check recorded votes,
no ability to perform meaningful recounts and susceptibility to
electronic voting fraud. Nonetheless, the 2002 Help America Vote
Act (HAVA) mandates that by January 1 states submit plans to make
the switch in time for the 2006 elections.
More troubling, the backers of the act and the manufactures of
e-voting machines are a rats nest of conflicts that includes
Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS)
and Accenture. Why are major defense contractors like Northrop-Grumman
and Lockheed-Martin mucking about in the American electoral system?
And who are Accenture and EDS?
Until January 1, 2001, Accenture was known as Andersen Consulting,
a part of Arthur Andersen. Despite having offshore headquarters,
Accenture is a member of the U.S. Coalition of Service Industries
(USCSI), an industry association that promotes vastly extending the
privatization and free trade in services via the WTO and GATT. It
also is a member of U.S. Trade, the coalition that pushed for
fast-track trade authority. In February 2001, Accenture and
election.com, the leading global election software and services
company, formed an alliance to jointly deliver comprehensive election
solutions to governments worldwide. The companies will combine
their strengths and experience in the development of election
software and the use of technology to offer governments new
efficiencies that aid election administration. Election.com also
has a contract with the Federal Voter Assistance program to provide
online absentee balloting for the armed services. It is expected
to be completely electronic, that is, have no paper trail against
which to check results.
This is worrisome because Accenture already has been involved in
scandals in the United States and Canada. In the late 90s, the
company was hired to overhaul Ontarios welfare service for $50
million-$70 million. By 2002, the project was capped at $180 million,
although the total reached $246 million. To meet its contractual
agreement with Accenture, the Ontario government was forced to cut
welfare payments to $355.71 per child in poverty and fire large
numbers of social service workers. Election.com also had problems
in Canada. The company contracted to provide online Internet voting
for the National Democratic Party in 2003, but hackers paralyzed
the central computer and disrupted voting. The security and accuracy
of election.coms voting software has since come under attack by
Canadian voters who also challenged the ballotless software.
EDS, another internationally oriented information technology
corporation, recently received a $51 million subcontract from Sytel
Inc, a software and service provider to the Army, Air Force and Dow
Chemical, among others, to support personnel systems including
personnel management, hiring and job postings, employee training,
job exchange programs and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
complaint tracking for the Department of Homeland Security.
Partisan ties
Why Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, EDS and Accenture have been
hired to alter the election process in America becomes clear when
personnel is considered. The three largest voting machine companies
in America are Election Systems and Software (ES&S), Sequoia and
Diebold. Like Accenture, they, too, have tarnished pasts.
ES&S, formerly American Information Systems, is owned by the McCarthy
Group, which was founded in the 90s by Michael McCarthy, campaign
director to Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) during the 1996 and 2002
elections. In a January interview with Bev Harris on talion.com,
McCarthy said that Hagel still owns up to $5 million in the ES&S
parent company, the McCarthy Group and that Hagel also had owned
shares in AIS Investors Inc., a group of investors in ES&S itself.
According to Harris, Hagel did not disclose owning or selling shares
in AIS Investors Inc. to the Senate Ethics Committee, nor did he
disclose that ES&S is an underlying asset of McCarthy Group. In an
October article in the London Independent, Andrew Gumbel writes
that Hagel became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected
to the Senate from Nebraska, cheered on by the Omaha World-Herald
newspaper which also happens to be a big investor in ES&S. In what
can only be called a glaring conflict of interest, 80 per cent (sic)
of Mr. Hagels winning votesboth in 1996 and in 2002were counted,
under the usual terms of confidentiality, by his own company.
Sequoia is the second-largest company, with roughly one-third of
the voting machine market. In 1999, the Justice Department filed
federal charges against Sequoia alleging that employees paid out
more than $8 million in bribes. In 2001, election officials in
Pinellas County, Florida, cancelled a $15.5 million contract for
voting equipment after discovering that Phil Foster, a Sequoia
executive, faced indictment in Louisiana for money laundering and
corruption.
Diebold is probably the best known of the three because of its
recent unsuccessful attempt to quash the release of thousands of
inter-office memos over the Internet. The memos show that Diebold
executives were aware of bugs in the companys software and warn
that the network is poorly protected against hackers. The company
also came under scrutiny because of voting irregularities caused
by its machines in the 2000 election in Florida.
Diebolds CEO, Walden ODell is an avid supporter of George W. Bush
and has come under attack for penning a fund-raising letter in which
he promised to help deliver Ohios votes to Bush in 2004. Diebold
has been retained by the state of Maryland to provide voting software
for the 2004 election, but because of ongoing negative publicity,
Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation
(SAIC) of San Diego, to assess the security of the companys voting
software.
But wait, theres more
Many SAIC officers are current or former government and military
officials. Retired Army Gen. Wayne Downing, who until last summer
served as chief counter-terrorism expert on the National Security
Council, is a member of SAICs board. Also on the board is former
CIA Director Bobby Ray Inman, who served as director of the National
Security Agency, deputy director of the CIA and vice director of
the Defense Intelligence Agency. During the first Bush administration
and while on the board of SAIC, Immen was a member of the National
Foreign Intelligence Board, an advisory group that reports to the
president and to the director of Central Intelligence.
Retired Adm. William Owens, a former vice chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff who sits on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfelds
Defense Policy Board, served as SAICs president and CEO and until
recently was its vice chairman. He now is chairman of the board of
VoteHere, which seeks to provide cryptography and computer software
security for the electronic election industry. Robert Gates, ex-CIA
director, former SAIC board member and a veteran of the Iran-Contra
scandal, also is on the board of VoteHere.
SAIC has a history of problems. In a 1995 article in Web Review,
investigative journalist Stephen Pizzo notes that in 1990 the Justice
Department indicted SAIC on 10 felony counts for fraud, claiming
that SAIC mismanaged a Superfund toxic cleanup site. SAIC pleaded
guilty. In 1993 the Justice Department again brought charges against
the company for civil fraud on an F-15 fighter contract. In May
1995, the company was charged with lying about security system tests
it conducted for a Treasury Department currency plant in Fort Worth,
Texas.
It is not clear how SAIC became the company of choice to evaluate
security standards of the voting machine industry. Under HAVA, Bush
is required to establish an oversight committee, headed by two
Democrats and two Republicans, as well as a technical panel to
determine standards for new voting machinery. The four commission
heads were to be in place by last February, but [as of October 13]
just one has been appointed. The technical panel also remains
unconstituted, even though the new machines it is supposed to vet
are already being sold in large quantities, Gumbel says.
Many computer experts agree that electronic voting represents the
most feasible means of conducting large-scale elections, but not
until security of the software can be established. But the voting
machine companies want to retain secrecy over their codes as well
as maintain control over the entire voting process, including the
counting of ballots.
Most voting machines do not provide a paper trail so, in the case
of a recount, all one can do is push a button and watch as the
computer spits out the same set of numbers.
Americans are being rushed into this electronic voting frontier
with little public awareness of the consequences. Diebold already
has between 35,000 and 50,000 machines in place around the country.
With the government investing nearly $4 billion in voting machines,
those who insist on ensuring that the system is secure have been
shunted aside.
Perhaps this is how the administration intends to bring democracy
to the world: Hold elections using voting machines supplied by
Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia and elect friendly governments. Then,
hope that those people who have never experienced the democratic
process wont know the difference. More troubling is that many
Americans may not know the difference, either.
Mark Lewellen-Biddle is working on his Ph.D. in American Studies
and Political Science at Purdue University.
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