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An I-Team 8 Investigation
Part One: Will Your Vote Count?

By Rick Dawson and Loni Smith McKown
I-Team 8

An I-Team 8 investigation reveals recent changes in voting technology have raised the risk of fraud and miscounting. The investigation finds serious questions about security and troubling concerns on both how the technology is sold, and who is getting rich on public money. It’s an investigation into the heart and soul of our way of government: your ability to vote.

You can blame all of this on the fiasco of the 2000 presidential election. It prompted the most change since the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. But after billions have been spent we have to ask: will your vote count?

The curtain is closing on the lever machines of yesterday, but new voting technology has new worries.

“It opens the possibility for a very quiet and subtle alteration of the vote nationally, by someone who wished to do that,” said Eugene Spafford, Purdue computer expert. That someone could be an insider or hacker who could electronically rig an election.

Another concern: testing of voting machines isn't tough enough and could miss problems. There's always the possibility of equipment failure.

Ever since the presidential election of 2000 put the words “hanging chad” into the lexicon, states are going high-tech.

One reason Marion County chose optical scan machines is because ballots are saved in case of a recount. “These machines are much more secure and much more tamperproof than old lever machines ever were,” said Doris Anne Sadler, Marion County clerk.

But other technology, like touch-screen machines, has no paper trail.

“There's no way to do the recount. All you have are the numbers. It's not a recount; it's a reread. And there's a significant difference there in the quality of results,” said Spafford.

Programming the Ballot Box

Karen Horseman helped choose Marion County's new machines. But she tells the I-Team she has reservations about the technology. “The companies that program them, who's watching them and what they're doing? Imagine how simple it would be to program a machine to read a ballot a certain way every third precinct,” said Horseman. “Instead of actually stuffing the ballot box, now you program it.”

There is another over-arching concern, and that's money. How much we are paying and who's getting rich?

“No one on this planet knows how much money the federal government ultimately is gonna give us yet,” said Todd Rokita, Indiana secretary of state .

When President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act , it promised almost $4 billion of our federal tax money would be reimbursed to counties buying new equipment. But the I-Team learned we'll only get back about two thirds of our investment.

In all, Indiana counties will spend almost $80 million for equipment purchased from just a few companies. When you multiply that by 50 states, “They're making a lot here. I think they are making a good degree of money,” said Rokita.

Fifty years ago, sales pitches for voting equipment emphasized accuracy and security. They still do. “I think this year you'll see that our entire industry is going to be under the microscope,” said James Ries, president of MicroVote .

Indianapolis-based MicroVote has been making electronic voting machines for about 20 years. The company's president knows this technology has skeptics.

"Leap of Faith"

“It's one of those areas of a leap of faith. That you really do have to have a faith in your local jurisdiction, that they are conducting equitable elections in the best faith of the voters,” said Ries.

Others wonder how much faith we should have in those making the machines. “We have one of every kind of our technology and equipment in here,” said Ken Carbullido, executive of Election Systems and Software (ES&S) .

The I-Team went to Omaha, Nebraska, where ES&S bills itself as the world's largest provider of voting machines. US Senator Chuck Hagel was once president of this company whose machines actually counted many of his Nebraska votes. “Senator Hagel might have had an affiliation some years ago, some role in the company. He's completely out of the operation at all,” said Carbullido.

In fact, the I-Team has learned that the Senate ethics committee found Senator Hagel still has financial ties to ES&S’ parent company, the McCarthy group. The senator's campaign treasurer is the chairman of that company.

Walden O’Dell is the man behind Ohio-based Diebold. The company is more widely known for its ATM machines. In the voting machine business for only two years, Diebold has become a major player.

Last summer O'Dell sent a fund-raising letter to fellow Republicans saying he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

“Perhaps it was a little irresponsible for these CEO’s or anybody in this kind of business to say something like that,” said Rokita.

But Diebold's money is talking, too. In the last election cycle, together, O’Dell and his company donated more than $100,000 to the Republican National Committee.

Ties That Bind

“When you work with a vendor, you develop a relationship,” said State Representative Kathy Richardson. She should know. Rep. Richardson was the Hamilton County clerk when she began purchasing $1.3 million worth of electronic voting machines from MicroVote. She's still Hamilton County's election administrator and says she plans to purchase an additional $700,000 worth of equipment.

Marion County's new $11.1 million optical-scan equipment was set up by Wendy Orange, a former employee of the Marion County clerk's office. She's now the ES&S project manager, with her office in the election board's warehouse.

The companies don't think that's a conflict. All these years, they've been saying, "trust us."

Companies still have many friends in government. But they have more than a few foes in academia, like Eugene Spafford of Purdue University, one of the nation's leading computer security experts. “This is a system that has the potential to hurt the public's confidence, to hurt some of the elections, and we should not be rushing headlong into adopting it,” he said.

Remember: States rushed to buy new voting machines because the federal government said they had to in time for this year's presidential election. That deadline has since been extended. But because of concerns about accuracy, reliability and security, many counties and even some states are holding off from any further purchases.

The machines are supposed to be tested to make sure they work properly, but I-Team 8 found that testing standards aren't tough enough.

An I-Team 8 Investigation
Part Two: Will Your Vote Count?

Election returns used to be tallied late into the night. Today, we want instant results. But at what cost?

I-Team 8's investigation reveals serious concerns about accuracy, reliability and security of modern voting technology. It leads to a question at the very heart of democracy: Will our votes count?

“Those of us who work with computing are perhaps most aware of the potential failures and the manipulations of the systems,” said Eugene Spafford, Purdue computer expert.

The first time Marion County's optical-scan machines were used in a general election, but it still took eight weeks to find out who won. “They're far more accurate because you don't have human beings making tallies,” said Doris Anne Sadler, Marion County clerk.

Are they really more accurate? I-Team 8 conducted our own test, with Sadler's cooperation. We marked 50 ballots from the last general election, chose five machines at random and had them tally ten ballots apiece. Each optical-scan machine counted votes correctly.

“So we take the individual results from each card and accumulate them into one place so we can give you an overall total for each race,” said Wendy Orange, ES&S project manager.

We compared results. Something happened when totaling the results from the five machines. One computer counted incorrectly, leading to a disparity of ten votes for one candidate. “It could be that I just didn't copy a file correctly to the hard drive,” said Orange.

Had this been a real election, we're told there would have been more quality control. “We run that test several times, prior to the election so that we're assured everything would accumulate correctly,” said Orange.

System Glitches

Incidents like this are referred to as glitches. Human error or machine malfunction, they're still mistakes that could affect the count.

Purdue University's Eugene Spafford is one of the nation's leading computer security experts. “With the voting machines, it's no single instance that is, by itself, great cause for concern, but it's the number of them that continue and the possibility for more,” he said.

In Texas, touch-screens either failed to respond to the touch or appeared to register a vote for the opposing candidate. In Florida, both optical-scan and touch-screen voting machines failed to read or record all votes cast.

Even in Boone County, Indiana, initial results on push-button voting machines showed 144,000 votes cast in a county with 19,000 registered voters.

What's the Excuse?

Glitches are reported in practically every U.S. state. What's the excuse?

“There might be what you might call a ‘glitch’ but that may just be something in terms of procedure,” said Ken Carbullido, ES&S.

“Instead of saying we have a technological difficulty, people point directly towards fraud, or they say there's something going on,” said Steve Shamo, MicroVote.

“It's a double-edged sword. As long as humans are involved, as long as we have humans are involved, it's unreasonable to expect a perfect system,” said Todd Rokita, Indiana secretary of state.

But it's not unreasonable to expect a secure system. “If an organization wanted to influence an election, one of the places to start would be either bribe or blackmail employees of a voting firm to insert very carefully crafted backdoors into the software that would allow them somehow to manipulate the vote,” said Spafford.

“With the human interaction in the process, it's going to be very difficult for some programmer theoretically to engineer the circuitry on a machine to do something that that voter didn't want them to do, with all the human checks along the way,” said Rokita.

Then how could electronic voting machines be rigged? We asked Spafford to show us how an election could be rigged. “We put together a very simplistic example of how a computer system can be manipulated,” he said.

Election Rigged in Half an Hour

Spafford said one of his undergraduates put together a rigged system in about half an hour. The student rigged a system where every third vote for one candidate actually goes to the other candidate. “Were you to ask us to design a program to do this and hide the code that changed the results, we could do that given about three days’ time,” said Spafford.

Hidden code, like a game buried in a spreadsheet program, could be planted in a voting machine and stay invisible, altering the count only on Election Day. “And the numbers can't be re-counted. All you can do is re-read them. The whole notion of a recount goes away - which is a very good way to hide if you are actually attempting to alter an election,” said Spafford.

Voting equipment and programs have to pass tests before being used. “With the certification levels that we have, with the process that we have, I think it will be very difficult if not impossible to change the turnout of an election,” said Rokita.

But computer experts tell the I-Team federal testing standards are not tough enough. “The independent testing associations do not include detailed testing at a level that would find code that is intended to be hidden,” said Spafford.

Certification

Our investigation reveals there's no testing at the state level. To become certified, companies just apply.

Sometimes uncertified equipment gets delivered. That was the case with this machine Marion County bought to count absentee ballots. It was not used in November and couldn't be used in the eight-week-long recount.

Rokita told I-Team he didn’t know of any uncertified system being used in Indiana. But two weeks after that interview, the Indiana Election Commission discovered three counties had used voting machines with uncertified programming.

“It's not possible to build a system that's a hundred percent secure against all threats. It is possible to build a system where any attempt to subvert it is likely to be caught and its effects are likely to be constrained to a small area,” said Spafford.

Indiana's primary is just months away. The stakes are even larger in the November general election: Indiana governor and President of the United States.

Rokita says we’re better off now than in 2000. But Spafford leaves this warning: “If the election is close, if it's controversial, the use of the electronic technology is only going to make the debate and perhaps the accusations that much stronger and longer lasting. And that's not something we really need in this country right now.”

What's so sad about this electronic voting is that it's soooo obviously open to hacking and fraud. It doesn't even qualify as real news. I have friends from overseas who are in AWE that our country is using electronic voting, because it's so potentially unsafe. It's like a joke that it even exsists.

Waaaakkkkkkeeeeee uuuuuuuuppppppppp...... :o

So, Mr. Shamo, if the vote shift that causes one candidate to win over another, when he actually should not have, is caused by "technological difficulty," shouldn't there be a revote? When I hang wallpaper and accidently put up a piece with the pattern upside down, the problem has to be corrected. Isn't this a similar state of affairs? I don't want to live with upside down wallpaper or a candidate who has won because the machines were malfunctioning.

Ever notice when an issue is found, they act as though it's the first one discovered in the entire process. As a tester for software....when this stuff happens, There is a technical reason for it.

I think a HUGE problem is the fact that people running the elections ARE NOT computer experts. The sweet, little, old ladies who run ours couldn't tell you what a modem was if you offered them a million bucks. If we're going to have high tech voting, we need to recruit nerds and geeks to work the polls!

You're exactly right! Most people dont have a clue. All they see is what is visually in front of them. Not faulting the little ole ladies, by far.