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digital culture The Democracy You Save May Be Your Own
The use of electronic voting machines in the 2004 election may represent a giant step backward for democracy, their critics warn. One woman is fighting to change that. Apart from the term, hanging chad, the presidential election of 2000 also introduced a new concept to American democracy; namely, whoever controls the votes, controls the election. Vowing never to relive the utter fiasco which was the Florida recount, politicians began to champion vote reform and the institution of electronic voting machines to insure accurate vote counts. One woman, however, is showing the world that electronic voting machines are democracy’s worst enemy. Working from her basement office in Renton, Washington, (that’s Pacific Northwest Washington, not D.C. Beltway Washington), Bev Harris is about as far removed from the political workings of the Capitol as a person can be. Yet when she decided to investigate the workings of electronic voting machines and the companies that make them, she uncovered a situation that has caused lawmakers to stand up and take notice. A book publicist by trade, Harris hardly qualifies as a hacker. Perhaps that is what is so disturbing about the ease in which she stumbled onto the voting database for the 2002 California primary. Through the online files of electronic voting machine maker Diebold, within a few clicks Harris had the ability to change the primary voting records without leaving a trace. Horrified by what she saw, Harris turned to the Web, first to confirm her discovery and then to make it public. “None of this would have been possible without the Internet,” Harris said. After wrangling up a few local computer science professors to verify her findings, Harris found herself with an unbelievable story on her hands and no one willing to print it. “I’m a publicist, so I know how to get a story in the paper. But I couldn’t get anyone to touch this,” she said. “It wasn’t until I released the files on Democratic Underground that the story started getting a lot of awareness. Other websites started picking it up and then it got covered by a few alternative newspapers. Now it is a mainstream story which has been covered by Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times.” The Internet is now flooded with websites and stories of electronic voting gone wrong, including Harris’s own site, blackboxvoting.com. According to Harris, black box voting, which happens to be the name of her book on the subject, “is a computer term in which the processes happening on the inside are secret. Basically, no one is allowed to see what is going on inside.” The idea of a bunch of techies and Web geeks creating an Internet firestorm to prevent the adoption of new technology seems antithetical, sort of like a group of eight-year-old girls rallying to prevent the release of a new Barbie Dream House. Harris, however, says that it is only logical. “Technology people are the ones who get it, politicians certainly don’t, and the vendors are too busy stuffing their pockets to even worry about it,” she said. “Tabulating votes is a complex system, with many areas that can go wrong. People familiar with technology understand what this country is facing and how big a problem this could potentially be. If they don’t get this fixed, the upcoming election will be like Florida nationwide.” What started out as an investigation into the security of electronic voting machines has turned into a virtual Pandora’s Box of political foul play. Investigations into the makers of electronic voting machines have led to discoveries of payoffs, conflicts of interest and even promises of “delivering” certain states to the Republican Party. Furthermore, Harris said the manufacturers of these machines, citing trade secrets, do not have to reveal how they come to their tallies, and a lack of a paper trail makes it virtually impossible to tell when we’re being cheated. “We can’t know how often the machines get it wrong because we aren’t allowed to compare the actual vote with the machine-counted vote,” she said. Blackboxvoting.com cites dozens of documented cases in which malfunctioning or improperly uploaded electronic voting machines have either deleted large numbers of votes or simply created votes out of thin air. There is the election in Alameda County, California in which one third of the voting machines tallied no votes after a day’s worth of polling. Or the one in Dallas, Texas in which 41,000 votes were not voted due to software programming errors. Harris acknowledged that paper ballots were not infallible, but said the fundamental difference was a matter of scale. Hand counting mistakes are minimal compared with an electronic voting machine’s ability to wipe out thousands of votes in an instant. November looms and the solution to this problem doesn’t seem to be anywhere in sight. Is Harris worried? “Well, we can always buy pencils if we have to,” she said with a laugh. “I’m joking, but this is actually a very frightening situation. The country isn’t ready and it is not proper to run an election like this.” Just as Harris used the Internet to initially make the public aware of the problem, she urges concerned voters to keep up the fight online. “Now is the time to roll up our sleeves. If you encounter a problem with an electronic voting machine, post it on the Internet and make others aware of it. If we keep feeding these stories to the press, there will eventually come a point where they can no longer ignore us.” Related Links: Truthout, a website dedicated to truth and fairness in the media. VerifiedVoting.org fights for verifiable, transparent voting procedures. BuzzFlash.com targets the "pro-democracy, anti-hypocrisy" web audience. Kim Zetter, columnist for Wired focuses on e-voting issues. American Democracy at Risk, a non-partisan website speaking out against the dangers of electronic voting machines. Kasey Wehrum edits the “Net Art” section of ReadMe and is a graduate journalism student at New York University. |
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| Recent comments by Bill Gates have stirred up a small backlash among copyright reformists |
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 08.21.2004 - 4:06 pm EDT"Roshan shares a personal anecdote about P2P software"
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