Bev Harris at Seattle Times

She's at center of high-tech voting debate

Seattle Times - Thursday, August 21

Bev Harris, a middle-aged woman who operates a small public-relations business out of her Renton home, would seem an unlikely person to be at the center of a national battle over electronic voting.

Yet in recent months her muckraking, Web-based journalism has helped energize a growing movement of citizens and computer scientists concerned about the potential for fraud in America's increasingly high-tech elections.

Harris has been vilified as a conspiracy theorist and lauded as "the Erin Brockovich of elections."

Public concern over the integrity of elections was fanned by the spectacle of hanging and dimpled chads on Florida's antiquated punch-card ballots during the 2000 presidential election.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002, aimed at preventing such controversial elections in the future, requires states to replace mechanical voting machines and punch-card ballots with optical scan or touch-screen systems by 2006.

Snohomish County has become the first in Washington to introduce touch-screen voting. King County has used an optical-scan system since 1998.

Harris might have remained obscure if she had not stumbled across something on the Internet.

While seeking information last January about a voting-machine company for a book she was writing, she found a Web site "on about the 15th page of Google." The open, unprotected site held some 40,000 files that included user manuals, source code and executable files for voting machines made by Diebold, a corporation based in North Canton, Ohio.

She had exposed a massive security breach.

Harris — whose book, "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century," (Plan Nine Publishing, $15.95) is due in print within weeks — was unknown and able to find little media interest in the find. That began to change early last month when a New Zealand Web site, Scoop, posted articles about the Diebold Web site, the election industry and Harris' claim that electronic voting is vulnerable to fraud.

Scoop, in Harris' view, "tabloidized" the news, hyping it as "bigger than Watergate" and "the biggest political scandal in American history, if not global history."

A more sober analysis by computer scientists from Johns Hopkins and Rice universities brought the issue to a mainstream audience.

Dan Wallach of Rice and Avi Rubin, Tadayoshi Kohno and Adam Stubblefield of Hopkins' Information Security Institute reviewed source code from the Diebold Web site for the company's increasingly popular touch-screen voting machines. They branded the machines' protective software "far below even the most minimal security standards," warning that election insiders or voters with fake "smart cards" could manipulate the vote.

Claims rebutted

Diebold, a security company best known for its ATMs, issued a rebuttal of the scientists' claims. Executives also questioned the scientists' motives, noting that Rubin and Wallach had joined hundreds of other computer technologists in signing a resolution against voting machines that lack accompanying paper ballots or other "voter-verified audit trail."

The Hopkins-Rice study was tainted this week when Rubin acknowledged he had a financial stake in a Diebold competitor, Bellevue-based VoteHere. Rubin said he was quitting VoteHere's advisory board and returning his stock options.

Diebold issued a statement that said it was "shocked and disappointed" over Rubin's conflict of interest.

Diebold Vice President Tom Swidarski likens the growing fears of election fraud to predictions of a Y2K technological meltdown four years ago. "I would have reporters calling me constantly about ATMs printing out money and planes falling out of the sky. There were all these doomsday scenarios."

Posting sensitive files on an unprotected Web site was "a huge mistake" made by Global Election Systems, a company Diebold acquired two years ago, Swidarski said. Diebold closed the site after Harris publicized its existence.

Before the site was closed, Harris downloaded software for Diebold's Global Election Management System (GEMS), which counts votes in King County and 1,000 other counties and cities in several states.

Harris has published on her Web site a description of how she changed the votes of two Georgia senatorial candidates in an election simulation — and then covered her tracks so the vote tampering would not be detected. "All you have to do is go in the back door, and you can change it," she said.

Diebold's Swidarski dismissed Harris' simulated vote rigging, saying election supervisors would detect any manipulation of votes.

Election officials in King and Snohomish counties and the Washington Secretary of State's Office say their faith in electronic-voting systems has not been shaken by the challenges of Harris and the Hopkins and Rice scientists.

Dean Logan, the state elections director who will soon become King County's elections director, said election results are closely watched by local officials, with investigations and recounts when irregularities are suspected.

Ellen Hansen, elections consultant to the Metropolitan King County Council and former county elections director, said she is trying to schedule a meeting with Harris. Hansen's initial discussions with elections experts about Harris' concerns have not led her to conclude that elections here could be rigged.

But, Hansen said, "Clearly, nobody's dismissing it. Nobody's saying what she's saying is impossible. ... Everybody wants a good election."

Bev Harris' Web sites are at blackboxvoting.org and blackboxvoting.com

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printed from Bev Harris at Seattle Times on 2004-05-25 22:26:14