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Voting Rights Activists Gather in Oakland To Urge Fair Elections By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Friday September 16, 2005

Did George W. Bush steal America’s 2004 elections? 

For some 200 East Bay political activists gathered at the “Elections In Crisis!” symposium at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater this week, that’s not even an issue any more. The question they posed, over and over, in speeches, PowerPoint presentations, and movie documentaries, was how to stop it from happening again. 

According to Dan Ashby of the Voting Rights Task Force of the Wellstone Democratic Club, the sponsoring organization for the one-day symposium, electronic voting machines continue to be the main problem. 

“Any electronically-counted vote on proprietary software produced by private companies is inherently insecure,” Ashby said. “We need to end elections run by private companies. We need to return to hand-counted paper ballots, which has the most measure of security.” 

The vulnerability of electronic voting machines to fraud and vote-manipulation was the subject of the slide show presentation by Washington State investigative reporter Bev Harris, the author of Black Box Voting, a recently-published book on ballot tampering in the 21st century. 

Because vote-altering subprograms can be introduced into voting machines through the insertion of source codes that do their work and then erase all trace of their own existence, “we will never know exactly how many of these elections were stolen,” Harris said. “If it’s done right, there will be no trail.” 

But Harris gave examples of how her organization hired computer experts to hack into Diebold voting machines to alter vote totals, sometimes within a matter of a few seconds, during authorized tests in which she said Diebold security personnel stood by and watched but did not detect the hacking. 

Diebold manufactures the touch screen voting machines that are used in Alameda County elections. 

Harris said that a major vulnerable point for the Diebold machines is not necessarily the machines themselves, but the electronic memory card—similar in appearance to an ATM card—which is used by elections supervisors to interface with the machines. 

“What our expert found was that the program to count the votes was not on the individual voting machines themselves, but in the cards,” she said, explaining that at the end of an election, the vote card is inserted into the individual machine. It downloads the machine’s vote totals, and then is inserted into a second machine that electronically transmits the total to a central tabulating computer assembling the votes from all of the machines. “Our expert also found that these vote cards were available on the Internet, for $300,” Harris said. 

Harris said that her source was able to write his own program on the purchased vote card that, when slipped into the Diebold voting machine, altered the vote totals. 

While most of the symposium’s speakers, as well as Voting Rights Task Force member Ashby, pointed to the Republican administration as the main manipulator of election vote totals. Harris said that electronic voting machine votes were subject to voter theft and fraud from any number of directions, including disgruntled computer company employees and local business interests seeking to change the outcome of bond measures. 

Pointing out that many of the companies involved in the production and operation of electronic voting machines were both interconnected and strewn with high-level operators who had previously been convicted for computer fraud and other similar crimes, Harris said that “the potential for manipulation is widespread, and it can vary from place to place.” 

The other main speaker, Bob Fitrakis, blasted American voting officials for allowing the country to operate elections that “don’t meet minimal international standards.” Fitrakis is an Ohio journalist and editor of the phonebook-sized Did George W. Bush Steal America’s 2004 Election?, a collection of documents related to Republican election actions primarily in Ohio. 

Noting that he served as an international observer in the El Salvador elections of 1999, Fitrakis said “if I had gone into a precinct and was told that the votes were going to be counted in secret, with no public access, by representatives of an organization with close ties to the ruling junta, I would have immediately written that the election was a fraud.” 

Fitrakis said this was exactly the situation in the 2004 Presidential election, when many votes were counted on proprietary-software machines operated by Diebold, a company whose founders had close ties to the Republican administration. 

Wellstone’s Ashby said that the major purpose of the symposium was “to bring together in one place and one time activists and organizers and experts” concerned about vote-stealing and vote-manipulation. 

“This is going to be a multi-pronged effort,” he said. “We’re hoping that people in the audience will become interested in one of the many proposals that were introduced.” 

Other speakers at the symposium asked support for legislation proposed by state Rep. Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) to limit the influence of big-money donations on elections (AB 583), to urge Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign two pieces of legislation (SB 370 and AB 1636) that would provide for more secure and verifiable electronic voting, to support open source codes for electronic voting machines, and to conduct “parallel voting” activities during elections to verify whether the electronic vote totals accurately reflect the way people actually voted. 

Ashby said his organization’s next major concern was the upcoming November special election, where he said there will be no paper audit trail for electronic voting machines. Such an audit trail is not scheduled to go into effect in California until January 2006. 

“This is one reason we think the governor was in such a rush to hold this special election,” Ashby said. “We’re looking into what our organization can do to prevent an illegal Republican takeover of this election through manipulation of the voting machines.”