-Caveat Lector-
Manufacturers Admit Voting Machines
Unreliable
"American elections are a fraud and a scam" is the stern
verdict of Pat Buchanan and a deeply disturbing
commentary on the state of democracy in America.
Exclusive to The SPOTLIGHT
By Christopher Bollyn
CHICAGO—Despite acknowledging "failure rates" ranging
from 16 percent to 28 percent, election officials here
express no concern for the integrity of the ballot in the
age of voting machines.
Across the United States, in precincts from coast to coast,
computers equipped with cellular telephony and two-way
mo dems count the votes. These ma chines, designed and
operated by private companies, and the laws that ushered
in their use, have essentially disenfranchised citizen
election judges from the vote-counting process and
relegated them to insignificant roles as public servants
working for private business on election night.
Some officials concerned with elections have pondered the
unthinkable, namely, the stealing of a presidential
election by computer fraud in the metropolitan areas of
key states.
Steve White, former assistant attorney general of
California, said, "Given the importance of the national
election, sooner or later it will be attempted. There is a
real reluctance to concede the gravity of the problem."
Every official interviewed at the Illinois State Board of
Elections was indifferent to the threat of computer vote
fraud. Rick Fulle, assistant director of voting systems and
25-year veteran of the board said, "You can't secure any
computer system."
A hand count of the votes by the election judges at the
precinct level, before posting the results, is the only way
to ensure that the machine tally is correct and that no
computer fraud has been perpetrated. However, election
officials discourage any manual audit saying that there are
too many choices on the ballot and that a manual count
would take too long.
Tests of computer vote-counting systems used in Illinois
from 1983-1987, which checked tens of thousands of
ballots, revealed significant errors in the computer
counting in more than 20 percent of the tests.
Fulle said that in Illinois today there is "a 16 percent error
rate" with ballot-counting machines. He expected
numerous problems on election night saying "equipment
will fail across the state."
"I don't understand why nobody cares," Michael L. Harty,
former Illinois director of voting systems and standards
said. "At one point, we had tabulation errors in 28 percent
of the systems tested, and nobody cared."
Officials from the Illinois Board of Elections said election
judges are only required to verify that the number of
ballots tabulated by the machine matches the number of
ballots counted by the judges—as if voters are only voting
for one candidate.
"Nothing in the [Illinois] law requires that the count be
accurate," Fulle added.
In this way the basic role of election judges—to count and
verify the accuracy of the vote—has been usurped and
compromised by election machines operated by private
companies.
Whether it was the Precinct Ballot Counter 2100 (PBC),
the Optech Eagle III, the Model 100 Optic Mark Reader
(OMR), or the Votronic touch-screen system that counted
your vote, these machines have something in common:
they are all designed and operated by Elections Systems &
Software, Inc. (ES&S). Each contains a two-way modem,
allowing them to communicate—and be communicated
with—while they are in operation.
What is particularly troubling about these machines is the
fact that they contain an internal modem, which enables
anyone with a modem-equipped computer, from hackers
and vendors to telephone company personnel and
politicians, to access and alter the computer's tally of the
votes.
ES&S is "the largest company in the world focusing solely
on automating the election process." The company
"provides specialized systems and software to automate
the entire election process for local, state, and national
governments worldwide."
ES&S is a reorganized company that was given a new
name in November 1997 after combining two of the largest
election machine companies: Business Re cords Corp.
(BRC, formerly part of Cro nus In dus tries) and American
Informa tion Systems, Inc. (AIS).
ES&S is a privately-held company owned by unknown
investors and headed by Aldo Tesi, who refers to the
democratic franchise as "the election industry."
The company is headquartered in Omaha, Neb. and
supplies "thousands and thousands of machines being
used across the country" to more than 2,200 U.S.
jurisdictions in 49 states.
Cook County bought nearly 5,000 PBC machines from ES&S
at a cost of $25 million for the suburbs and the city of
Chicago in what a company spokesman called a "huge
contract."
ES&S supplied Model 100 ballot-counting machines through
a Madrid-based company called Indra for the elections in
Venezuela.
It was reported in The Omaha World Herald that the head
of Venezuela's National Elections Council, Etanislao
Gonzalez, placed the blame for the technical difficulties
during the election on the Nebraska-based ES&S.
The Omaha World Herald is published by John Gottschalk,
who is one of the directors of ES&S.
"The firm flagrantly failed to meet its commitments and
the failure had destabilized the country's electoral
process," Gonzalez said.
A Venezuelan air force jet flew to Omaha to fetch experts
to "salvage" the election. It was reported that more than 6
percent of the 7,000 voting machines broke down during
the Venezuelan election and that there were major
"technical glitches."
The PBC machines contain an internal Expedite modem
made by Novatel Wire less, an international company
based in San Diego.
Novatel is a "spin-off" of two Canadian companies,
Novatel, Inc. of Calgary, a company specializing in
satellite communications and global positioning systems,
and an internationally owned oil company in Alberta.
"You certainly run the risk of somebody hacking into these
[vote-counting] ma chines," a spokesman for Novatel Wire
less told The SPOTLIGHT. "The machine can be accessed
anytime it is plugged in," if someone knows the
computer's Inter net protocol or IP address.
"Internet voting scares me," he added, "it puts us in the
same situation as a Third-World country."
When asked about the ownership of Novatel Wireless, he
said, "I've no idea who owns the company."
Roy Saltman, a computer consultant at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology's Computer Systems
Labora tory, wrote a report for the Com merce De partment
in 1988 entitled, Accuracy, In tegrity, and Security in
Computerized Vote-Tallying.
Saltman documented many instances of vote
mistabulation and the inherent vulnerability of U.S. voting
systems to error and fraud, including: "fraudulent
alterations in the computer program or in control cards
that manipulate the program" and "introduction of false
voting summaries through changes in data stored in
removable data storage units of precinct-located,
vote-counting devices."
Herb Deutsch, who works in the technical department of
ES&S in Rockford, Ill., where the PBC was designed, has
worked with election software and hardware for 25 years
and formerly worked for BRC.
Deutsch defended the PBC saying that its ballot tabulation
program is "generic" and that its computer code has been
"certified."
Deutsch said that he trusted that the election computers
were safe from hackers on the very day that it was
reported that Microsoft's computers and source code had
been "hacked" for a week.
Each PBC machine is programmed and run by a
pre-programmed 512-K memory card. According to
Deutsch, "the memory card can be used for lots of
purposes" and contains the coded instructions that
"essentially tell the machine what to do" when it is turned
on. These cards are programmed at the company offices of
ES&S in Chicago.
The card is removed by the election judges and turned in
to headquarters when the polls close.
Vikant Corp., a Chicago area company owned by Alex
Kantarovich of Minsk, Belorussia, supplied the control
cards to ES&S.
When The SPOTLIGHT inquired where Vikant cards are
produced, Kan tarovich said, "I cannot disclose where the
cards are made," but admitted that they are not made in
America.
Kantarovich told The SPOTLIGHT that he has been in
America for 11 years but declined to discuss his
employment prior to running Vikant Corp., saying, "I don't
want to disclose that information."
Kantarovich said he had obtained his degree in the Soviet
Union and initially refused to answer questions about how
his product was chosen for the ES&S voting equipment.
It is "inside information that I cannot disclose," he added.
Kantarovich said later that his firm was chosen over larger
firms like IBM and Panasonic because Vikant was able to
meet the specific requirements of ES&S and provide the
cards on short notice. He added, however, that there had
been "some problems" with the cards from other suppliers.
"To tell you the truth, I have no idea how these vote
counting machines work," Kantarovich said. "We are just
the supplier of one particular product."
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