Beware computers that count votes

Computerised voting seems to be a good thing at first glance. 
But computer technologists and voting-rights advocates are now 
sounding the alarm: Just who owns the machines? Can they be 
programmed by those who own and operate them? Is this how the 
Bush administration stole the 2000 presidential election in the 
United States?

These questions are coming up again as the November 2004 
elections are to take place in the US.

In the past Afro-Americans and other "undesirable voters" were 
excluded from the vote by the poll tax or by literacy tests. Now 
it is being done by using computers.

O'Dell who is the chairman of the board of Diebold Election 
Systems, the second largest company in the US that counts votes 
is quoted as saying that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver 
its electoral votes to [George W Bush] in 2004".

On occasion, O'Dell hangs out at the Bush ranch in Crawford, 
Texas. He hosted a US$600,000 fundraiser for the Bush-Cheney 
campaign in Ohio in which Cheney was the featured speaker.

Questions began to swirl about Diebold's vote-counting machines 
soon after they began securing lucrative contracts under Bush's 
"Help America Vote Act", which provides US$3.9 billion to the 
states to help finance a total shift to electronic voting by 
2006.

The Act also provides funding for computerised voter rolls, 
including programs for the removal of "ineligible" voters. It is 
modelled on the vote scrubbing operation carried out by Database 
Technologies in the 2000 election when tens of thousands of 
mostly African American and Latino voters were improperly removed 
from the Florida voting rolls. This was the key to George W 
Bush's theft of the Presidential election.

Investigators discovered a web site set up by Global Elections 
Systems (GES) that was taken over by Diebold in 2002. It 
contained thousands of sensitive files on the hardware and 
software of the touch screen machines. It proved just how 
vulnerable they are to tampering and vote falsification.

Diebold sought an injunction to block circulation of the 
information on grounds of copyright infringement. But Swarthmore 
College students posted the memos on dozens of sites on the 
Internet and Diebold has since withdrawn the lawsuit.

A key criticism of some touch screen machines is that they leave 
no paper trail. There is no record for the voters to see how they 
cast their votes. The process has been described as voting into a 
"black box".

Three corporations own the hardware and software used to count 
about 80 percent of the votes cast electronically in the US.

A striking fact about the boards of these companies is the 
presence of former CIA directors, including James Woolsey, Bobby 
Ray Inman, John Deutch, and Gates and Carlucci. When has the CIA 
been pro-democracy? Why this keen interest in voting technology?

Who monitors these private companies? When asked questions they 
cite "security and competition" as reasons why they can't divulge 
every aspect of their vote-counting procedures.

Critics say that voting machines must not be privatised. Those 
who would profit from skewing elections against the working class 
should not own the machines. The voting apparatus should be 
publicly owned and operated. There should be no "trade secrets" 
to ensure that a voting machine company won't have to tell how 
the machines operate.

The critical issue is to keep the vote directly in the hands of 
the voters. The election laws in some countries require that as 
many ordinary people as possible be permitted into the room where 
the votes are tallied.

The US right wing, frightened as usual into skullduggery and 
violence by any whiff of democracy, knows well that it can't win 
if it does not cheat.