High-tech train wreck?

It's Election Day 2004. Do you know where your voting machine has been?What about its software code? Its programmers? And just what political persuasion are they?

Flummoxed? Chances are, the secretary of state's office isn't completely sure either. And that's why a long and growing list of computer scientists and security experts are calling on election officials around the country to consider a small but significant change to direct recording electronic (DRE) voting -- our new touchscreen machines. They want the machines to produce a paper record of the ballots cast, a voter-verifiable audit trail. To make their case, they're using Georgia as an example of what can go wrong even in a seemingly successful election and just how many opportunities exist to sabotage the system.

That's probably news to most Georgians. According to a December survey released by the University of Georgia, 70 percent of the 800 respondents said they were "very confident" the machines recorded their votes correctly. Ninety-seven percent said they had no problems using the new touchscreen system supplied by Diebold.

The cadre of computer experts suggests voters need a healthy dose of skepticism. Paper is the wave of the future.

"I'm making a strong statement there," says Stanford University computer scientist David Dill. "I'm saying within the state of the art in computer science, it is not known how to be sufficiently sure that the programs are bug-free and especially to be sufficiently sure that there is no tampering, that it's actually safe to use them without paper."

Secretary of State Cathy Cox, though, says a paper trail will create more opportunity for fraud, not less. Georgia's tainted election history serves as a primer on what could happen, she says.

But conversations with Cox and her staff make one wonder whether they've been given the best information on just how vulnerable the DRE system is.

And in this case, the potential harm that accompanies the cure outweighs the risk of doing nothing.

Georgia has never been a leader in ensuring untainted elections. Besides the ignominious racial history it shares with states across the South -- poll taxes, voter intimidation and worse -- Georgia also enjoys a rich heritage of vote buying and voter fraud. As recently as the mid-1990s, Dodge County was the site of the largest-ever federal vote-buying investigation, which sent two dozen people to jail. Moreover, in many poor, rural counties, the punch card system often resulted in elections in which votes could not be counted for as much as 20 percent of voters, so-called undervotes.

Under the old system, the state was ripe for a Florida-style, hanging-chad meltdown.

But Cox's $54 million effort to computerize the state's election system changed the country's estimation of Georgia, as scores of articles from across America before and after the November elections attest. The secretary of state moved ahead with voting reform on the state's dime instead of waiting for federal money that was only recently released.

Cox argued that it was necessary lest Georgia be the site of Florida 2000 redux.

"I think [Cox] has done a remarkable job," says Robert Pastor, the head of American University's Center for Democracy and Election Management, and former Emory University professor. The secretary of state should be lauded for putting Georgia in the forefront of election reform, he says.

Cox and her office engineered a statewide voter education program designed to familiarize Georgians with the DRE system, and they did it without any partisan chest beating. Her success reinforced her reputation as an administrator and cemented Cox as one of the most popular Democrats in the state, someone who figures to be in the scrum for governor in four years.

That said, Nov. 5 didn't pass without a few hiccups -- machines freezing up and complaints of computers registering incorrect votes. But for a new system, everything seemed to go remarkably well.

But take a short trip around the Internet today, and Georgia looks positively Nigerian. You'll likely happen upon Bev Harris' blackbox voting site, among a number of others that question the security of Georgia's 2002 election.

Some of the conspiracy theory floating around in the electronic ether can be traced to Gov. Sonny Perdue's defeat of incumbent Roy Barnes, the largest gubernatorial upset in the nation in 2002. But focusing on the conclusions that some of the critics draw, ignores the fact that investigations like Harris' raise some real questions.

Among the more troubling discoveries: Harris, a Seattle-based publicist and writer, found a Geocities website that Diebold used to allow technicians to download program information while in the field. On the site, which could be accessed anonymously and without a password, Harris discovered files such as "rob-georgia." The mere fact that anyone could get onto the site is alarming enough, but conspicuously named documents seemed to indicate Election Day mischief.

Then there is the matter of the software patches. Diebold put the patches on all the touchscreen machines because a Windows bug was freezing the machines after 75 or so votes, says Cox's office. Yet no one at the state, neither Cox's office nor a group at Kennesaw State University overseeing the transition to the DRE machines, examined the source code of the software patches to be sure that they did what Diebold told them they would do.

"What Georgia did instead was they called the manufacturer and they just asked over the telephone if it would change anything," Harris says. "Of course, the manufacturer doesn't want to spend several thousand dollars getting it re-certified, so they just said, 'No. Don't worry about.' Nobody looked at them." And even with the patches, Diebold technicians ran around the state on Election Day telling poll workers that they needed to re-boot the machines after a certain number of ballots or they would tally votes for the wrong candidates, as one Oconee County poll worker, who asked to remain anonymous, recalls. Diebold admits that a small percentage of its machines experienced the freezing problem.

To the secretary of state's office, Harris is an irritant and a gadfly. And they rebut a number of her accusations. They produce a Diebold e-mail that states, "[T]here is no merit to the insinuations of security breaches in the Diebold Election Systems solutions. The old [Geocities] Global Election Systems site has been taken down because it contained old, out-of-date material." (Harris notes, however, that new files were placed on the site as recently as mid-January.)

As for the "rob-georgia" file, Cox says Diebold employed a field technician in Georgia named Rob.

She dismisses the possibility of subverting Georgia elections as extremely unlikely and staggeringly difficult because of the multi-tiered testing process that subjects the machines, software and the firmware to rigorous examinations at the state and national levels. Critics of paperless elections, Cox asserts, just don't know what they're talking about. In addition to the memory cards that capture the individual voter's results, two additional memories store the ballot tallies. And Diebold claims it has never "lost" votes in an election.

"It would take a conspiracy beyond belief, of all these different poll workers, [most of whom] are just happy to know how to unfold this machine and plug it in, who couldn't begin to understand how to get in there and change the software," Cox says. "The machines are not networked, so you would have to get into every individual machine to try to manipulate elections. Probably not more than maybe 100-200 people voted on any one machine in any polling place. I don't see how this could happen in the real world."

There's a long line of computer scientists willing to explain it. On the one hand, Stanford University's Dill agrees that Georgia's election safeguards are laudable and more stringent than those in other states, but he says Cox's assessment that it would take a vast conspiracy to rig an election is flat wrong.

"It requires one programmer at the company who has a political agenda or who has been bribed or somebody who can break into the company's network, who can hack the code when they're not looking," Dill says.

"Furthermore," he adds, "it's not a weird idea. I've looked a little bit into tampering with gambling machines. The security with gambling machines is generally much stronger than with voting machines, yet people will do amazing things. Insiders have hacked the code. They've had multi-person conspiracies ... for relatively small amounts of money, much less than would be involved in controlling some piece of the government."

Proponents of paper audits produce election scenarios that make one wonder whether Cox's staff is relying on the right people to supply it with technical answers. For instance, Dill and University of Iowa computer scientist Douglas Jones, who also recently served as chairman of the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems, suggest a programmer could make changes to the binary code that runs the computer without leaving his fingerprints in the source code that is supposed to be examined by federal labs.

After consulting with the state's experts, Cox press secretary Chris Riggal says that is an impossibility, that any changes to the binary code would be reflected in the source code.

"[His] response is another example of willful or uninformed misrepresentation that is common on the part of the vendors, misinformed election officials and gullible people," says Peter Neumann, one of the top computer security specialists in the country, who then explains in an e-mail message a number of ways interested parties could get around current security measures.

But Cox says paper audits are the wrong way to go. It creates too many new opportunities to compromise an election. She cites a California Institute of Technology/MIT voting study that states: "A receipt is an easy check that every voter could use to make sure the process works correctly. However, receipts invite corruption." Observable votes allow voters to trade their picks to corrupt officials or political operatives, it concludes.

"I'll be honest with you, whenever you manually start handling paper in elections in this state, you invite problems," Cox says. "Even with this optical scan ballot that we've had, when they have a recount and the paper has to be locked up overnight how mysteriously some of the ballots disappear, or the next day they get mis-marked. We have just a terrible history of people trying to manipulate elections here."

The current DRE machines can spit out paper receipts, but Cox also worries that will only lead to paper jams, more technical problems and a spike in the time it takes for voters to make their selections.

Dill buys the latter argument but not the former.

"We're not advocating that paper receipts be distributed to the voters at all," he says. "We're saying that those things need to go into a locked ballot box so that they're available for recounting."

Cox's concerns about the problems paper receipts could cause are another matter, Dill says. Paper will pose more problems, but "you can't sacrifice the integrity of the elections in order to make it easier. If you want to have easy elections, we could draw straws. We could just let the incumbents continue to serve, but that's not how we do things. The ease of the election is not the most important thing. Issues like the privacy of the voter and the integrity of the election are the most important things."

Pastor, who is also on the national governing board for the non-partisan citizens' group Common Cause, which promotes honest and open government, seconds Dill and he's joined the list of experts advocating paper audits of the voting machines, a full accounting of which can be found at Dill's website: verify.stanford.edu/evote.html. Pastor also points to a significant failing of election reform in Georgia: While Cox's office noted the decline in undervotes, it didn't do a study on how well the machines performed, so all they have is anecdotal evidence and Diebold's own statement that just 120 of its units froze up on Election Day. Without an independent audit of the performance of the system, there exists a gap in the empirical arguments for and against introducing paper receipts.

Given Cox's reluctance to entertain the paper ballot solution, it seems unlikely Georgia will change its ways without controversy intervening first. And Harris says that's a foregone conclusion.

"Whatever happens, this is not going to go away," she concludes. "All they're going to get is lawsuits."

kevin.griffis@creativeloafing.com