by Bob Fitrakis
The
ghosts of 2004 election irregularities
Diebold was at the
center of Ohio’s 2004 election debacle, much of this captured in an
article by Free Press Senior Editor Harvey Wasserman and this author,
entitled, “Diebold’s Political Machine.” Walden "Wally"
O'Dell, chairman of the board and chief executive of Diebold, was a
long-time funder of Republican candidates. In September 2003, he held
a packed $1,000-per-head GOP fundraiser at his 10,800-square-foot
mansion Cotswold Manor in Upper Arlington, Ohio. He was feted as a
guest at then-President George W. Bush's Texas ranch, joining a cadre
of “Pioneers and Rangers” who pledged to raise more than $100,000
for the Bush reelection campaign. Most memorably, in 2003 O'Dell
penned a letter pledging his commitment “to helping Ohio deliver
its electoral votes to the President.” O'Dell defended his actions,
telling the Cleveland Plain Dealer “I'm not doing anything wrong or
complicated.” But he also promised to lower his political profile
and “try to be more sensitive.” But the Diebold boss' partisan
cards were squarely on the table. Prior to the 2004 election,
Blackwell tried to award a $100 million unbid contract to Diebold for
electronic voting machines. A storm of public outrage and a series of
lawsuits forced him to cancel the deal. But a substantial percentage
of Ohio's 2004 votes were counted by Diebold software and Diebold
Opti-scan machines which frequently malfunctioned in the Democratic
stronghold of Toledo. It was revealed in 2006 that Blackwell owned
Diebold stock. Diebold's GEMS election software was used in about
half of Ohio counties in the 2004 election. Because of Blackwell's
effort, 41 counties also used Diebold machines in Ohio's highly
dubious 2005 election. Also in the Ohio 2004 election, a
whistleblower leaked documents revealing that Diebold had allegedly
used illegal, uncertified hardware and software during California
election.
The
ghosts in the Diebold election machines go bump in the 2002 election
Wherever Diebold and
the other most well-known voting machine company Election Systems &
Software (ES&S) go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets
follow. Alastair Thompson, writing for scoop.co of New Zealand,
explored whether or not the 2002 U.S. mid-term elections were “fixed
by electronic voting machines supplied by Republican-affiliated
companies.” The Scoop investigation concluded that: “The state
where the biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran
its election with the most electronic voting machines.” Those
machines were supplied by Diebold. ES&S and Diebold would later
merge and now count about 80 percent of all U.S. votes. Wired News
reported that “. . . a former worker in Diebold’s Georgia
warehouse says the company installed patches on its machine before
the state’s 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified
by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election
officials.” Questions were raised in Texas when three Republican
candidates in Comal County each received exactly the same number of
votes – 18,181 – on ES&S machines. Following the 2003
California election, an audit of the company revealed that Diebold
Election Systems voting machines installed uncertified software in
all 17 counties using its equipment. In 2012, Ohio Secretary of State
Jon Husted approved a secret last-minute contract allowing ES&S
to install untested, “experimental” software patches on central
voting tabulators in 39 Ohio counties. Congressional testimony
exposed that last-minute patches were installed in several Ohio
counties including Miami and Clermont in the 2004 election. Johns
Hopkins researchers at the Information Security Institute issued a
report declaring that Diebold’s electronic voting software
contained “stunning flaws.” The researchers concluded that vote
totals could be altered at the voting machines and by remote access.
Diebold vigorously refuted the Johns Hopkins report, claiming the
researchers came to “a multitude of false conclusions.” Perhaps
to settle the issue, apparently an insider leaked documents from the
Diebold Election Systems website and posted internal documents from
the company to Bev Harris' Black Box Voting website. Diebold went to
court to stop, according to court records, the “wholesale
reproduction” of some 13,000 pages of company material. The
Associated Press reported in November 2003 that: “Computer
programmers, ISPs and students at [at] least 20 universities,
including the University of California, Berkeley and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology received cease and desist
letters” from Diebold. A group of Swarthmore College students
launched an “electronic civil disobedience” campaign to keep the
hacked documents permanently posted on the Internet.
Diebold
computer goblin causes the 2000 election to be called for Bush
The rush to embrace
computerized voting, of course, began with Florida’s 2000
presidential election. But, in fact, one of the Sunshine State's
election-day disasters was the direct result of a malfunctioning
computerized voting system; a system built by Diebold. The massive
screw-up in Volusia County was all but lost in the furor over hanging
chads and butterfly ballots in South Florida. In part that is because
county election officials avoided a total disaster by quickly
conducting a hand recount of the more than 184,000 paper ballots used
to feed the computerized system. But the huge computer miscount led
several networks to incorrectly call the race for Bush. The first to
call it was Fox News where Bush’s first cousin, John Ellis, was in
charge of election night coverage. The first signs that the
Diebold-made system in Volusia County was malfunctioning came early
on election night, when the central ballot-counting computer showed a
Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Vice
President Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes poured
into the plus column for Bush that didn't belong there. Taken
together, the massive swing seemed to indicate that Bush, not Gore,
had won Florida and thus the White House. Election officials
restarted the machine, and expressed confidence in the eventual
results, which showed Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214.
After the recount, Gore picked up 250 votes, while Bush picked up
154. But the erroneous numbers had already been sent to the media.
Harris has posted a series of internal Diebold memos relating to the
Volusia County miscount on her website, blackboxvoting.com. One memo
from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold,
complains, “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by
the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation
as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it
was uploaded.” Another, from Talbot Ireland, Senior VP of Research
and Development for Diebold, refers to key “replacement” votes in
Volusia County as "unauthorized." Harris has also posted a
post-mortem by CBS detailing how the network managed to call Volusia
County for Bush early in the morning. The report states: “Had it
not been for these [computer] errors, the CBS News call for Bush at
2:17:52 AM would not have been made.” As Harris notes, the
20,000-vote error shifted the momentum of the news reporting and
nearly led Gore to concede. It also gave rise to the incorrect chant
that, “Bush won twice.” What's particularly troubling, Harris
says, is that the errors were caught only because an alert poll
monitor noticed Gore's vote count going down through the evening,
which of course is impossible. Diebold blamed the bizarre swing on a
"faulty memory chip," which Harris claims is simply not
credible. The whole episode, she contends, could easily have been
consciously programmed by someone with a partisan agenda. Such claims
might seem far-fetched, were it not for the fact that a cadre of
computer scientists showed a year ago that the software running
Diebold's new machines can be hacked with relative ease. In 2006,
Princeton computer scientists revealed that a computer virus could be
easily implanted on a Diebold AccuVote Touch Screen voting system
allowing the vote to be flipped. Professor Edward Felten noted that a
single individual, “with just one or two minutes of unsupervised
access to either the voting machine or the memory card” could rig
the system. Carnegie Mellon’s Michael Shamos called the discovery
“the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system.”
Diebold
sued over faulty equipment, settles by giving away more faulty
equipment
Cuyahoga County
(Cleveland, Ohio) election officials accused Diebold of breach of
contract, negligence and fraud following the 2008 Ohio primary.
Then-Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner sued Diebold for breach
of contract, warranty violations and misrepresentations by Diebold
representatives involving 47 Ohio counties. In a bizarre settlement
in 2010, more than half of Ohio's county boards of elections received
free and discounted voting machines and software from Premier
Election Solutions (formally Diebold). This is a result of the August
2008 lawsuit against Diebold filed by Brunner. In the counterclaim
filed by Brunner, she alleged that Diebold voting equipment "dropped
votes in at least 11 counties." The failure to count votes
occurred when Diebold memory cards were uploaded to computer servers.
Diebold in 2010 reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC) after the U.S. government sued them for $25 million
in a fraud case. Diebold admitted that they had overstated the value
of their election division by 300% in a stock manipulation scheme.
U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach noted that “Companies that pay
bribes to public officials, whether those officials are in Cleveland,
in Ohio, or overseas, violate the law.” Amen. Why would a free
people allow a company with Diebold’s track record to have anything
to do with our elections at all. The Diebold indictment underscores a
much greater problem in the U.S. election system. As long as the
United States allows corrupt, partisan private corporations to
secretly count its votes, democracy remains in danger. Harvey
Wasserman contributed to this article.
Appears in Issue:
October 31st 2013