ARE NEW YORK CITY'S NEW VOTING MACHINES REALLY CHEAT PROOF? -- The SHADOW: Issue #54

ARE NEW YORK'S NEW VOTING MACHINES REALLY CHEAT-PROOF?
By A.Kronstadt

No more "pulling the lever"

All New Yorkers who are smart enough or dumb enough to
have ever voted are familiar with the mechanical lever voting
machines that were first introduced in New York State in
1892. To vote using these machines in New York City, a voter
first steps up to a desk where a poll worker verifies his
registration by finding his name in a list of registered voters
and allows the person to sign in, which enforces the
one-person-one vote rule. The voter is issued a card with a
number which is passed on to someone standing next to the
curtain-draped booth, who throws it in randomly with the other
cards for voters using the machine -- the number of these
cards will have to agree with the number of votes registered
by the machine in that booth at the end of the voting day, as a
check on the integrity of the election process.

Then, the voter enters the booth and is told to pull the big
lever to the left, which closes the curtain and unlocks the
many small levers each representing a candidate for a
particular office, represented by a row, who is identified with a
political party represented by a column. Candidates are
selected by pushing a lever which remains pushed in a very
unequivocal way such that one knows who one has voted for,
and there is no issue of hanging chads or whether a box on a
paper ballot has been filled in darkly enough to be read by a
machine.

The lever system is set up so that a voter absolutely cannot,
inadvertently, push down the levers for more than the allowed
number of candidates for the same office-for instance two
mayoral candidates from opposing parties-and thus invalidate
his or her vote. That is not mechanically possible with this
kind of machine. This is a technical improvement with respect
to the paper ballot, where a voter confused about the
presentation might very well make the mistake of marking two
boxes that represent two candidates vying for the same office.
However, the lever machines provide no "paper trail"
recording what each voter did in the polling place, which is a
security-related advantage of the even older system of paper
ballots.

After voting, the citizen pulls the large lever to the right and
the machine makes an authoritative clunking sound that
registers the votes and re-opens the curtain. The New York
State voting machines are electro-mechanical devices based
on gears and levers, comparable to electric typewriters-when
the big lever is pulled each of the little levers that has been
selected by the voter activates a hole punching device which
punches another hole in a roll of tape along a row reserved
for the particular candidate to whom the lever corresponded.

At the end of the day, the rolls of tape, now sealed with official
wax seals by representatives of the Board of Elections, are
impounded by officers from the local precinct, along with the
cards and the books with the signatures. From there, they are
moved by other Board of Elections people by vehicle to the
Board of Elections headquarters, where the tallying is carried
out by hand.

The machines sometimes fail, so paper ballots are kept on
hand as a backup. This is an established system, like the
paper ballots that were used even earlier in elections, and
both the rolls of paper containing the votes punched into
paper and the paper ballots used as an auxiliary measure
constitute a "paper trail" that can be revisited in the case of
electoral irregularities.

These lever voting machines will become museum pieces in
New York State, the last state still using them, as of
September 14, 2010, the date of the New York State primary
elections. In those contests, a series of new digital machines
will be introduced throughout the state, which are touted as
having a superior paper trail to the mechanical lever
machines, which are no longer manufactured, and which are
supposed to bring New York voting into the information age
as mandated by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

Crooked Diebold still behind the scenes

The new electronic terminals have been manufactured by the
company Election Systems and Software (E.S. & S). under its
trademark INTELECT. E.S. & S. In 2009, E.S. & S bought out
Premier Election Solutions, which is the name under which
Diebold Election Systems rebranded itself in the wake of
criticism from computer professionals regarding the ability to
invisibly tamper with vote totals recorded on Diebold's widely
distributed AccuVote touch-screen electronic voting system,
and after resignation of the company's tainted CEO Walden
O'Dell in 2005. However, as we describe below, on
INTELECT's own Web site, the owner of that company
describes INTELECT as being in partnership with Diebold.

Former Diebold Chief Wally O'Dell, a major fundraiser for
Republican candidates in Diebold's home state of Ohio,
stated in a 2003 fundraising letter that he was "committed to
helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." At
the time, George W. Bush was running for re-election.

Statements like that resulted in a 2004 lawsuit (Moss v. Bush,
2004) challenging the certification of Ohio's electoral votes on
the basis of conflict of interest and extensive irregularities,
mostly related to failure to process voter registrations, as
opposed to any proven manipulation of the machines
manufactured by Diebold and its interlocking sister
corporation, E.S.&S. The lawsuit died on the vine after the
Ohio attorney general looked the other way as 58 of Ohio's
electoral districts destroyed records that would have shed
light on why over 15,000 Ohio citizens were denied the right
to vote.

Meanwhile, Wally O'Dell and a half-dozen top Diebold
executives were named as defendants in a lawsuit by
shareholders attempting to recover 2.7 million dollars in
insider trading proceeds, as well as 40 million dollars in
damages inflicted by the deceptive business practices by the
Diebold brass. Much of the insider trading was based on the
executives' prior knowledge of how political machinations to
get states to purchase Diebold equipment were coming along.

Furthermore, O'Dell was not the only high executive of either
Diebold or E.S.&S. with right-wing Republican connections,
as much of the original capital for the election systems end of
Diebold, which gave spawn to E.S.&S. as well, came from
individuals known for contributing to right-wing causes,
including Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson, Jr., a supporter of
Dominionist Christianity and creationism, and the Hunt family
of Texas, which has been a major contributor to the
fundamentalist camp in America's culture wars.

The technical security features of the machines that Diebold
was selling to various states for use in the 2004 elections did
little to reassure the public that O'Dell was not trying to use
these "black box" voting devices as a means of skewing the
election in favor of Bush.

The original Diebold machines were touch-screen devices
that were intended to be completely paperless. The only
record of the votes submitted via a machine consisted of
invisible bits and bytes on a memory card, which would be
read on an ordinary computer at some remote location after
being transported from the polling place via a chain of custody
that everyone was just expected to trust. Furthermore,
independent computer experts have verified that a completely
different memory card could be exchanged for the real one,
and that the Diebold software had no means of verifying that
this was not the original memory card. Hence, there are a
myriad of overlapping reasons why the people selling the new
voting machines to New York State do not want to have the
name Diebold stamped upon them, even though that
company, as we will presently see, still has its finger deep in
the pie.

New York's New Voting Machines

On August 11, 2010, a demonstration of the E.S.&S. DS200
ballot scanner, which will be officially used for the first time in
N.Y.C. for the first time in the September 14 primaries, was
held in the auditorium of Our Lady of Pompeii Roman Catholic
Church in Greenwich Village. Two DS200s, each looking like
a recycling bin with a copying machine on top, were displayed
in the front of the auditorium .The personable Board of
Elections employees accompanying them, Mr. Brian Cooper,
Mr. Roberto de la Roca, and Ms. Lisa Presley, had no
objections to members of the public including this SHADOW
writer closely examining them and trying them out.

Before getting into the technical details, I must remark that the
only commercial name visible on the machines is the name
INTELECT, with a single "L". Searching this name on the Start
Page search engine [http://startpage.com] leads to the Web site
of Ocañas Printing, one of several enterprises, including INTELECT
that is owned by Austin Texas entrepreneur Gilberto Ocañas, a
major Democratic mover and shaker in the Southwest. On his
Web Page he describes the mission of his company as follows:

    "Intelect, LLC founded by Gilberto S. Ocañas, was
    established for the deployment and management of
    modern election systems technology. Mr. Ocañas and
    his staff have over 30 years combined experience in
    the elections process.

    Intelect is an Electoral Solutions provider with expertise
    in providing innovative solutions to international, domestic,
    local and national governments. As the representative for
    Diebold Election Systems in Puerto Rico, Intelect offers
    the necessary experience to provide the solutions to meet
    specific requirements in the election process, including
    HAVA (Help America Vote Act).

    Our elections management services include:
    a.. Voter Education
    b.. Demographic Statistics
    c.. Providing information to candidates, parties and
            voters
    d.. Contingency Plan Design
    e.. Analysis of Legislative Framework
    f.. Project Management
    g.. On-Site Support and Simulations
    h.. Feasibility of Systems Implementations
    i.. Training Management, Poll workers, Operators and
            Electoral Personnel
    j.. Canvassing
    k.. Disseminating elections results
    l.. Campaign contributions tracking

    Intelect, in partnership with Diebold Elections Systems,
    Inc (DESI), will provide full support of the elections.
    Working in coordination with the local election officials,
    DESI technicians will work under the direction of the
    Intelect Project Manager to provide on-site pre and post
    election support. Intelect is proud to be in partnership
    with Diebold Election Systems, Inc."

So, as we have said, Diebold still has its finger in the pie, with
its offshoot E.S.&S. selling the machines under a slightly less
tainted name, and with the system as a whole being managed
by the Hispanic Democrat and Obama fundraiser, Mr.
Ocañas, giving Diebold several layers of cover before one
realizes that they are still very much involved.

With the liberal Democrats in the picture, one feels free to
forget that Diebold and E.S.&S. were founded by Howard
Ahmanson and a cabal of right-wingers bent on driving
evolution out of the schools and staging a Christian coup de
etat that would write Leviticus into law. However, even with
the overtly fascist element slightly diluted in this manner, the
politicization and incestousness of this group of people who
are determining America's voting technology is still apparent.

The Details

And now, how do these Diebold/E.S.&S./INTELECT gizmos
work? The manufacturers appear to have taken to heart many
of the criticisms directed against touch-screen machines and
pure "black box" voting that creates no paper trail. The new
system starts with a paper ballot.

As described by the Board of Elections officials present, the
sign-in book of registered voters will continue to exist, but
instead of being handed a voter tracking card to be turned in
at the voting booth, the voter, after signing in, will receive the
paper ballot along with an envelope to maintain privacy, and
then be directed to the DS200 ballot scanner. The scanner
will not be enclosed by a curtain like the lever machines, but
will have a kind of hood over the top to block people on the
sides and in front from watching what the voter does. It might
still be possible to spy on the voter over his or her shoulder,
so the new system will be a little less "secret" just on that
basis.

The voter must then mark his or her choices with a black pen,
filling in the little ovals. As with all paper ballots, the possibility
of invalidating one's vote by voting for too many candidates
exists, and it is also possible to leave an ambiguous mark that
cannot be machine-read, the equivalent of a "hanging chad."

When the ballot has been marked, the voter feeds it into a
flat-bed scanner similar to the way a document goes into a
copying machine. We who have worked in offices realize that
this mechanical feed is the weak link in copying machines
and that there is the ever-present possibility of a paper jam.

The scanner then tabulates the votes on a memory card,
takes a digital photograph of the whole ballot and stores that
in graphical form on the card as well, and then allows the
ballot itself to fall into the receptacle underneath which is
estimated to be able to hold 4000 ballots, assuming that the
mechanical feed device can hold up long enough to collect
that many ballots.

If the mechanical feeding devices fail, the result would be
chaos at the polls; it remains to see whether this will happen
at the September 14 primary election. [My prediction came true,

as appended in the last paragraphs of this article, and with no
more than three voters present at the polling place.--AK]

Once the ballot is sucked in by the machine, the votes that
the machine deems incorrectly entered are displayed on a
touch screen. They cannot be corrected on the touch screen
itself, but the voter must go back to the table and get another
ballot to fill out. If the voter makes a mistake, the Board of
Elections rules will allow poll workers to provide him with up to
two replacement ballots. After that, the voter will be required
to see an administrative law judge to decide whether he or
she will be given another ballot or be disenfranchised for that
particular election.

This scenario in and of itself changes the face of the election.
Under the present system, the voters sign in, do their thing,
and leave, whereas now, people will be running back to the
poll workers' table looking for replacement ballots, and the
messed up ballots will be circulating and changing hands,
again making for less of a secret ballot. It is intrinsically a
more chaotic and labor-intensive system for the poll workers
than the old lever system, where everyone was simply in and
out.

Furthermore, people whose learning curve for mastering the
new system is slower may end up losing their votes. So, even
though the criterion seems at first reasonable, i.e., that
anyone so ineducable that they cannot fill out the ballot on
three tries deserves to be disqualified, the impact will strike
different groups of people in uneven ways and thereby shift
the political ecology to some extent, perhaps small or perhaps
large.

What happens at the end of the polling day is that the card
outputs a tape, resembling a paper supermarket checkout
slip, tabulating all of the votes for each candidate registered
by the memory card for that polling machine, and also
indicating votes that were disqualified for technical reasons on
the part of the machine, e.g., the mark in the oval was not
sufficient to be read. These tapes are then compared
manually by the poll workers with the number of voters who
signed in, and impounded by officers from the local precinct,
along with the memory chips and the sealed containers of
paper ballots, pending collection by Board of Elections
officials who take it all down to their offices where the votes
on the chips are automatically tabulated by computer using
INTELECT/Diebold/E.S&S. proprietary software.

Keep an Eye on Them!

The new system is thus not exactly like the old touch screen
system that made Diebold and E.S.&S. notorious, and which
was even parodied on a special 2008 Election episode of the
Simpsons. There are several elements of "paper trail"
involved, starting with the paper ballots themselves, which
can be recounted by manual criteria -- i.e., the poll workers
manually counting the ballots will accept some marks like
smaller checks or "x" marks that the machine rejected -- in
cases where there are deemed reasons for challenge.

However, we must keep in mind that the lever machines did
not have anything to do with irregular pen markings or
whether one filled an oval, so the very fact that new elements
like this exist may act as a subtle thumb on the scale.

Will the tendency to make these mistakes correlate with any
particular voting behavior, population, or areas of the city?
Even if the skewing is relatively small it could have effects in
tight elections.

There is the tape printed out at the end of the polling day,
which acts as a check on whether or not the memory chip has
been switched. One of the criticisms that experts have raised
with previous versions of software produced by the Diebold is:
what is to stop someone from switching the chip with another
having a different number of votes on it? Advocates for New
York's new electronic voting system maintain that if such a
discrepancy arose there would then be the gold standard of
the paper ballots themselves to fall back on.

Thus, if the new voting system has improved in any way or
become a system with a greater number of checks and
balances, we may thank the activists at organizations such as
www.blackboxvoting.org, who first pointed out the right-wing
connections of the people who were getting a monopoly on
the new voting technologies and who brought in independent
computer experts who made all of the necessary efforts to
break and hack the systems, thereby proving how easy it was
to do so.

And let us make sure to bring our camera phones with us on
and November 2nd of this year and document any funny
business -- e.g., strange messages on the screen or
hardware going into the machines through any kinds of ports
on the side or underneath. The system may have some
technological fixes that make it harder to cheat using them
than with the 2004-vintage electronic voting machines, but the
integrity of the election is based on the integrity of the system
as a whole, and the establishment has given us ample reason
to wonder about all of these integrities.

Addendum: My Experience Voting on the Lower East
Side in the September 14 Primary

On September 14, 2010, the scene at the polling place at the
School for Career Development on East Fourth Street was
sedate at 4:30pm, with five Board of Elections workers and no
more than two people attempting to vote, including this
SHADOW writer. There were some aspects of the new voting
procedure that were different from what had been explained
at the public demonstration at the West Village church hall.
For example, I was handed a card after signing the book, just
as in the old routine, indeed creating an additional check on
the process indicating the integrity of the sign-in process and
the number of votes, which was a plus.

However, on this particular day, the concept of the secret
ballot seemed to have evaporated, since, after being handed
the card and the paper ballot, which tore off raggedly on the
end, I was escorted to a little school podium with an American
flag emblem on the front and a pen tethered inside, already
providing far less privacy than the curtain-draped booths in
which the lever machines were literally concealed. These
mini-desks were not put on display at the meeting at Our Lady
of Pompeii Church.

Having filled the oval (there were only two contests in the
primary, one of which I ignored) and made eye contact with
the poll worker at the desk, another poll worker was
dispatched in my direction, who simply took the ballot from
me, brought it over to the other end of the school gymnasium
where two DS200 scanners were situated, and proceeded to
feed the paper into the machine. Immediately, the prophesy
that I made above was fulfilled and the screen read out "Ballot
Jam" along with some unreadable computer verbiage.

My assumption had been that the poll worker had inserted the
ragged end of the ballot where it had been torn from the pad
earlier at the desk, but in fact it was the other, clean
factory-cut end that was jamming the machine. After two
unsuccessful attempts at the right-hand machine, my ballot
was voided and the poll workers led me back to the desk to
be issued another one. While I was filling out the new ballot at
the little podium, miracle of miracles, a second voter
appeared, was issued a ballot and went over himself to feed it
into the scanner to the left of the one where my ballot had
been rejected, and the machine sucked his paper up.

Once again, I went over to the scanners accompanied by a
poll worker who tried to feed it into the right-hand machine
again, where it was once again rejected. There was clearly
something wrong with that machine. I then volunteered to
feed it into the right-hand machine myself, and it was finally
sucked up. The machine displayed the words "Your vote has
been counted. Thank you for voting."

Conclusion

There were a lot of unsettling aspects to my voting experience
on September 14 that I never experienced with the lever
machines. For one, there was the lack of privacy manifested
by the absence of a curtain and the informality of other people
handling the ballot, even though they insisted that they were
not looking at the content of it. Then there was the jamming of
the machine, which I had actually predicted in writing in the
original text of this article (see above). And finally, there was
the fact that I had actually filled out two ballots, and there was
another supposed voided one that was still floating around the
school gymnasium. I did not myself see the "Voided" stamp
being applied. Could it under certain circumstances have
ended up in the plastic can with the other ballots, or even
have been passed through the functioning scanner later on
when nobody was looking?

And finally, there was the mechanical failure, he ballot jam
which happened even with the pitiful trickle of voters in this
primary election. In a real election where there are more than
two voters every half hour this would be exponentially
more likely to occur. In fact, the likelihood of a mechanical
failure would increase precisely in cases where the electorate
is the most interested in the outcome.

Is mechanical chaos, as opposed to hanging chads, the
right-wing's "final solution" to the problem of troublesome
democracy in America?

Let us see what happens on November 2nd.

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