The New York Times gets into the Act and finally covers the black box
voting controversy with a major piece today, although not as exhaustive
as that of The Independent of a few weeks ago.  The person the Times
trots out as one of the leading critics of Diebold, New Jersey Senator
Jon Corzine, is the former president of Goldman Saks, one of the largest
Wall Street firms.  He is best known for arranging the private financing
to bail out Long Term Capital Management.

Kelly

    The New York Times

    November 9, 2003

    Machine Politics in the Digital Age

By MELANIE WARNER

    IN mid-August, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold
Inc., sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy
and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to
be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. "I am committed to
helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,"
wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio.

    That is hardly unusual for Mr. O'Dell. A longtime Republican, he is
a member of President Bush's "Rangers and Pioneers,'' an elite group of
loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race.

    But it is not the only way that Mr. O'Dell is involved in the
election process. Through Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary in
McKinney, Tex., his company is among the country's biggest suppliers of
paperless, touch-screen voting machines.

    Judging from Federal Election Commission data, at least eight
million people will cast their ballots using Diebold machines next
November. That is 8 percent of the number of people who voted in 2000,
and includes all voters in the states of Georgia and Maryland and those
in various counties of California, Virginia, Texas, Indiana, Arizona and
Kansas.

    Some people find Mr. O'Dell's pairing of interests - as
voting-machine magnate and devoted Republican fund-raiser - troubling.
To skeptics, including more than a few Democrats, it raises at least the
appearance of an ethical problem. Some of the chatter on the Internet
goes so far as to suggest that he could use his own machines to sway the
election.

    Senator Jon Corzine, Democrat of New Jersey, does not buy such
conspiracy theories, but he said he was appalled at the situation.

    "It's outrageous," he said. "Not only does Mr. O'Dell want the
contract to provide every voting machine in the nation for the next
election - he wants to 'deliver' the election to Mr. Bush. There are
enough conflicts in this story to fill an ethics manual."

    Mr. O'Dell declined to be interviewed for this article, but a
company official said that his political affiliations had nothing to do
with Diebold's operations, and that the company derived the bulk of its
revenue from A.T.M.'s, not voting machines. "This is not Diebold; this
is Wally O'Dell personally," said Thomas W. Swidarski, senior vice
president for strategic development and global marketing at Diebold, who
works closely with Mr. O'Dell. "The issue has been misconstrued."

    BUT the controversy surrounding Diebold goes beyond its chief
executive's political activities. In July, professors at Johns Hopkins
University and Rice University analyzed the software code for the
company's touch-screen voting machines and concluded that there was "no
evidence of rigorous software engineering discipline" and that
"cryptography, when used at all, is used incorrectly."

    Making matters worse, the software code for the machines was
discovered in January by a Seattle-area writer on a publicly accessible
Internet site. That the code was unprotected constitutes a significant
security lapse by Diebold, said Aviel D. Rubin, an associate professor
of computer science at Johns Hopkins, co-author of the study of the
code.

    Mr. Swidarski said the code on the Internet site was outdated and
was not now in use in machines.

    About 15,000 internal Diebold e-mail messages also found their way
to the Internet. Some referred to software patches installed on Diebold
machines days before elections. Others indicated that the Microsoft
Access database used in Diebold's tabulation servers was not protected
by passwords. Diebold, which says passwords are now installed on
machines, is threatening legal action against anyone who posts the files
or links to them, contending that the e-mail is copyrighted.

    A recent report for the state of Maryland by SAIC, an engineering
and research firm, has added to concerns about the security of Diebold's
systems. It recommended 17 steps that Maryland election officials could
take to ensure better security when using Diebold's machines.

    The company seized upon this as evidence that its systems, if used
properly, were secure. But the report's overall assessment was not
particularly upbeat. "The system, as implemented in policy, procedure
and technology, is at high risk of compromise," SAIC wrote.

    It has been a bumpy couple of months for Mr. O'Dell, 58, who is
known as Wally and spent 33 years at Emerson Electric before joining
what is now Diebold Election Systems. Associates say he was stunned by
the reaction to his August letter and now regrets writing it.

    "Wally's going to take a lower profile on this stuff," Mr. Swidarski
said. But Mr. Swidarski did not indicate that Mr. O'Dell would put a
halt to all of his political activities. Those have included attendance
at a Bush fund-raiser in Cincinnati on Sept. 30 and a flight to
Crawford, Tex., in August for a Pioneers and Rangers meeting attended by
the president.

    Other Diebold executives have contributed to President Bush's
re-election campaign. According to data reported to the Federal Election
Commission, 11 executives have added a total of $22,000 to the
president's campaign coffers this year. No money from Diebold or its
executives has gone to Democratic presidential candidates this year.

    The controversy over security has started to affect Diebold's
business. Last week, the office of the California secretary of state
halted certification of Diebold's latest touch-screen voting machines,
which individual counties are considering using. In Wisconsin, security
concerns have soured election officials' perceptions of computerized
voting. "We were already not strongly in favor of it, but the whole
problem has changed when you're getting e-mails every week saying,
'You're not going to do this, right?' " said Kevin J. Kennedy, director
of Wisconsin's election board.

    Matt Summerville, an analyst at McDonald Investments in Cleveland,
said the California decision could cause Diebold to book less revenue in
its voting division this year than it had hoped. "It has certainly made
their business a little more challenging," said Mr. Summerville, who
expects the voting division to contribute $113 million this year to
Diebold's total revenue of $2.1 billion.

    So far, investors have not seemed concerned. Diebold's stock is up
almost 36 percent for the year.

    Until recently, Diebold's voting business looked extremely
promising. Florida's electoral fiasco in 2000 confirmed what many state
and county election officials had known for years: that punch-card
systems were outdated. Encouraged by a new federal law that set aside
$3.9 billion for voting improvements, many states and counties are
moving rapidly to computer-based systems.

    Analysts say the biggest beneficiaries of the federal dollars are
likely to be Diebold, Election Systems & Software in Omaha and Sequoia
Voting Systems, based in Oakland, Calif. So far, Washington has provided
$650 million to states to buy new voting machines and improve the
election process, though most of that has yet to be spent. An additional
$830 million is waiting to be disbursed as soon as a new national
oversight committee for elections is established.

    NOT everyone is convinced that spending hundreds of millions of
dollars to computerize the nation's voting is a good thing. The Johns
Hopkins and SAIC reports are part of a growing chorus of criticism about
the reliability and safety of paperless voting systems.

    "There's a feeling in the computer scientist community of utter
dismay about the state of voting-machine technology," said Douglas W.
Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of
Iowa and a member of Iowa's board of examiners for voting machines.

    David L. Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford, said: "If I
was a programmer at one of these companies and I wanted to steal an
election, it would be very easy. I could put something in the software
that would be impossible for people to detect, and it would change the
votes from one party to another. And you could do it so it's not going
to show up statistically as an anomaly.''

    Diebold says there are enough checks and balances in the system to
catch this. "Programmers do not set up the elections; election officials
do," Mr. Swidarski said. "All a programmer knows are numbers, which are
not assigned to real people and parties until set-up time."

    But Professor Dill says the inherent complexity of software code
makes it nearly impossible to ensure that computerized elections are
fair. He advocates that machines be required to print out a paper
ballot, which voters can use to verify their selections and which will
serve as an audit trail in the event of irregularities or recounts.

    Touch-screen machines from Diebold, called AccuVotes, do not have
such a "voter verified" paper trail. ES&S and Sequoia are working on
prototypes for machines with printers. Diebold's machines are like
A.T.M.'s, in that voters touch their selection and hit "enter" to record
their votes onto memory cards inside each terminal. After voting has
ended, the memory cards are inserted into a Diebold server at each
precinct. The results are tabulated and sent by modem, or the data disks
are sent to a central office.

    Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist and president of the
consulting firm Notable Software, who has been studying election systems
for 14 years, says the trouble with this system is that it is secretive.
It prohibits anyone from knowing whether the data coming out of the
terminals represents what voters actually selected. If someone were to
challenge election results, the data in memory cards and the software
running the voting terminals could be examined only by Diebold
representatives.

    MS. MERCURI ran up against this last year, when she served as a
consultant in a contested city council election in Boca Raton, Fla. Her
request to look at the software inside the city's machines, made by
Sequoia, to see if there were any bugs or malfunctions, was denied by a
judge on the grounds that the technology was protected by trade-secret
clauses. Sequoia, ES&S and Diebold routinely include such clauses in
their contracts.

    "These companies are basically saying 'trust us,' " Ms. Mercuri
said. "Why should anybody trust them? That's not the way democracy is
supposed to work."

    Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, is leading an
effort to make computerized voting more transparent. His bill,
introduced this year, would require that computerized voting systems
produce a voter-verified paper ballot and that the software code be
publicly available.

    The bill, in the House Administration Committee, has 60 co-sponsors,
all Democrats.

    "Someone said to me the other day, 'We've had these electronic
voting machines for several years now and we've never had a problem.'
And I said, 'How do you know?' and he couldn't answer that,"
Representative Holt said. "The job of verification shouldn't belong to
the company; it should belong to the voter."

    Diebold said it would be willing to attach ballot printers to
touch-screen machines if customers wanted them. But Mr. Swidarski said
elections boards were not clamoring for it. "We're agnostic to it," he
said.

    Mr. Swidarski disputed the assertion that Diebold's systems are
vulnerable to tampering. Before each election, he said, the software
goes through rigorous testing and certification by one of three
companies contracted through the National Association of State Election
Directors. Those companies "go through every line of code," he said.
"It's an extensive process that takes several months, and then the
machines go for testing at the state level."

    Critics say that the certification process is not as thorough as the
companies would have people believe, and that the resulting reports,
like the technology, are not available for public inspection. This
opacity is what worries detractors most.

    "We know from Enron and WorldCom that when accounting is weak,
crooks have been known to take over," Professor Jones said. "If
vulnerabilities exist in any voting system for a long enough time,
someone's going to exploit it."


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