In the last few weeks, there has been new information and reporting
on the issue of electronic voting. A major piece copied below appeared
in The London Independent. Additionally, more than 13,000 electronic
mail messages by employees of Diebold, a voting machine manufacturer,
were posted to the Internet in the last few weeks. They are currently on
the website Why War at:

    http://www.why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html

    The memos date from 1999 to the end of February, 2003. The content
of the documents seriously calls into question democracy in America. The
e-mails demonstrate that Diebold knew about security flaws in their
software and consistently refused to fix them. The memoranda show that
Diebold recognized a flaw in the 2000 presidential election in Florida
in which one precinct gave Al Gore more than 16,000 negative votes -- a
flaw that only came to light due to the mandated recount. They show that
Diebold broke voting laws in applying patches to their machines during
the course of the 2002 elections in Georgia. They also show that Diebold
knowingly left open a "back door" security hole after it was exposed in
county elections in Kansas. Under Diebold's systems, voting records can
be tampered with at every step of the way, from the machines themselves
to the databases in which the totals are stored.

    The website is continuing to post the e-mails as an act of civil
disobedience, after Diebold ordered their removal. One can view
excerpts, browse the archive, conduct a search, or download the entire
stash of e-mails in a zip file. The files are also hosted at

    http://www.equalccw.com/voteprar.html

    and at the University of Southern California, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Purdue University, and Amherst and Hampshire
Colleges. If Diebold's attempts to prevent review of the documents
continues, they will be undoubtedly moved to off shore servers, out of
easy reach of American courts and presumably Diebold's attorneys.

    In addition, Wired News reports at:

    http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60563,00.html

    that an engineer of Automated Business Systems and Services
contracted by Diebold for the 2002 Georgia election said that he
installed software in the voting machines that was not certified by
state and federal agencies in Diebold's warehouse and at county
warehouses. He applied the software modifications to thousands of
machines.

    As the article details below, Diebold is one of several voting
machine companies that have very serious problems.

    Kelly

    The [London] Independent

    14 October 2003

    All the President's Votes?

    Sub-title:

    A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it's
over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged,
unscrutinised control of a few large - and pro-Republican -
corporations. Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive

    URL for this article:

    http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=452972

    by Andrew Gumbel

    Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia
last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes,
the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11
points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls
indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was
ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby
Chambliss.

    Those figures were more or less what political experts would have
expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to
statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia
appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship
to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of
as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland
lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12
points.

    Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do
and launched internal investigations. Political analysts credited the
upset - part of a pattern of Republican successes around the country -
to a huge campaigning push by President Bush in the final days of the
race. They also said that Roy Barnes had lost because of a surge of
"angry white men" punishing him for eradicating all but a vestige of the
old confederate symbol from the state flag.

    But something about these explanations did not make sense, and they
have made even less sense over time. When the Georgia secretary of
state's office published its demographic breakdown of the election
earlier this year, it turned out there was no surge of angry white men;
in fact, the only subgroup showing even a modest increase in turnout was
black women.

    There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in
different parts of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in
line with the primary election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated
north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage
points higher than he had in the primaries. And in 74 counties in the
Democrat south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for
the Republicans than the party as a whole had won less than three months
earlier.

    Now, weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections, and
the figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except statistical
anomalies worthy of further study. But in Georgia there was an extra
reason to be suspicious. Last November, the state became the first in
the country to conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting
machines, after lavishing $54m (£33m) on a new system that promised to
deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in
the history of the republic. The machines, however, turned out to be
anything but reliable. With academic studies showing the Georgia
touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone
to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from different
companies being introduced at high speed across the country, computer
voting may, in fact, be US democracy's own 21st-century nightmare.

    In many Georgia counties last November, the machines froze up,
causing long delays as technicians tried to reboot them. In heavily
Democratic Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta, 67 memory cards from the
voting machines went missing, delaying certification of the results
there for 10 days. In neighbouring DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were
unaccounted for; they were later recovered from terminals that had
supposedly broken down and been taken out of service.

    It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards
were tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will probably
never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not
conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that
sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict
trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually
illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch
the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines
worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The
machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could
theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but these
were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible. Had Diebold
Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to review the votes, all it could have
done was programme the computers to spit out the same data as before,
flawed or not.

    Astonishingly, these are the terms under which America's top three
computer voting machine manufacturers - Diebold, Sequoia and Election
Systems and Software (ES&S) - have sold their products to election
officials around the country. Far from questioning the need for rigid
trade secrecy and the absence of a paper record, secretaries of state
and their technical advisers - anxious to banish memories of the hanging
chad fiasco and other associated disasters in the 2000 presidential
recount in Florida - have, for the most part, welcomed the touchscreen
voting machines as a technological miracle solution.

    Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute
swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota,
Illinois and New Hampshire - all in races that had been flagged as key
partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party. Again, this
was widely attributed to the campaigning efforts of President Bush and
the demoralisation of a Democratic Party too timid to speak out against
the looming war in Iraq.

    Strangely, however, the pollsters made no comparable howlers in
lower-key races whose outcome was not seriously contested. Another
anomaly, perhaps. What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners
of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican
Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to
Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which
he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes
to the president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the
contract on the state's new voting machinery?

    Alarmed and suspicious, a group of Georgia citizens began to look
into last November's election to see whether there was any chance the
results might have been deliberately or accidentally manipulated. Their
research proved unexpectedly, and disturbingly, fruitful.

    First, they wanted to know if the software had undergone adequate
checking. Under state and federal law, all voting machinery and
component parts must be certified before use in an election. So an
Atlanta graphic designer called Denis Wright wrote to the secretary of
state's office for a copy of the certification letter. Clifford Tatum,
assistant director of legal affairs for the election division, wrote
back: "We have determined that no records exist in the Secretary of
State's office regarding a certification letter from the lab certifying
the version of software used on Election Day." Mr Tatum said it was
possible the relevant documents were with Gary Powell, an official at
the Georgia Technology Authority, so campaigners wrote to him as well.
Mr Powell responded he was "not sure what you mean by the words 'please
provide written certification documents' ".

    "If the machines were not certified, then right there the election
was illegal," Mr Wright says. The secretary of state's office has yet to
demonstrate anything to the contrary. The investigating citizens then
considered the nature of the software itself. Shortly after the
election, a Diebold technician called Rob Behler came forward and
reported that, when the machines were about to be shipped to Georgia
polling stations in the summer of 2002, they performed so erratically
that their software had to be amended with a last-minute "patch".
Instead of being transmitted via disk - a potentially time-consuming
process, especially since its author was in Canada, not Georgia - the
patch was posted, along with the entire election software package, on an
open-access FTP, or file transfer protocol site, on the internet.

    That, according to computer experts, was a violation of the most
basic of security precautions, opening all sorts of possibilities for
the introduction of rogue or malicious code. At the same time, however,
it gave campaigners a golden opportunity to circumvent Diebold's own
secrecy demands and see exactly how the system worked. Roxanne Jekot, a
computer programmer with 20 years' experience, and an occasional teacher
at Lanier Technical College northeast of Atlanta, did a line-by-line
review and found "enough to stand your hair on end".

    "There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most
basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the
operating system." Although the programme was designed to be run on the
Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep
out intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less
secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it,
"nullified".

    Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers
working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as
"a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work."
"Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were
operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for
the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to
figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the
code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction
to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint
there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an
immediate red flag."

    Mostly, though, she was struck by the shoddiness of much of the
programming. "I really expected to have some difficulty reviewing the
source code because it would be at a higher level than I am accustomed
to," she says. "In fact, a lot of this stuff looked like the homework my
first-year students might have turned in." Diebold had no specific
comment on Ms Jekot's interpretations, offering only a blanket caution
about the complexity of election systems "often not well understood by
individuals with little real-world experience".

    But Ms Jekot was not the only one to examine the Diebold software
and find it lacking. In July, a group of researchers from the
Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore
discovered what they called "stunning flaws". These included putting the
password in the source code, a basic security no-no; manipulating the
voter smart-card function so one person could cast more than one vote;
and other loopholes that could theoretically allow voters' ballot
choices to be altered without their knowledge, either on the spot or by
remote access.

    Diebold issued a detailed response, saying that the Johns Hopkins
report was riddled with false assumptions, inadequate information and "a
multitude of false conclusions". Substantially similar findings,
however, were made in a follow-up study on behalf of the state of
Maryland, in which a group of computer security experts catalogued 328
software flaws, 26 of them critical, putting the whole system "at high
risk of compromise". "If these vulnerabilities are exploited,
significant impact could occur on the accuracy, integrity, and
availability of election results," their report says.

    Ever since the Johns Hopkins study, Diebold has sought to explain
away the open FTP file as an old, incomplete version of its election
package. The claim cannot be independently verified, because of the
trade-secrecy agreement, and not everyone is buying it. "It is
documented throughout the code who changed what and when. We have the
history of this programme from 1996 to 2002," Ms Jekot says. "I have no
doubt this is the software used in the elections." Diebold now says it
has upgraded its encryption and password features - but only on its
Maryland machines.

    A key security question concerned compatibility with Microsoft
Windows, and Ms Jekot says just three programmers, all of them senior
Diebold executives, were involved in this aspect of the system. One of
these, Diebold's vice-president of research and development, Talbot
Iredale, wrote an e-mail in April 2002 - later obtained by the
campaigners - making it clear that he wanted to shield the operating
system from Wylie Labs, an independent testing agency involved in the
early certification process.

    The reason that emerges from the e-mail is that he wanted to make
the software compatible with WinCE 3.0, an operating system used for
handhelds and PDAs; in other words, a system that could be manipulated
from a remote location. "We do not want Wyle [sic] reviewing and
certifying the operating systems," the e-mail reads. "Therefore can we
keep to a minimum the references to the WinCE 3.0 operating system."

    In an earlier intercepted e-mail, this one from Ken Clark in
Diebold's research and development department, the company explained
upfront to another independent testing lab that the supposedly secure
software system could be accessed without a password, and its contents
easily changed using the Microsoft Access programme. Mr Clark says he
had considered putting in a password requirement to stop dealers and
customers doing "stupid things", but that the easy access had often "got
people out of a bind". Astonishingly, the representative from the
independent testing lab did not see anything wrong with this and granted
certification to the part of the software programme she was inspecting -
a pattern of lackadaisical oversight that was replicated all the way to
the top of the political chain of command in Georgia, and in many other
parts of the country.

    Diebold has not contested the authenticity of the e-mails, now
openly accessible on the internet. However, Diebold did caution that, as
the e-mails were taken from a Diebold Election systems website in March
2003 by an illegal hack, the nature of the information stolen could have
been revised or manipulated.

    There are two reasons why the United States is rushing to overhaul
its voting systems. The first is the Florida débâcle in the Bush-Gore
election; no state wants to be the centre of that kind of attention
again. And the second is the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), signed by
President Bush last October, which promises an unprecedented $3.9bn
(£2.3bn) to the states to replace their old punchcard-and-lever
machines. However, enthusiasm for the new technology seems to be
motivated as much by a bureaucratic love of spending as by a love of
democratic accountability. According to Rebecca Mercuri, a research
fellow at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government and a specialist
in voting systems, the shockingly high error rate of punchcard machines
(3-5 per cent in Florida in 2000) has been known to people in the
elections business for years. It was only after it became public
knowledge in the last presidential election that anybody felt moved to
do anything about it.

    The problem is, computer touchscreen machines and other so-called
DRE (direct recording electronic) systems are significantly less
reliable than punchcards, irrespective of their vulnerability to
interference. In a series of research papers for the Voting Technology
Project, a joint venture of the prestigious Massachussetts and
California Institutes of Technology, DREs were found to be among the
worst performing systems. No method, the MIT/CalTech study conceded,
worked more reliably than hand-counting paper ballots - an option that
US electoral officials seem to consider hopelessly antiquated, or at
least impractical in elections combining multiple local, state and
national races for offices from President down to dogcatcher.

    The clear disadvantages and dangers associated with DREs have not
deterred state and county authorities from throwing themselves headlong
into touchscreen technology. More than 40,000 machines made by Diebold
alone are already in use in 37 states, and most are touchscreens. County
after county is poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on
computer voting before next spring's presidential primaries. "They say
this is the direction they have to go in to have fair elections, but the

rush to go towards computerisation is very dubious," Dr Mercuri says.
"One has to wonder why this is going on, because the way it is set up it
takes away the checks and balances we have in a democratic society.
That's the whole point of paper trails and recounts."

    Anyone who has struggled with an interactive display in a museum
knows how dodgy touchscreens can be. If they don't freeze, they easily
become misaligned, which means they can record the wrong data. In
Dallas, during early voting before last November's election, people
found that no matter how often they tried to press a Democrat button,
the Republican candidate's name would light up. After a court hearing,
Diebold agreed to take down 18 machines with apparent misalignment
problems. "And those were the ones where you could visually spot a
problem," Dr Mercuri says. "What about what you don't see? Just because
your vote shows up on the screen for the Democrats, how do you know it
is registering inside the machine for the Democrats?"

    Other problems have shown up periodically: machines that register
zero votes, or machines that indicate voters coming to the polling
station but not voting, even when a single race with just two candidates
was on the ballot. Dr Mercuri was part of a lawsuit in Palm Beach County
in which she and other plaintiffs tried to have a suspect Sequoia
machine examined, only to run up against the brick wall of the
trade-secret agreement. "It makes it really hard to show their product
has been tampered with," she says, "if it's a felony to inspect it."

    As for the possibilities of foul play, Dr Mercuri says they are
virtually limitless. "There are literally hundreds of ways to do this,"
she says. "There are hundreds of ways to embed a rogue series of
commands into the code and nobody would ever know because the nature of
programming is so complex. The numbers would all tally perfectly."
Tampering with an election could be something as simple as a
"denial-of-service" attack, in which the machines simply stop working
for an extended period, deterring voters faced with the prospect of long
lines. Or it could be done with invasive computer codes known in the
trade by such nicknames as "Trojan horses" or "Easter eggs". Detecting
one of these, Dr Mercuri says, would be almost impossible unless the
investigator knew in advance it was there and how to trigger it.
Computer researcher Theresa Hommel, who is alarmed by touchscreen
systems, has constructed a simulated voting machine in which the same
candidate always wins, no matter what data you put in. She calls her
model the Fraud-o-matic, and it is available online at
www.wheresthepaper.org.

    It is not just touchscreens which are at risk from error or
malicious intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes is
vulnerable. An optical scan of ballots in Scurry County, Texas, last
November erroneously declared a landslide victory for the Republican
candidate for county commissioner; a subsequent hand recount showed that
the Democrat had in fact won. In Comal County, Texas, a computerised
optical scan found that three different candidates had won their races
with exactly 18,181 votes. There was no recount or investigation, even
though the coincidence, with those recurring 1s and 8s, looked highly
suspicious. In heavily Democrat Broward County, Florida - which had
switched to touchscreens in the wake of the hanging chad furore - more
than 100,000 votes were found to have gone "missing" on election day.
The votes were reinstated, but the glitch was not adequately explained.
One local official blamed it on a "minor software thing".

    Most suspect of all was the governor's race in Alabama, where the
incumbent Democrat, Don Siegelman, was initially declared the winner.
Sometime after midnight, when polling station observers and most staff
had gone home, the probate judge responsible for elections in rural
Baldwin County suddenly "discovered" that Mr Siegelman had been awarded
7,000 votes too many. In a tight election, the change was enough to hand
victory to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley. County officials talked
vaguely of a computer tabulation error, or a lightning strike messing up
the machines, but the real reason was never ascertained because the
state's Republican attorney general refused to authorise a recount or
any independent ballot inspection.

    According to an analysis by James Gundlach, a sociology professor at
Auburn University in Alabama, the result in Baldwin County was full of
wild deviations from the statistical norms established both by this and
preceding elections. And he adds: "There is simply no way that
electronic vote counting can produce two sets of results without someone
using computer programmes in ways that were not intended. In other
words, the fact that two sets of results were reported is sufficient
evidence in and of itself that the vote tabulation process was
compromised." Although talk of voting fraud quickly subsided, Alabama
has now amended its election laws to make recounts mandatory in close
races.

    The possibility of flaws in the electoral process is not something
that gets discussed much in the United States. The attitude seems to be:
we are the greatest democracy in the world, so the system must be fair.
That has certainly been the prevailing view in Georgia, where even
leading Democrats - their prestige on the line for introducing
touchscreen voting in the first place - have fought tooth-and-nail to
defend the integrity of the system. In a phone interview, the head of
the Georgia Technology Authority who brought Diebold machines to the
state, Larry Singer, blamed the growing chorus of criticism on "fear of
technology", despite the fact that many prominent critics are themselves
computer scientists. He says: "Are these machines flawless? No. Would
you have more confidence if they were completely flawless? Yes. Is there
such a thing as a flawless system? No." Mr Singer, who left the GTA
straight after the election and took a 50 per cent pay cut to work for
Sun Microsystems, insists that voters are more likely to have their
credit card information stolen by a busboy in a restaurant than to have
their vote compromised by touchscreen technology.

    Voting machines are sold in the United States in much the same way
as other government contracts: through intensive lobbying, wining and
dining. At a recent national conference of clerks, election officials
and treasurers in Denver, attendees were treated to black-tie dinners
and other perks, including free expensive briefcases stamped with
Sequoia's company logo alongside the association's own symbol. Nobody in
power seems to find this worrying, any more than they worried when
Sequoia's southern regional sales manager, Phil Foster, was indicted in
Louisiana a couple of years ago for "conspiracy to commit money
laundering and malfeasance". The charges were dropped in exchange for
his testimony against Louisiana's state commissioner of elections.
Similarly, last year, the Arkansas secretary of state, Bill McCuen,
pleaded guilty to taking bribes and kickbacks involving a precursor
company to ES&S; the voting machine company executive who testified
against him in exchange for immunity is now an ES&S vice-president.

    If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the
Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies
are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars
into party coffers in the past few years. The ownership issue is, of
course, compounded by the lack of transparency. Or, as Dr Mercuri puts
it: "If the machines were independently verifiable, who would give a
crap who owns them?" As it is, fears that US democracy is being hijacked
by corporate interests are being fuelled by links between the big three
and broader business interests, as well as extremist organisations. Two
of the early backers of American Information Systems, a company later
merged into ES&S, are also prominent supporters of the Chalcedon
Foundation, an organisation that espouses theocratic governance
according to a literal reading of the Bible and advocates capital
punishment for blasphemy and homosexuality.

    The chief executive of American Information Systems in the early
Nineties was Chuck Hagel, who went on to run for elective office and
became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected to the Senate from
Nebraska, cheered on by the Omaha World-Herald newspaper which also
happens to be a big investor in ES&S. In yet another clamorous conflict
of interest, 80 per cent of Mr Hagel's winning votes - both in 1996 and
again in 2002 - were counted, under the usual terms of confidentiality,
by his own company.

    In theory, the federal government should be monitoring the
transition to computer technology and rooting out abuses. Under the Help
America Vote Act, the Bush administration is supposed to establish a
sizeable oversight committee, headed by two Democrats and two
Republicans, as well as a technical panel to determine standards for new
voting machinery. The four commission heads were supposed to have been
in place by last February, but so far just one has been appointed. The
technical panel also remains unconstituted, even though the new machines
it is supposed to vet are already being sold in large quantities - a
state of affairs Dr Mercuri denounces as "an abomination".

    One of the conditions states have to fulfil to receive federal
funding for the new voting machines, meanwhile, is a consolidation of
voter rolls at state rather than county level. This provision sends a
chill down the spine of anyone who has studied how Florida consolidated
its own voter rolls just before the 2000 election, purging the names of
tens of thousands of eligible voters, most of them African Americans and
most of them Democrats, through misuse of an erroneous list of convicted
felons commissioned by Katherine Harris, the secretary of state doubling
as George Bush's Florida campaign manager. Despite a volley of lawsuits,
the incorrect list was still in operation in last November's mid-terms,
raising all sorts of questions about what other states might now do with
their own voter rolls. It is not that the Act's consolidation provision
is in itself evidence of a conspiracy to throw elections, but it does
leave open that possibility.

    Meanwhile, the administration has been pushing new voting technology
of its own to help overseas citizens and military personnel, both
natural Republican Party constituencies, to vote more easily over the
internet. Internet voting is notoriously insecure and open to abuse by
just about anyone with rudimentary hacking skills; just last January, an
experiment in internet voting in Toronto was scuppered by a Slammer worm
attack. Undeterred, the administration has gone ahead with its so-called
SERVE project for overseas voting, via a private consortium made up of
major defence contractors and a Saudi investment group. The contract for
overseeing internet voting in the 2004 presidential election was
recently awarded to Accenture, formerly part of the Arthur Andersen
group (whose accountancy branch, a major campaign contributor to
President Bush, imploded as a result of the Enron bankruptcy scandal).

    Not everyone in the United States has fallen under the spell of the
big computer voting companies, and there are signs of growing wariness.
Oregon decided even before HAVA to conduct all its voting by mail.
Wisconsin has decided it wants nothing to do with touchscreen machines
without a verifiable paper trail, and New York is considering a similar
injunction, at least for its state assembly races. In California, a
Stanford computer science professor called David Dill is screaming from
the rooftops on the need for a paper trail in his state, so far without

result. And a New Jersey Congressman called Rush Holt has introduced a
bill in the House of Representatives, the Voter Confidence and Increased
Accessibility Act, asking for much the same thing. Not everyone is
heeding the warnings, though. In Ohio, publication of the letter from
Diebold's chief executive promising to deliver the state to President
Bush in 2004 has not deterred the secretary of state - a Republican -
from putting Diebold on a list of preferred voting-machine vendors.
Similarly, in Maryland, officials have not taken the recent
state-sponsored study identifying hundreds of flaws in the Diebold
software as any reason to change their plans to use Diebold machines in
March's presidential primary.

    The question is whether the country will come to its senses before
elections start getting distorted or tampered with on such a scale that
the system becomes unmanageable. The sheer volume of money offered under
HAVA is unlikely to be forthcoming again in a hurry, so if things aren't
done right now it is doubtful the system can be fixed again for a long
time. "This is frightening, really frightening," says Dr Mercuri, and a
growing number of reasonable people are starting to agree with her. One
such is John Zogby, arguably the most reliable pollster in the United
States, who has freely admitted he "blew" last November's elections and
does not exclude the possibility that foul play was one of the factors
knocking his calculations off course. "We're ploughing into a brave new
world here," he says, "where there are so many variables aside from
out-and-out corruption that can change elections, especially in
situations where the races are close. We have machines that break down,
or are tampered with, or are simply misunderstood. It's a cause for
great concern."

    Roxanne Jekot, who has put much of her professional and personal
life on hold to work on the issue full time, puts it even more strongly.
"Corporate America is very close to running this country. The only thing
that is stopping them from taking total control are the pesky voters.
That's why there's such a drive to control the vote. What we're seeing
is the corporatisation of the last shred of democracy. "I feel that
unless we stop it here and stop it now," she says, "my kids won't grow
up to have a right to vote at all."

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