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Will the Next Election Be Hacked?
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Rolling Stone
Thursday 05 October 2006 Issue
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Fresh disasters at the polls - and new evidence from an industry insider - prove that electronic voting machines can't
be trusted.
Read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" in the June 15th, 2006, issue of "Rolling Stone," his investigation into how Republicans prevented more than 350,000
voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is
broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry
and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with
funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation's election systems - with much of the
money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America's 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections
approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated
that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the country this year, faulty equipment and
lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some
ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took
machines home for unsupervised "sleepovers" before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering. And in Ohio
- where, as I recently reported in "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the
presidency - a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in
Cuyahoga County.
Even worse, many electronic machines don't produce a paper record that can be recounted when equipment malfunctions -
an omission that practically invites malicious tampering. "Every board of election has staff members with the
technological ability to fix an election," Ion Sancho, an election supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me. "Even
one corrupt staffer can throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no way I'd
ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential
election."
Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia. An
African-American whose parents fought for voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to be working as a
consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company promote its new electronic voting machines. During the
presidential election two years earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in Georgia - almost double
the national average - and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded
properly.
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