A very serious problem

Funny, just when we begin using an automated voting system, other countries, including the United States doubt whether it is all that reliable.

Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers in his article “Warning on voting machines reveals oversight failure” and datelined Washington writes:

“Disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop ballot totals for entire precincts is stirring new worries that an unofficial laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold nationwide since 2003.”

To say that something may have gone so badly wrong in the May 10 election is neither exceptional nor impossible. I believe that those who insist that we should not criticize the Smartmatic voting system do a disservice to the Filipino nation.

There is a serious problem and we should look into how countries equally affected dealt with it. Gordon writes that “the Texas-based Premier Elections Solutions alerted at least 1,750 jurisdictions across the country that special precautions are needed to address the problem in tabulation software affecting all 19 of its models dating back a decade.”

What is wrong with spending time to find out if our votes were properly counted. That is what we hoped we could have if we had automated voting. But what happened is the complete opposite. What we had was a perversion of elections with manipulated machines taking over the voting system. It was so vicious that as the Whistleblower said the system could vote in anyone the group wanted to through the switched memory card.

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We have the example of what happened in Texas. Voting experts were skeptical that crosschecks of ballot totals by election workers would have spotted instances “where its servers failed to register some precinct vote totals when receiving data from multiple memory cards,” Gordon writes.

“It was not enough that Premier’s products were tested and passed as qualified by the National Association of State Election Directors.” Computer scientists, some state officials and election watchdog groups protested alleging that the “NASED-sponsored testing system was a recipe for disaster, shrouded in secrecy, and allowing equipment makers to help design the tests.” When the government finally took over the testing it could not certify even a single voting machine.

I have heard concerned citizens say that if they are complaining about May 10 it is not because their candidates lost. They want to know what happened and decide whether we can solve these problems before we go into another automated election.

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There is much talk that the CIA may have had a hand in the fiasco. But it is not that simplistic. Indeed, it was a CIA expert who said that most electronic voting isn’t secure. Apart from the problems encountered in America experts point to other countries where it had monitored electronic voting systems. It reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and concern that machines were vulnerable to tampering. Include the Philippines, circa 2010.

Steve Stigall, an electronic voting expert finds this disturbing and says the US must take up the lessons coming from these countries. He described cases that were attempts to use computers to undermine democratic elections in developing nations.

His findings were not covered by media until fairly recently. What he told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 “to modernize US voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results ought to be reprinted here.” He was the whistleblower in his country.

I have excerpted some points of Stigall’s presentation relevant to us after May 10:

“You heard the old adage ‘follow the money,’” Stigall said, according to a transcript of his hour-long presentation that McClatchy obtained. “I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to . . . make bad things happen.”

“Stigall said that voting equipment connected to the Internet could be hacked, and machines that weren’t connected could be compromised wirelessly. Eleven US states have banned or limited wireless capability in voting equipment, but Stigall said that election officials didn’t always know it when wireless cards were embedded in their machines.”

“Numerous computer-security experts have concluded that US systems can be hacked, and allegations of tampering in Ohio, Florida and other swing states have triggered a campaign to require all voting machines to produce paper audit trails.”

The CIA got interested in electronic systems a few years ago, Stigall said, after concluding that foreigners might try to hack US election systems.

Stigall, the American whistleblower who studied electronic systems in about three dozen countries, said that most countries’ machines produced paper receipts that voters then dropped into boxes. However, even that doesn’t prevent corruption, he said.

”How do you defeat the paper ballots the machines spit out?” Stigall asked. “Those numbers must agree, must they not, with the electronic voting-machine count?

Questions about Venezuela’s voting equipment caused a stir in the United States long before Obama became president, because Smartmatic, a voting machine company that partnered with a firm hired by Chavez’s government, owned US-based Sequoia Voting Systems until 2007. Sequoia machines were in use in 16 states and the District of Columbia at the time.

Reacting to complaints that the arrangement was a national security concern, the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States launched an investigation. Smartmatic then announced in November 2007 that it had sold Sequoia to a group of investors led by Sequoia’s US-based management team, thus ending the inquiry.

In Ukraine, Stigall said, opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko lost a 2004 presidential election runoff because supporters of Russian-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych introduced an unauthorized computer into the Ukraine election committee national headquarters. They snuck it in.

“The implication is that these people were . . . making subtle adjustments to the vote. In other words, intercepting the votes before it goes to the official computer for tabulation.”

Taped cell-phone calls of the ensuing cover-up led to nationwide protests and a second runoff, which Yushchenko won.

Election Assistance Commission officials didn’t trumpet Stigall’s appearance Feb. 27, and he began by saying that he didn’t wish to be identified. (CNP: How’s that for a whistleblower?) However, the election agency had posted his name and biography on its Web site before his appearance.

Electronic voting systems have been controversial in advanced countries, too. Germany’s constitutional court banned computerized machines this month on the grounds that they don’t allow voters to check their choices.

Susannah Goodman, the director of election reform for the citizens’ lobby Common Cause, said they showed that “we can no longer ignore the fact that all of these risks are present right here at home . . . and must secure our election system by requiring every voter to have his or her vote recorded on a paper ballot.”