28 March 2003

Computerized Balloting is Taking Over Elections In Maryland -
But Can We Trust the Results?


By Van Smith

On Nov. 21, a computer programmer for Autotote, an electronic-wagering company, admitted in court that he was the "inside man" in a computer-based scheme that manipulated horse-racing stakes, culminating in an Oct. 23 Breeders' Cup wager that would have yielded $3 million in winnings for a Baltimore man had the bet not raised suspicions.

The scandal prompted the National Thoroughbred Racing Association to convene a panel headed by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani to review the industry's computer-betting system. It also spawned a lawsuit: Gambler Jimmy "the Hat" Allard accuses Autotote of negligence, claiming in a statement made through his law firm that the "betting public may have been cheated out of countless millions of dollars for possibly the past eight years" due to lapses in the company's computer security.

This fall, voters in four Maryland counties for the first time cast ballots on computerized voting machines using a technology called "direct recording electronic" (DRE), a system that Baltimoreans have been using since 1998. The whole state is scheduled to switch over to a unified computer voting system by 2006, but DRE system skeptics question the system's security because, just like the Breeders' Cup betting scandal, it could be rigged using computer code.

Imagine a computer programmer at Diebold Election Systems or Sequoia Pacific Systems, the two companies that manufacture computer voting machines used in Maryland, manipulating the software code used to run the machines to tweak the results in favor of some candidate, some party, some agenda. Imagine that he or she gets caught overreaching. Losers and voters in computerized elections nationwide would mull lawsuits and question the integrity of their races' results, just as Allard questions whether bettors have been cheated all along by the Autotote system.

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