Electronic-Vote Critics Urge Changes to System

Andy Sullivan - Sept 22, 2004

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Voting activists on Wednesday enlisted computer experts, a trained monkey and a man on a hunger strike in a last-minute pitch to convince officials to improve the security of electronic vote-counting systems.

With six weeks to go before the Nov. 2 presidential election, activists said officials still have time to set up a paper trail as a counterweight to an electronic voting system they portrayed as wide open to manipulation.

"It's not too late; there are some security measures we can put in place," said Bev Harris, executive director of the activist group Black Box Voting.

The debate over electronic voting has largely centered on touch-screen systems like Diebold Inc.'s AccuVote-TS, which will be used by roughly one in three voters this November.

But a far greater threat is posed by the software used to tabulate votes on the county level, which counts not only electronic votes but those cast using traditional paper-based methods, Harris and others said.

"The touch-screen machines that we've been focusing our attention on, they're just the tip of the iceberg," said Joan Krawitz, co-founder of the National Ballot Integrity Project.

At a press conference, computer-security experts demonstrated what they said were flaws in tabulating software made by Diebold and Sequoia Voting Systems.

Experts showed ways they could alter vote totals without a password, record a vote for one candidate as a vote for another, or simply erase the vote totals completely.

[...] They also showed a video of a chimpanzee hitting two computer keys -- "delete" and "enter" -- to erase records that vote totals had been altered.

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