Feature
Inside the black box
by Mark Revington
What do possible election fraud in the United States and a small, independent website based in New Zealand have in common? The word "scoop".
It’s an unassuming place from the street, a quiet backwater in a Wellington suburb. A little unkempt, the house of someone unconcerned with external appearances. The lawn doesn’t appear to have met a mower that it couldn’t tame and the paint is cracked and dry. But then Alastair Thompson has other things on his mind, notably the story he calls "bigger than Watergate".
It broke a couple of weeks ago on Thompson’s Scoop website (www.scoop.co.nz) with this introduction: "IMPORTANT NOTE: Publication of this story marks a watershed in American political history. It is offered freely for publication in full or part on any and all Internet forums, blogs and noticeboards. All other media are also encouraged to utilise material. Readers are encouraged to forward this to friends and acquaintances in the United States and elsewhere."
Cue thunder, lightning, ominous roll of drums. What warranted this kind of build-up?
An apparent exposé of a huge security flaw in the United States voting system, primarily uncovered by a US writer named Bev Harris, author of a soon-to-be published book called Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century and someone with whom Thompson has been working closely in recent months.
Was it bigger than Watergate? Far more computer-savvy minds than this writer’s are still debating the significance of what appeared on the Scoop website, but the kind of hyperbole employed was always going to attract criticism. So far, the mainstream US media have ignored the Scoop story, but it ignited fierce debate across the Internet, drew huge traffic to the Scoop site, and fed increasing controversy over electronic voting machines.
Think of vote counts in New Zealand and the overwhelming image is a Dickensian one, of draughty halls, harried volunteers, and a tally that always seems to be late, inevitably followed by some sort of official witch-hunt.
Think of the US and the overwhelming image is of a president who got fewer votes than his rival, yet still got the top job thanks to massive confusion in the state in which his brother is governor.
Perhaps President Bush had that in mind late last year when he signed into law the Help America Vote Act, which will provide almost $6.8 billion to states to buy new electronic voting machines. By next year, many US voters will cast their ballot on controversial touch-screen machines, which don’t provide a paper audit trail, owned by a small number of private companies who keep their software secret.
Can the machines be trusted? Of course, say the companies that manufacture and programme them and the officials who implement them. Security is their second name. A growing band of computer experts don’t agree. Computer programs can always be hacked, says Stanford University computer scientist David Dill, who organised a petition signed by more than 300 of the top scientists and computer boffins in the US, calling for voting machines to have a paper audit trail. It would be easy for a programmer to change the way a machine counted votes during an election while keeping the change secret from any security tests, says Dill. "The election could be running smooth as silk, only the wrong person is elected and no one can tell. No one can prove it," he told the Mercury News.
What does this have to do with Scoop? For the past few months the website has been running stories from Harris, detailing discrepancies and curious coincidences in electronic voting technology in the US. Until now, the companies that make these machines had managed to keep their software secret. But Harris, who has spent thousands of hours interviewing everyone from election officials to the programmers who worked for the companies that made the electronic voting machines, discovered a public file transfer site that contained up to 40,000 files, including manuals, source codes, and a vote counting system that she and Thompson say contains a trapdoor that could allow someone to alter the data.
The files came from Diebold Election Systems, one of the largest providers of electronic voting technology in the world. Diebold has since closed the website and says the files were old and unimportant.
Harris believes otherwise and there is a long list of interviews on her website (www.blackboxvoting.com) to back her case. The full set of files has been copied and since dispersed around the world, including publication on Scoop. "We can now reveal for the first time the location of a complete online copy of the original data set," trumpeted Scoop. At the very least, says Thompson, the existence of the files on a public website is a bad security breach. What they contain may be much worse.
HARRIS FIRST BECAME interested in electronic voting when she read a story called "Assume crooks are in charge of the election machines". She had spent time in the 1990s uncovering financial fraud and had written a book called How to Embezzle a Fortune, which contained tips on how to identify accounting fraud and uncover embezzled funds. She knew her way around basic research and, just out of curiosity, decided to research some of the companies involved in electronic voting machines.
The first names she discovered, she says, "were the wrong people, people with vested interests. It was like opening Pandora’s Box." A book contract followed and then Harris began sending out her stories.
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