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ping into the machines remotely, or Cheney board-member cronies who order back doors built into the software. Hollywood-style plots like these are about as likely as they sound. Instead, Stanford University computer science professor David Dill, who has been campaigning for better voting machines, says the most likely hack would be an inside job carried out by an accomplished, partisan hacker who lands a trusted job at Diebold, ES&S, or one of the election offices. "Imagine a programmer, system administrator, or even a janitor who gets access to the code," Dill says.
Dill points out that most successful computer crimes are pulled off by insiders. It's the standard M.O. for identity theft: The thief finagles a job at a financial firm, close to the big database of customer accounts, and walks out the door with a copied disk. Likewise, voting machines could be tampered with by insiders who turn out to be party agents, or even a lone gunman with the political drive to match his coding skills--say, a Unix guru who thinks Nader just needs a little help to defeat those corporate campaign contributions.
The only sure check against an outlaw wacko programmer is an army of wacko programmers poring over every line of his work. There are also ways to verify that the booths themselves aren't running tampered code. Instead of looking for Diebold's ties to Dick Cheney, we should be watching that quiet new repairman.
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that any of the voting-machine vendors will go the open-source route. Proprietary code is a given in most corporate cultures, and Jim Barksdale's conversion to open source at Netscape five years ago didn't exactly set a great example of successful results. But there's another feature that should be added to the electronic machines that already record about 20 percent of America's votes: an old-fashioned paper trail. Dill calls it a "voter verifiable audit trail," which means that before you leave the booth, you the voter get a printout of what the machine thinks your votes are, for your review. If you agree with the printout, you drop it into a sealed box where it can be used for recounts. Boxes full of paper are much harder to manipulate than electronic tallies. Without a paper copy of your vote stored as a backup, there's no way to prove whether electronic vote totals were tampered with.
Adding a ballot-printing option to electronic machines should be an easy fix, but unless Congress mandates that elections have a paper trail, don't expect local governments to line up behind the idea. ES&S claims it will be able to add a printer to existing machines for $500 each--a 10 percent markup. And a Diebold spokesman told me, "While Diebold is certainly capable of producing receipt printers, we currently have no plans to manufacture receipt printers primarily because our customers haven't requested it." HAVA passed without requiring a voter-verified audit trail, and a bill to amend it hasn't gone far in the House. Unless that changes, if you don't like next November's election results, at least you'll be able to blame the computer.
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