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In January 2003, voting activist Bev Harris was holed up in the basement of her three-story house in Renton, Washington, searching the Internet for an electronic voting machine manual, when she made a startling discovery.
Clicking on a link for a file transfer protocol site belonging to voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems, Harris found about 40,000 unprotected computer files. They included source code for Diebold's AccuVote touch-screen voting machine, program files for its Global Election Management System tabulation software, a Texas voter-registration list with voters' names and addresses, and what appeared to be live vote data from 57 precincts in a 2002 California primary election.
"There was a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been there," Harris said.
The California file was time-stamped 3:31 p.m. on Election Day, indicating that Diebold might have obtained the data during voting. But polling precincts aren't supposed to release votes until after polls close at 8 p.m. So Harris began to wonder if it were possible for the company to extract votes during an election and change them without anyone knowing.
A look at the Diebold tabulation program provided a possible answer.
Harris discovered that she could enter the vote database using Microsoft Access -- a standard program often bundled with Microsoft Office -- and change votes without leaving a trace.
Diebold hadn't password-protected the file or secured the audit log, so anyone with access to the tabulation program during an election -- Diebold employees, election staff or even hackers if the county server were connected to a phone line -- could change votes and alter the log to erase the evidence.
It was getting scarier and scarier," Harris said. "I was thinking we have an immense problem here that's much bigger than me."
Over the past year, doubts about the accuracy and integrity of e-voting equipment have been growing, thanks to Harris' discovery. Some election officials have called Harris, a 53-year-old mother of five and a self-employed publicist, a wacko, a conspiracy nut and even a threat to democracy for her role in raising the controversy. But day by day, other election officials, secretaries of state, legislators and voters have come to agree with her that something is seriously wrong with electronic voting systems and the companies that make them.
In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, which allocated $3.9 billion in matching federal funds to help states upgrade to new e-voting systems. Touted as the answer to the hanging chads in Florida that marred the 2000 presidential election, e-voting machines have been lauded by their makers as faster, more accurate and easier to use than punch-card and lever machines. But election glitches involving the systems paint a different picture, depicting machines that sometimes fail to boot up, fail to record votes or even record them for the wrong candidates. Computer scientists say the machines are also easy to hack.
In addition to glitches, there are concerns about the people behind the machines. A few voting company employees have been implicated in bribery or kickback schemes involving election officials. And there are concerns about the partisan loyalties of voting executives -- Diebold's chief executive, for example, is a top fund-raiser for President Bush.
Despite all this, many election officials who have purchased the machines for their counties deny the systems' vulnerability to miscounts or rigging and vehemently defend the integrity of the voting companies.
E-voting machines aren't new. They've been around since the 1960s and '70s, when optical-scan and punch-key machines (where a voter chooses candidates with a keyboard) were introduced. Paperless touch-screen machines, also known as Direct Recording Electronic machines, appeared in the '90s. However, they cost about $3,000 each, and few counties opted to buy them until funds became available through HAVA.
According to political consulting firm Election Data Services, about 50 million people in the United States will vote this November using paperless touch-screen voting machines, while 55 million will use optical-scan ma
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