All your vote are belong to us! (was: Diebold Inc.)

[Elias Sinderson]

The latest in a string of stories I've seen on electronic voting... Is 
it just me, or is something rotten in the state of America? All of this 
seems just a little too 'funny' for my taste, especially with the 
coverage I've seen around the issue. None of it smells quite right, 
especially the bits on the public not being able to independently audit 
the machines... WTF, whose democracy is this anyway?

E
___________________________________

All the President's Votes?
A Quiet Revolution is Taking Place in US Politics. By the Time It's 
Over, the Integrity of Elections Will be in the Unchallenged, 
Unscrutinized Control of a Few Large - and Pro-Republican - 
Corporations. Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive
by Andrew Gumbel
Published on Monday, October 13, 2003 by the lndependent/UK 
<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=452972>
Reposted from <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1013-01.htm>

Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last 
November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the 
incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In 
a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max 
Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to 
five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.

Those figures were more or less what political experts would have 
expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to 
statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia 
appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship 
to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of 
as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland 
lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.

Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to do and 
launched internal investigations. Political analysts credited the upset 
- part of a pattern of Republican successes around the country - to a 
huge campaigning push by President Bush in the final days of the race. 
They also said that Roy Barnes had lost because of a surge of "angry 
white men" punishing him for eradicating all but a vestige of the old 
confederate symbol from the state flag.

But something about these explanations did not make sense, and they have 
made even less sense over time. When the Georgia secretary of state's 
office published its demographic breakdown of the election earlier this 
year, it turned out there was no surge of angry white men; in fact, the 
only subgroup showing even a modest increase in turnout was black women.

There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in different 
parts of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in line with 
the primary election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated north 
Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage points 
higher than he had in the primaries. And in 74 counties in the Democrat 
south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for the 
Republicans than the party as a whole had won less than three months 
earlier.

Now, weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections, and the 
figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except statistical 
anomalies worthy of further study. But in Georgia there was an extra 
reason to be suspicious. Last November, the state became the first in 
the country to conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting 
machines, after lavishing $54m (£33m) on a new system that promised to 
deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in 
the history of the republic. The machines, however, turned out to be 
anything but reliable. With academic studies showing the Georgia 
touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone 
to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from different 
companies being introduced at high speed across the country, computer 
voting may, in fact, be US democracy's own 21st-century nightmare.

In many Georgia counties last November, the machines froze up, causing 
long delays as technicians tried to reboot them. In heavily Democratic 
Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta, 67 memory cards from the voting 
machines went missing, delaying certification of the results there for 
10 days. In neighboring DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were unaccounted 
for; they were later recovered from terminals that had supposedly broken 
down and been taken out of service.

It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were 
tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will probably never 
know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not conducted 
by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold 
Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict 
trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually 
illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch 
the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines 
worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The 
machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could 
theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but these 
were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible. Had Diebold 
Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to review the votes, all it could have 
done was program the computers to spit out the same data as before, 
flawed or not.

Astonishingly, these are the terms under which America's top three 
computer voting machine manufacturers - Diebold, Sequoia and Election 
Systems and Software (ES&S) - have sold their products to election 
officials around the country. Far from questioning the need for rigid 
trade secrecy and the absence of a paper record, secretaries of state 
and their technical advisers - anxious to banish memories of the hanging 
chad fiasco and other associated disasters in the 2000 presidential 
recount in Florida - have, for the most part, welcomed the touchscreen 
voting machines as a technological miracle solution.

Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute 
swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota, 
Illinois and New Hampshire - all in races that had been flagged as key 
partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party. Again, this 
was widely attributed to the campaigning efforts of President Bush and 
the demoralization of a Democratic Party too timid to speak out against 
the looming war in Iraq.

Strangely, however, the pollsters made no comparable howlers in 
lower-key races whose outcome was not seriously contested. Another 
anomaly, perhaps. What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners 
of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican 
Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to 
Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which 
he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes 
to the president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the 
contract on the state's new voting machinery?

Alarmed and suspicious, a group of Georgia citizens began to look into 
last November's election to see whether there was any chance the results 
might have been deliberately or accidentally manipulated. Their research 
proved unexpectedly, and disturbingly, fruitful.

First, they wanted to know if the software had undergone adequate 
checking. Under state and federal law, all voting machinery and 
component parts must be certified before use in an election. So an 
Atlanta graphic designer called Denis Wright wrote to the secretary of 
state's office for a copy of the certification letter. Clifford Tatum, 
assistant director of legal affairs for the election division, wrote 
back: "We have determined that no records exist in the Secretary of 
State's office regarding a certification letter from the lab certifying 
the version of software used on Election Day." Mr Tatum said it was 
possible the relevant documents were with Gary Powell, an official at 
the Georgia Technology Authority, so campaigners wrote to him as well. 
Mr Powell responded he was "not sure what you mean by the words 'please 
provide written certification documents' ".

"If the machines were not certified, then right there the election was 
illegal," Mr Wright says. The secretary of state's office has yet to 
demonstrate anything to the contrary. The investigating citizens then 
considered the nature of the software itself. Shortly after the 
election, a Diebold technician called Rob Behler came forward and 
reported that, when the machines were about to be shipped to Georgia 
polling stations in the summer of 2002, they performed so erratically 
that their software had to be amended with a last-minute "patch". 
Instead of being transmitted via disk - a potentially time-consuming 
process, especially since its author was in Canada, not Georgia - the 
patch was posted, along with the entire election software package, on an 
open-access FTP, or file transfer protocol site, on the internet.

That, according to computer experts, was a violation of the most basic 
of security precautions, opening all sorts of possibilities for the 
introduction of rogue or malicious code. At the same time, however, it 
gave campaigners a golden opportunity to circumvent Diebold's own 
secrecy demands and see exactly how the system worked. Roxanne Jekot, a 
computer programmer with 20 years' experience, and an occasional teacher 
at Lanier Technical College northeast of Atlanta, did a line-by-line 
review and found "enough to stand your hair on end".

"There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most basic 
display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the operating 
system." Although the program was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 
NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep out 
intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less secure 
Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".

Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers 
working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as 
"a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work." 
"Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were 
operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for 
the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to 
figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the 
code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction 
to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint 
there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an 
immediate red flag."

Mostly, though, she was struck by the shoddiness of much of the 
programming. "I really expected to have some difficulty reviewing the 
source code because it would be at a higher level than I am accustomed 
to," she says. "In fact, a lot of this stuff looked like the homework my 
first-year students might have turned in." Diebold had no specific 
comment on Ms Jekot's interpretations, offering only a blanket caution 
about the complexity of election systems "often not well understood by 
individuals with little real-world experience".

But Ms Jekot was not the only one to examine the Diebold software and 
find it lacking. In July, a group of researchers from the Information 
Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discovered 
what they called "stunning flaws". These included putting the password 
in the source code, a basic security no-no; manipulating the voter 
smart-card function so one person could cast more than one vote; and 
other loopholes that could theoretically allow voters' ballot choices to 
be altered without their knowledge, either on the spot or by remote access.

Diebold issued a detailed response, saying that the Johns Hopkins report 
was riddled with false assumptions, inadequate information and "a 
multitude of false conclusions". Substantially similar findings, 
however, were made in a follow-up study on behalf of the state of 
Maryland, in which a group of computer security experts catalogued 328 
software flaws, 26 of them critical, putting the whole system "at high 
risk of compromise". "If these vulnerabilities are exploited, 
significant impact could occur on the accuracy, integrity, and 
availability of election results," their report says.

Ever since the Johns Hopkins study, Diebold has sought to explain away 
the open FTP file as an old, incomplete version of its election package. 
The claim cannot be independently verified, because of the trade-secrecy 
agreement, and not everyone is buying it. "It is documented throughout 
the code who changed what and when. We have the history of this program 
from 1996 to 2002," Ms Jekot says. "I have no doubt this is the software 
used in the elections." Diebold now says it has upgraded its encryption 
and password features - but only on its Maryland machines.

A key security question concerned compatibility with Microsoft Windows, 
and Ms Jekot says just three programmers, all of them senior Diebold 
executives, were involved in this aspect of the system. One of these, 
Diebold's vice-president of research and development, Talbot Iredale, 
wrote an e-mail in April 2002 - later obtained by the campaigners - 
making it clear that he wanted to shield the operating system from Wylie 
Labs, an independent testing agency involved in the early certification 
process.

The reason that emerges from the e-mail is that he wanted to make the 
software compatible with WinCE 3.0, an operating system used for 
handhelds and PDAs; in other words, a system that could be manipulated 
from a remote location. "We do not want Wyle [sic] reviewing and 
certifying the operating systems," the e-mail reads. "Therefore can we 
keep to a minimum the references to the WinCE 3.0 operating system."

In an earlier intercepted e-mail, this one from Ken Clark in Diebold's 
research and development department, the company explained upfront to 
another independent testing lab that the supposedly secure software 
system could be accessed without a password, and its contents easily 
changed using the Microsoft Access program Mr Clark says he had 
considered putting in a password requirement to stop dealers and 
customers doing "stupid things", but that the easy access had often "got 
people out of a bind". Astonishingly, the representative from the 
independent testing lab did not see anything wrong with this and granted 
certification to the part of the software program she was inspecting - a 
pattern of lackadaisical oversight that was replicated all the way to 
the top of the political chain of command in Georgia, and in many other 
parts of the country.

Diebold has not contested the authenticity of the e-mails, now openly 
accessible on the internet. However, Diebold did caution that, as the 
e-mails were taken from a Diebold Election systems website in March 2003 
by an illegal hack, the nature of the information stolen could have been 
revised or manipulated.

There are two reasons why the United States is rushing to overhaul its 
voting systems. The first is the Florida débâcle in the Bush-Gore 
election; no state wants to be the center of that kind of attention 
again. And the second is the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), signed by 
President Bush last October, which promises an unprecedented $3.9bn 
(£2.3bn) to the states to replace their old punchcard-and-lever 
machines. However, enthusiasm for the new technology seems to be 
motivated as much by a bureaucratic love of spending as by a love of 
democratic accountability. According to Rebecca Mercuri, a research 
fellow at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government and a specialist 
in voting systems, the shockingly high error rate of punchcard machines 
(3-5 per cent in Florida in 2000) has been known to people in the 
elections business for years. It was only after it became public 
knowledge in the last presidential election that anybody felt moved to 
do anything about it.

The problem is, computer touchscreen machines and other so-called DRE 
(direct recording electronic) systems are significantly less reliable 
than punchcards, irrespective of their vulnerability to interference. In 
a series of research papers for the Voting Technology Project, a joint 
venture of the prestigious Massachusetts and California Institutes of 
Technology, DREs were found to be among the worst performing systems. No 
method, the MIT/CalTech study conceded, worked more reliably than 
hand-counting paper ballots - an option that US electoral officials seem 
to consider hopelessly antiquated, or at least impractical in elections 
combining multiple local, state and national races for offices from 
President down to dogcatcher.

The clear disadvantages and dangers associated with DREs have not 
deterred state and county authorities from throwing themselves headlong 
into touchscreen technology. More than 40,000 machines made by Diebold 
alone are already in use in 37 states, and most are touchscreens. County 
after county is poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on 
computer voting before next spring's presidential primaries. "They say 
this is the direction they have to go in to have fair elections, but the 
rush to go towards computerization is very dubious," Dr Mercuri says. 
"One has to wonder why this is going on, because the way it is set up it 
takes away the checks and balances we have in a democratic society. 
That's the whole point of paper trails and recounts."

Anyone who has struggled with an interactive display in a museum knows 
how dodgy touchscreens can be. If they don't freeze, they easily become 
misaligned, which means they can record the wrong data. In Dallas, 
during early voting before last November's election, people found that 
no matter how often they tried to press a Democrat button, the 
Republican candidate's name would light up. After a court hearing, 
Diebold agreed to take down 18 machines with apparent misalignment 
problems. "And those were the ones where you could visually spot a 
problem," Dr Mercuri says. "What about what you don't see? Just because 
your vote shows up on the screen for the Democrats, how do you know it 
is registering inside the machine for the Democrats?"

Other problems have shown up periodically: machines that register zero 
votes, or machines that indicate voters coming to the polling station 
but not voting, even when a single race with just two candidates was on 
the ballot. Dr Mercuri was part of a lawsuit in Palm Beach County in 
which she and other plaintiffs tried to have a suspect Sequoia machine 
examined, only to run up against the brick wall of the trade-secret 
agreement. "It makes it really hard to show their product has been 
tampered with," she says, "if it's a felony to inspect it."

As for the possibilities of foul play, Dr Mercuri says they are 
virtually limitless. "There are literally hundreds of ways to do this," 
she says. "There are hundreds of ways to embed a rogue series of 
commands into the code and nobody would ever know because the nature of 
programming is so complex. The numbers would all tally perfectly." 
Tampering with an election could be something as simple as a 
"denial-of-service" attack, in which the machines simply stop working 
for an extended period, deterring voters faced with the prospect of long 
lines. Or it could be done with invasive computer codes known in the 
trade by such nicknames as "Trojan horses" or "Easter eggs". Detecting 
one of these, Dr Mercuri says, would be almost impossible unless the 
investigator knew in advance it was there and how to trigger it. 
Computer researcher Theresa Hommel, who is alarmed by touchscreen 
systems, has constructed a simulated voting machine in which the same 
candidate always wins, no matter what data you put in. She calls her 
model the Fraud-o-matic, and it is available online at 
www.wheresthepaper.org.

It is not just touchscreens which are at risk from error or malicious 
intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes is vulnerable. An 
optical scan of ballots in Scurry County, Texas, last November 
erroneously declared a landslide victory for the Republican candidate 
for county commissioner; a subsequent hand recount showed that the 
Democrat had in fact won. In Comal County, Texas, a computerized optical 
scan found that three different candidates had won their races with 
exactly 18,181 votes. There was no recount or investigation, even though 
the coincidence, with those recurring 1s and 8s, looked highly 
suspicious. In heavily Democrat Broward County, Florida - which had 
switched to touchscreens in the wake of the hanging chad furore - more 
than 100,000 votes were found to have gone "missing" on election day. 
The votes were reinstated, but the glitch was not adequately explained. 
One local official blamed it on a "minor software thing".

Most suspect of all was the governor's race in Alabama, where the 
incumbent Democrat, Don Siegelman, was initially declared the winner. 
Sometime after midnight, when polling station observers and most staff 
had gone home, the probate judge responsible for elections in rural 
Baldwin County suddenly "discovered" that Mr Siegelman had been awarded 
7,000 votes too many. In a tight election, the change was enough to hand 
victory to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley. County officials talked 
vaguely of a computer tabulation error, or a lightning strike messing up 
the machines, but the real reason was never ascertained because the 
state's Republican attorney general refused to authorize a recount or 
any independent ballot inspection.

According to an analysis by James Gundlach, a sociology professor at 
Auburn University in Alabama, the result in Baldwin County was full of 
wild deviations from the statistical norms established both by this and 
preceding elections. And he adds: "There is simply no way that 
electronic vote counting can produce two sets of results without someone 
using computer programs in ways that were not intended. In other words, 
the fact that two sets of results were reported is sufficient evidence 
in and of itself that the vote tabulation process was compromised." 
Although talk of voting fraud quickly subsided, Alabama has now amended 
its election laws to make recounts mandatory in close races.

The possibility of flaws in the electoral process is not something that 
gets discussed much in the United States. The attitude seems to be: we 
are the greatest democracy in the world, so the system must be fair. 
That has certainly been the prevailing view in Georgia, where even 
leading Democrats - their prestige on the line for introducing 
touchscreen voting in the first place - have fought tooth-and-nail to 
defend the integrity of the system. In a phone interview, the head of 
the Georgia Technology Authority who brought Diebold machines to the 
state, Larry Singer, blamed the growing chorus of criticism on "fear of 
technology", despite the fact that many prominent critics are themselves 
computer scientists. He says: "Are these machines flawless? No. Would 
you have more confidence if they were completely flawless? Yes. Is there 
such a thing as a flawless system? No." Mr Singer, who left the GTA 
straight after the election and took a 50 per cent pay cut to work for 
Sun Microsystems, insists that voters are more likely to have their 
credit card information stolen by a busboy in a restaurant than to have 
their vote compromised by touchscreen technology.

Voting machines are sold in the United States in much the same way as 
other government contracts: through intensive lobbying, wining and 
dining. At a recent national conference of clerks, election officials 
and treasurers in Denver, attendees were treated to black-tie dinners 
and other perks, including free expensive briefcases stamped with 
Sequoia's company logo alongside the association's own symbol. Nobody in 
power seems to find this worrying, any more than they worried when 
Sequoia's southern regional sales manager, Phil Foster, was indicted in 
Louisiana a couple of years ago for "conspiracy to commit money 
laundering and malfeasance". The charges were dropped in exchange for 
his testimony against Louisiana's state commissioner of elections. 
Similarly, last year, the Arkansas secretary of state, Bill McCuen, 
pleaded guilty to taking bribes and kickbacks involving a precursor 
company to ES&S; the voting machine company executive who testified 
against him in exchange for immunity is now an ES&S vice-president.

If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the 
Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies 
are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars 
into party coffers in the past few years. The ownership issue is, of 
course, compounded by the lack of transparency. Or, as Dr Mercuri puts 
it: "If the machines were independently verifiable, who would give a 
crap who owns them?" As it is, fears that US democracy is being hijacked 
by corporate interests are being fueled by links between the big three 
and broader business interests, as well as extremist organizations. Two 
of the early backers of American Information Systems, a company later 
merged into ES&S, are also prominent supporters of the Chalcedon 
Foundation, an organization that espouses theocratic governance 
according to a literal reading of the Bible and advocates capital 
punishment for blasphemy and homosexuality.

The chief executive of American Information Systems in the early 
Nineties was Chuck Hagel, who went on to run for elective office and 
became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected to the Senate from 
Nebraska, cheered on by the Omaha World-Herald newspaper which also 
happens to be a big investor in ES&S. In yet another clamorous conflict 
of interest, 80 per cent of Mr Hagel's winning votes - both in 1996 and 
again in 2002 - were counted, under the usual terms of confidentiality, 
by his own company.

In theory, the federal government should be monitoring the transition to 
computer technology and rooting out abuses. Under the Help America Vote 
Act, the Bush administration is supposed to establish a sizeable 
oversight committee, headed by two Democrats and two Republicans, as 
well as a technical panel to determine standards for new voting 
machinery. The four commission heads were supposed to have been in place 
by last February, but so far just one has been appointed. The technical 
panel also remains unconstituted, even though the new machines it is 
supposed to vet are already being sold in large quantities - a state of 
affairs Dr Mercuri denounces as "an abomination".

One of the conditions states have to fulfil to receive federal funding 
for the new voting machines, meanwhile, is a consolidation of voter 
rolls at state rather than county level. This provision sends a chill 
down the spine of anyone who has studied how Florida consolidated its 
own voter rolls just before the 2000 election, purging the names of tens 
of thousands of eligible voters, most of them African Americans and most 
of them Democrats, through misuse of an erroneous list of convicted 
felons commissioned by Katherine Harris, the secretary of state doubling 
as George Bush's Florida campaign manager. Despite a volley of lawsuits, 
the incorrect list was still in operation in last November's mid-terms, 
raising all sorts of questions about what other states might now do with 
their own voter rolls. It is not that the Act's consolidation provision 
is in itself evidence of a conspiracy to throw elections, but it does 
leave open that possibility.

Meanwhile, the administration has been pushing new voting technology of 
its own to help overseas citizens and military personnel, both natural 
Republican Party constituencies, to vote more easily over the internet. 
Internet voting is notoriously insecure and open to abuse by just about 
anyone with rudimentary hacking skills; just last January, an experiment 
in internet voting in Toronto was scuppered by a Slammer worm attack. 
Undeterred, the administration has gone ahead with its so-called SERVE 
project for overseas voting, via a private consortium made up of major 
defense contractors and a Saudi investment group. The contract for 
overseeing internet voting in the 2004 presidential election was 
recently awarded to Accenture, formerly part of the Arthur Andersen 
group (whose accountancy branch, a major campaign contributor to 
President Bush, imploded as a result of the Enron bankruptcy scandal).

Not everyone in the United States has fallen under the spell of the big 
computer voting companies, and there are signs of growing wariness. 
Oregon decided even before HAVA to conduct all its voting by mail. 
Wisconsin has decided it wants nothing to do with touchscreen machines 
without a verifiable paper trail, and New York is considering a similar 
injunction, at least for its state assembly races. In California, a 
Stanford computer science professor called David Dill is screaming from 
the rooftops on the need for a paper trail in his state, so far without 
result. And a New Jersey Congressman called Rush Holt has introduced a 
bill in the House of Representatives, the Voter Confidence and Increased 
Accessibility Act, asking for much the same thing. Not everyone is 
heeding the warnings, though. In Ohio, publication of the letter from 
Diebold's chief executive promising to deliver the state to President 
Bush in 2004 has not deterred the secretary of state - a Republican - 
from putting Diebold on a list of preferred voting-machine vendors. 
Similarly, in Maryland, officials have not taken the recent 
state-sponsored study identifying hundreds of flaws in the Diebold 
software as any reason to change their plans to use Diebold machines in 
March's presidential primary.

The question is whether the country will come to its senses before 
elections start getting distorted or tampered with on such a scale that 
the system becomes unmanageable. The sheer volume of money offered under 
HAVA is unlikely to be forthcoming again in a hurry, so if things aren't 
done right now it is doubtful the system can be fixed again for a long 
time. "This is frightening, really frightening," says Dr Mercuri, and a 
growing number of reasonable people are starting to agree with her. One 
such is John Zogby, arguably the most reliable pollster in the United 
States, who has freely admitted he "blew" last November's elections and 
does not exclude the possibility that foul play was one of the factors 
knocking his calculations off course. "We're plowing into a brave new 
world here," he says, "where there are so many variables aside from 
out-and-out corruption that can change elections, especially in 
situations where the races are close. We have machines that break down, 
or are tampered with, or are simply misunderstood. It's a cause for 
great concern."

Roxanne Jekot, who has put much of her professional and personal life on 
hold to work on the issue full time, puts it even more strongly. 
"Corporate America is very close to running this country. The only thing 
that is stopping them from taking total control are the pesky voters. 
That's why there's such a drive to control the vote. What we're seeing 
is the corporatization of the last shred of democracy.

"I feel that unless we stop it here and stop it now," she says, "my kids 
won't grow up to have a right to vote at all."

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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