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Glitches, Security Gaps : Computers: Bugs in the Ballot Box

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Times Staff Writer

When computerized vote-counting systems first appeared in California about 20 years ago, election officials across the land breathed deep sighs of relief.

No more pieces of paper. No more waiting until the early morning hours for weary election workers to finish counting paper ballots, only to find later that the count was off by 2% or 3% or more. No more ballot-box stuffing. No more ballots scattered to the four winds as they were being transported from polling place to counting center.

Now computers would do the counting. Computers were never wrong, or hardly ever. Computers could not be stuffed with phony ballots. Computers were fast and would help local officials fend off criticism from candidates and the news media by producing quicker tallies.

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Even some political jurisdictions that were using lever voting machines made plans to change to computers. No longer would election officials have to store the bulky machines or pay large sums to keep them in working order.

But a series of flawed elections in recent years has destroyed some of that early enthusiasm, demonstrating that computerized vote tabulation has its own problems:

--Computer counts are not always accurate, because of programming errors or inexperienced election workers or, in a few cases, deliberate attempts to change the results.

--Because not enough attention is paid to security, most vote-counting systems are surprisingly vulnerable to tampering.

--Many election officials are poorly trained, overworked and underpaid. Unable to supervise increasingly complex vote-counting systems, they must depend on the producers of the equipment to protect the integrity of the election process.

Here to Stay

Despite these problems, computerized tabulation is here to stay, most experts agree. Lever machines are not even manufactured anymore, and few local election officials want to return to counting paper ballots.

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“Anything is better than paper,” said George A. Mann, registrar of voters in Santa Clara County, which is still using a computerized tabulation system that was purchased in 1966. That opinion is widely shared by election officials.

In a series of reports published in recent years, experts both inside and outside the federal government have called attention to flaws in electronic vote-counting and have proposed solutions for the problems.

Citizen groups, such as Los Angeles-based Election Watch, have pressed the federal government and the states to improve the accuracy of computerized systems and to tighten security.

But much remains to be done.

“The election community is underfunded and underorganized,” Lance J. Hoffman, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at George Washington University, wrote in a 1987 report. “With some exceptions, it knows little about managing computer security. Few jurisdictions share knowledge. Therefore, American elections are more vulnerable to fraud and error than is desirable or necessary.”

Electronic vote-counting systems first appeared in the mid-1960s and quickly gained acceptance. By the 1976 presidential election, one-fifth of all voting Americans used a system developed by the leader in the field--Computer Election Services of Berkeley.

Most systems, such as the Votomatic used in Los Angeles County, require voters to punch out small rectangular holes on IBM cards with a metal stylus. In other “mark sense” systems, the voter marks the ballot card with a special pen or pencil. The punched or marked cards are then fed, at a rate of up to 1,000 per minute, into machines that translate the holes or marks into numbers a computer can count.

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‘Glitches’ From the Start

Nationally, more than 50% of registered voters used computerized tabulation systems in 1988, according to a survey by Election Data Services Inc. of Washington, D.C. In California, it was 97%.

But there were problems, or “glitches,” as people in the computer industry like to call them, right from the start.

Some of the worst of the early disasters occurred in Los Angeles County in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when programming errors were made, votes were lost and uncounted ballots were carried around in fishnets and paper bags.

In Los Angeles and elsewhere, the “header cards” that separate one batch of ballots from another, and tell the computer where the votes come from and how they should be counted, either were missing or contained incorrect instructions.

Election workers placed ballots upside-down in the card readers, which jammed as a result. Voters punched their cards with ballpoint pens, instead of the stylus provided in each voting booth, and again the card readers jammed.

Los Angeles County was not alone.

Programming Error

In Missoula, Mont., in November, 1968, a programming error led to votes for Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon being counted for Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey and vice versa.

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In June, 1970, vote-counting in Fresno could not begin until 87 hours after the polls closed because the lone county employee assigned to write the vote-counting program did not complete the work until well after the election.

In a bizarre series of events, San Francisco managed to miscount about 13,000 ballots cast in the November, 1968, general election, causing the San Francisco Chronicle to editorialize that such an occurrence was “astonishing, alarming, preposterous and confidence-shaking but, unfortunately, not incredible.”

Defenders of electronic vote-counting say most of the mistakes of the early years have been corrected and the systems now are basically sound.

Improved Security

Acting on recommendations made by a blue-ribbon task force, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors bought new equipment, improved security and beefed up the elections staff. Many experts now consider the county’s election procedures to be among the best in the nation.

“The technology is very good,” said Deborah Seiler, assistant to California Secretary of State March Fong Eu. “I believe what is being done now is adequate to provide us with accurate, credible results.”

But the problems continue.

In Elkhart County, Ind., in 1982, the vote-counting program was inadequately tested, according to an account prepared later by Roy G. Saltman of the Federal Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology.

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When problems developed on election night, Saltman wrote, a part-time employee of Computer Election Services stopped the counting twice to alter the program, a fundamental violation of sound election practice. As a result, the totals were changed in three separate races and one winner was declared a loser.

Sloppy Testing

“It seems clear . . . that the full implications of computer processing of ballots were not completely appreciated by the persons responsible for running the election,” Saltman wrote.

In Carroll County, Md., in 1984, sloppy testing allowed an incorrect computer program to miss about 13,000 votes altogether. When these votes were tallied later, once again a winner became a loser.

In Orange County, a programming error in the 1980 presidential primary caused 15,000 votes for Jimmy Carter and Edward M. Kennedy to be counted instead for Lyndon LaRouche and Edmund G. Brown Jr. However, the mistake was corrected when the official canvass was completed about a month later.

The notion that computerized vote-counting was immune to ballot-box stuffing died a terrible death in Chicago in 1982, when Democratic ward bosses punched out false ballots for the dead, the drunken and the missing and, in one instance, ran the same straight-Democratic Party ticket through the card-reading machine 198 times.

Convicted of Election Crimes

For these and other offenses, 58 Democratic Party election officials and poll workers were convicted of federal election crimes.

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California has been spared most of these embarrassments, but the expert who certifies California vote-counting systems believes that the state has been lucky.

“California has had no rigged counts or major snafus,” said Robert J. Naegele of Santa Cruz. “I would not have thought we’d be this lucky, especially in some of the smaller jurisdictions where election officials are not very well trained.”

But in California, as elsewhere, no one can be sure that computerized elections have not been rigged because electronic fraud is difficult to detect.

Steve White, until recently the state’s chief assistant attorney general, said, “You can’t tell if these systems have been tampered with. . . . If you did it right, no one would ever know.”

Biggest Problem

But many experts believe that the biggest problem with computerized vote-counting is neither inaccuracy nor fraud but the large number of badly trained, poorly paid, overworked officials who try to run local elections.

“It is my impression that election administration is one of the most poorly funded sections of local government,” said Saltman, the federal government computer expert. “The overwhelming majority of the people who run elections are well-meaning and honest but they lack the technical training and resources to do a proper job.”

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Said Naegele, “Obviously there are chances for fraud, but we’ve found every time something has gone wrong (in California), it was because somebody hadn’t done his homework.

“It is up to the user to make sure this stuff works,” he added, “and when you get into these small counties, they just don’t have the funds or the people to do that.”

In many thinly populated counties, the same person serves as county clerk, county recorder, registrar of voters, clerk to the local Board of Supervisors and perhaps to the local Superior Court justices as well--all for $35,000 to $40,000 a year.

Many Duties

Frances J. Fairey, the clerk-recorder in Yuba County, north of Sacramento, interrupted a recent interview to rush out and perform a wedding ceremony on the county courthouse lawn.

“State law allows me to do that now,” Fairey said when she returned, somewhat breathless. “The county gets $15 per wedding but I don’t get anything extra.”

Local election officials “have to wear too many hats,” said Seiler of the secretary of state’s office.

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Nor are all the problems to be found in small counties.

San Francisco city and county (they are the same) has suffered through a series of election foul-ups, in part because the registrar of voters’ office has been chronically underfunded and poorly staffed.

Most of the desks in the registrar’s cavernous offices in the basement of San Francisco’s City Hall are empty. The registrar has only four permanent staff members and four temporary workers to handle 435,545 registered voters, while Sacramento County has a staff of 28 for 556,943 registered voters.

Besieged by problems, acting Registrar of Voters Michelle Corwin quit three weeks before the November, 1988, elections, posting a notice on her office door that she was resigning immediately and could not be reached.

‘Nobody Has Sued Us’

The Board of Supervisors approved emergency appropriations of half a million dollars, a staff was assembled hastily from various city and county departments and the election was held.

“I guess we did it right,” Germaine Q. Wong, the new acting registrar of voters, said wearily a few months later. “At least, nobody has sued us.”

“Unfortunately, it often takes a disaster before election offices are upgraded,” said a state official who asked not to be identified.

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Many county clerks and voting registrars do not have the time, or do not take the time, to learn how computerized vote-counting systems work. As a result, they depend heavily on the companies that sold them the systems.

Even well-informed election officials, in counties with reputations for conducting honest, efficient elections, depend on the expertise of computer vendors.

List of People Posted

In Santa Barbara County, for instance, Carol Acquistapace, chief deputy in the county clerk-recorder’s office, posts a list of people who will be admitted to the vote-counting area on election night.

Last Nov. 8, that list included Acquistapace and two assistants; four people to operate the card-reading machines; a citizen observer; a representative of Data General Corp., which manufactured the mainframe computer that would count the votes; Jim Howard of DFM Associates, the Irvine firm that provided the vote-counting computer program, and a sheriff’s deputy to keep everybody else out.

Of these 11 people, only Howard understood the vote-tabulation technology. Had something gone wrong (it did not), probably only Howard or someone else from DFM would have been able to fix it.

Like all salesmen, these vendors strive to maintain good relations with local election officials.

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Vendors Take Over Election

When the California county clerks’ association held its annual meeting at the elegant Marriott Hotel in Burlingame, Calif., last January, vendors picked up part of the tab and sponsored a “Great Gatsby” dinner-dance for the county officials and their guests.

In many election jurisdictions in California and across the country, vendors take over the election--planning the ballot format, testing the accuracy of the vote-counting program (a program the vendor has provided) and supervising the counting.

In such places, there is no independent check on the system. The people who installed the system say it works and nobody else has enough knowledge to challenge them.

“In a sense, we have privatization of elections,” said Larry Slesinger, who was program officer at the Markle Foundation of New York City in the early 1980s when the foundation sponsored several important studies of electronic vote tabulation. “County officials turn it over to private companies because they don’t understand the technology and they want to avoid election-night embarrassment.”

‘Air of Mystification’

Some vendors “are guilty of lending an air of mystification” to vote-counting technology, said Gary Chapman, executive director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a Palo Alto-based organization that has been sharply critical of the way in which electronic elections are conducted.

Until recently, most vendors refused to release the “source codes” that form the heart of the vote-counting programs, on grounds that these are trade secrets that must be protected from competitors.

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But several specialists said these codes are relatively simple computer programs that could be written by graduate students.

Chapman said the vendors “mystify the process” so that once they buy a system, election officials will be more willing to pay stiff monthly or annual consulting fees.

Even when these fees are paid, however, service is not always adequate.

“Local election officials are often at the mercy of some vendor with a smooth line,” said Willis Ware, a computer security expert at the RAND Corp.

Excellent Reputations

Some vendors, such as DFM, have excellent reputations for service, but others do not.

Companies often change their names, merge with others or go out of business altogether, leaving the local election officials who are their customers high and dry.

“They come and go all the time in the election field,” said Audrey Piatt, director of operations for the Virginia State Board of Elections.

Better training and more generous budgets would help local officials cope with the problems of computerized vote-counting.

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“We have thrust election officials into the computer age with little knowledge or training,” said Carol Garner, director of the Election Center, a privately financed Washington, D.C., group. “It’s a big problem and I don’t see it being corrected until cities, counties and states give election officials the money they need to buy good equipment and to hire computer experts and internal auditors.”

Hand Recount

State laws can help. California and some other states insist that new computerized equipment be certified (though the certification process frequently is abused or ignored), that the systems be tested before and after each election (though the testing often is inadequate) and that a small percentage of votes be recounted by hand, as a check against the computer tallies, among other requirements.

California and a few other states provide a limited amount of technical assistance to local election officials.

Additional help may come from a new set of voluntary state standards for computerized elections that the National Clearinghouse for Election Administration, an arm of the Federal Election Commission, has produced after a four-year struggle. The commission is expected to approve these new standards soon.

The standards call for certification of new vote-counting systems by independent testing authorities, depositing of source codes with independent escrow agents so they can be checked in case of disputed results, and the writing of vote-counting programs in computer language that is widely understood, among other proposals.

Voluntary Standards

But the standards are voluntary. States, counties and cities are under no obligation to adopt them, and many probably will not.

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The Election Center produces training tapes and sponsors seminars and workshops for local election officials.

Although the quality of election supervision is improving, the pace is slow.

“The election community is in a state of potential crisis,” said Kimball W. Brace, president of Washington-based Election Data Services Inc. “We’re waiting for a volcano to erupt, in the form of a major election scandal. . . . We know it’s going to happen, but we don’t know when or how we’re going to handle it.”

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