A Bad Run for Elections Firm

Last spring, the outlook for Diebold Election Systems Inc. couldn’t have been brighter. The Texas-based company was the nation’s leading producer of touch-screen voting machines and appeared likely to tap billions of dollars in federal and state funding set aside to replace the nation’s aging and disparaged punch-card voting systems.

But management missteps, technological glitches and simple bad luck have made the company -- whose voting machines are now banned in four California counties -- a symbol for all that could go wrong in the nation’s transition to electronic balloting.

In 10 months, the company’s voting systems have been assailed as vulnerable to manipulation, its chief executive has faced questions about his Republican Party activism, some of its equipment malfunctioned in the March primary, and the California secretary of state has called for criminal and civil investigations of the company.

Despite the criticism, Diebold’s voting systems have been a hit with many voters and local election officials. They’re easy to use, they dramatically decrease ballot-counting time, and they enable visually and physically handicapped voters to cast ballots independently.

They also prevent voters from selecting more candidates in a race than allowable, a mistake that ordinarily causes the votes to be disallowed.

“Our poll workers like the equipment. The senior citizens love the equipment. They don’t have to press the levers down,” said Kathy Williams, registrar of voters in Plumas County, Calif., which has used Diebold touch-screen machines since 2002.

The trouble started in July, when computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University studied the software behind Diebold’s voting system and announced at a news conference that any savvy teenager could manipulate Diebold’s technology and sway an election. Three subsequent studies exposed additional security concerns about electronic voting systems.

The software, though confidential, became public after it was mistakenly placed on an Internet site and was downloaded by an activist concerned about flaws in voting systems. As a result, Diebold’s technology has undergone scrutiny that competing systems have not.

Competitors’ systems “may have security holes and flaws similar to Diebold that have also escaped federal and state scrutiny,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, a Davis-based watchdog group.

As for Diebold, “The best thing for them to do would be to scrap the whole thing and start over with security experts helping them to design a system,” said Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins computer science professor who worked on the first test of Diebold’s system.

Rubin’s concerns focus in part on the credit-card sized “smart cards” that voters insert into the machines to cause the proper ballot to appear on their voting screens. His report said blank “smart cards” can be purchased on the Internet and programmed to allow voters to cast multiple votes. After subsequently working as a poll worker, Rubin said he thought alert election staff would probably prevent the use of homemade cards.

Diebold denounced the report’s assertions as flawed and said the company does not believe the cards can be replicated.

The firm stumbled a second time in August. Walden O’Dell, chief executive of the election system division’s corporate parent Diebold Inc., sent invitations to a $1,000-a-plate political fundraiser at his Ohio home and announced that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.”

Some now question whether the company can impartially help to count millions of ballots in November. O’Dell insisted he would never use his position to influence an election and announced that he would no longer be politically active.

But to some, the company’s connection to political activism is still troubling -- particularly because 60,000 of its touch-screen machines have been sold in eight states. The machines, most of them in California, Georgia and Maryland, make up more than half of the roughly 100,000 electronic voting machines expected to be used in the November election.

“The [O’Dell] fundraising letter is the kind of incident that raised doubts in people’s minds and adds to those perception problems, even if he has no intention of exercising his influence in an illegal manner,” said voting systems watchdog Alexander.

Diebold spokesman David Bear said O’Dell regrets the stir that his invitation caused. He blamed the problem on O’Dell’s lack of experience in politics and the media.

“He never thought that anyone would think there was a connection between his personal involvement and his business,” Bear said.

Diebold has not been in the voting business long. The company, which builds automatic teller machines, acquired Global Elections Systems in 2002 at a time the country was exploring a shift away from punch-cards and toward electronic voting.

“We stepped out to do the right thing for the country as well as our organization,” said Tom Swidarski, Diebold Inc. senior vice president. “If the country is going to debate this, we can wait.”

The company’s two biggest competitors, Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems, have also experienced glitches, but have not been decertified or faced calls for criminal investigation.

Not long after Diebold confronted the fundraising controversy, the company suffered another round of criticism after the March 2 primary election.

Some Diebold touch-screen machines failed to function properly in California, causing poll workers to turn away some early voters in San Diego County and to ask voters in Alameda County to vote by paper ballot. The problem was eventually corrected, but state officials say an unknown number of voters in San Diego County, where more than half of the polling places opened late because of the Diebold glitch, did not vote at all.

A report by secretary of state elections officials linked Diebold’s problems in San Diego and Alameda counties to devices that encode the cards that voters insert into voting machines, signaling which ballot should appear on the screen. Power switches on many of those devices malfunctioned, and, as a result, the machines did not function properly early on election day, though with more training, election workers could get the machines to function.

“Diebold neither alerted election officials about this problem, nor did it indicate to counties that additional poll worker training or documentation was necessary to address this problem,” state election staff said in the report.

Yet another problem cropped up in April, this time, over Diebold’s AccuVote-TSx model, the model used in San Diego County.

After discovering that the machines were nowhere near gaining federal certification -- although Diebold officials had told the state approval was pending -- California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, the state’s top elections official, banned their use in California.

That decision shut down one-third of California’s digital voting machines and meant that San Diego and three other counties -- Kern, Solano and San Joaquin -- will have to find alternatives on election day.

Shelley accused Diebold officials of misleading his staff about the company’s efforts to obtain federal approval of the AccuVote-TSx model, and said the company also used software in the March election that had not been approved by his staff. Shelley also called on Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer to conduct criminal and civil investigations of Diebold. That has begun, an attorney general’s spokesman said.

Diebold executives said last week they intend to cooperate with the attorney general’s investigation, but declined to discuss details of Shelley’s accusations. In a letter to the secretary of state last month, the company insisted it had not been dishonest with state officials and pledged to help run smooth elections in the state.

The company questioned the impact of the March election problems in San Diego and Alameda counties, noting that there is only speculation that the problems and delays caused voters not to cast ballots then.

California is not the only state where Diebold machines have been criticized. Last month, a group of Maryland residents sued the state seeking to prevent it from using Diebold voting machines in November. Citing the university security studies, the suit alleges that Diebold’s voting systems are not secure and reliable and therefore do not comply with state law.

“They have shown over and over again they are not operating with the high standard they should be,” said Katie DeBord, an attorney with a Washington law firm that filed the lawsuit.

Diebold officials say there has not been one documented security breach. They say they are willing to wait for the debate to play out in statehouses, courts and in Washington.

“We happen to be the ones out front and are getting some arrows,” said Diebold’s Swidarski. “We certainly didn’t expect this public debate to unfold the way it has.... There’s a lively and open debate. As a result, hopefully we’ll end up with a situation that’s improved.”