This should be no surprise — especially to those who’ve been appropriately concerned about electronic voting machines: Lyn Davis Lear is reporting on a GAO report that concluded the 2004 election was fraudulent and a Diebold insider is blowing the whistle (via Engadget).

What does the report confirm? Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman summarize:

1. Some electronic voting machines “did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.” In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush’s official margin of victory.
    
2. “It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate.” Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.
    
3. “Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.” 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.
    
4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a “widespread conspiracy” but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.
    
5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.
    
6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.
    
7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.
    
8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.

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It’s a story that won’t die, and yet it can’t get any attention. Since November 3rd, reasonable people have been wondering what happened. On election night, exit polls predicted a 5 million vote win for Kerry, but the official election results declared Bush the winner by 3 million votes. We’re all suspicious of polls, but an 8 million vote discrepancy is big and exit polls are considered the most accurate of all. In fact, exit polling is used by the US to judge the fairness of elections in other countries like Ukraine, where allegations of election fraud caused the collapse of the government and a re-vote in December 2004.

Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf covered this story in detail for In These Times in February. Most interestingly, they looked at the margin of error on a precinct by precinct basis and found that local politics and vote counting methods each played a strong role the difference between the exit polls and official count.

• Precincts that used old-fashioned hand counts (where there are lots of witnesses) had the smallest margin of error compared to the exit polls.
• Swing states had larger than average differences between the poll results and official counts.
• Republican strongholds — where republicans held all positions of power and authority — had the greatest difference between poll results and official counts, resulting in ‘official’ numbers that showed Kerry getting 30% fewer votes than the polling data indicated.
• Contrary to Fox News reports, Bush voters were found more likely to participate in polling than Kerry voters.

Outliers and spurious data are one thing, but these numbers correlate too closely with political affiliation to be explained away or brushed aside. …Too closely and too prickly in an election where there were more than 100,000 officially logged reports of voting irregularities.

And that’s why John Conyers, the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, is so hopping mad. As reported in this essay by Gore Vidal, Conyers led an investigation by the committee’s Dems into the allegations of election fraud in Ohio. The report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong In Ohio, includes the following:

With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State Kenneth J. Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.

Or, as Vidal reminds us, it was a repeat of the 2000 election where the state chair of the Bush/Cheney campaign was also the state’s Secretary of State and top election official.

Why bring this up now? Because in 2006 we’ll be starting a new election cycle, and we need to be aware of the Conyers report and others so we can avoid similar problems in 2008.

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