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Interviews by Bruce David and Dan Kapelovitz  Right-Wing Corporations Are Programming and Manning
Our Nation’s New Touch-Screen Voting Machines, Tallying Election Results With No Federal Supervision. Worse, the Software They Use Is Disturbingly Tamper-Prone, and the Lack of a Paper Trail Makes Recounts Nearly Impossible. In a Three-Part Exposé, Award-Winning Investigative Journalist Greg Palast, Actor Peter Coyote and Author Bev Harris Explain Why the Fix Is Probably Already in for 2004. GREG PALAST – Fixing the Fixed Voting Machines Investigative reporter Greg Palast sets the record straight on computerized voting machines. In addition to being the author of the excellent best-seller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast also hosts the BBC-produced exposé of the Bush family, Bush Family Fortunes, which has aired in countries all over the world—except, coincidentally, in America, where the Bush family happens to rule. In the documentary, Palast uncovered many of the details that proved the theft of the 2000 Presidential election and exposed disturbing connections between the Bushes and the Bin Ladens. Currently, Palast is working with Martin Luther King III to bring attention to the fact that our democracy is being hijacked via computerized voting machines. Hustler: Is the fix in on the 2004 election? PALAST: You may have already voted in 2004; they just haven’t told you how. Last year, our President signed a law, with little fanfare, called the Help America Vote Act. As soon as the Bush family tells us that they’re gonna help us vote, I say, "Look out." Sure enough, go into the details of it, and it has that old Florida swamp smell. I’ve been working with Martin Luther King III, and he’s calling this the Floridation of the nation. This law is going to provide $3.9 billion of your tax money to computerize the voting systems of America. We’re going to have computer screens in the voting booths. The administration has put to death any plan that would allow you to have some type of backup paper ballot or receipt. Which is pretty strange when you think about it. You get a Slurpee from a 7-Eleven; you get a receipt. You vote for President of the United States, and you get no record to prove exactly how you voted. Hustler: So you’re saying the Bush Administration is trying to thwart ballot-machine paper trails behind the scenes? PALAST: Absolutely. The whole law is being handled behind the scenes. No one even knows what the heck is in this Act. I’ve actually read every word of it. My staff has gone through it pretty carefully, which is quite different than any politician I’ve run into so far. The preamble sounds really good—motherhood and apple pie: "It was just terrible that legal voters were not allowed to vote in Florida, and we don’t want a repeat of the Florida debacle." What they’ve done is packaged Florida and imposed it on every other state. Hustler: Why should we be suspicious of these computer machines? PALAST: If you’ve ever had a Windows document, you sure as heck know it’s about as reliable as any other computer system. Except with this one you have more at stake: Who’s going to run this planet? We just had an election in Texas in which three Republicans won with exactly 18,181 votes. Hustler: All three won with the exact same number of votes? PALAST: The Republican elections officials thought that was quite an interesting coincidence. These were done on iVotronics machines, but the Democratic officials were actually able to go back and reset the machine to re-tally the votes and, lo and behold, suddenly the Democrats won. So if you think that this is a tamper-proof system, I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Hustler: Who owns and manufactures these machines? PALAST: iVotronics is owned by a company called ES&S [Election Systems and Software], founded by Senator Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska. Hagel became senator after Nebraska installed his voting machine. It was quite extraordinary, because you ended up with a Republican candidate winning in black districts in Nebraska. So obviously Chuck took his voting machine out for a test spin and did quite well. Hustler: He owns part of this company? PALAST: He’s out of it now, but he founded it. Hustler: What about Diebold? PALAST: Diebold is another Republican-connected company. Here’s the problem with privatizing democracy: Every single elections expert I’ve spoken to on this planet said there is nothing close to a paper ballot for safety, because you can count it in public and you can see how people voted. But there’s a second aspect to this little computer game that I don’t want to leave out, because no one’s watching this one. That is, in Florida, the key to the theft of the White House was the removal of tens of thousands of voters from the voter rolls before the elections. They were purged on the grounds that they were felons. In fact, 97% of the people on that list were innocent of any crime except voting while black. The Florida Republicans did that by using a computer program to purge the files of people they considered suspects. You’d think they would avoid that system, but in fact the Help America Vote Act is going to require that, by the 2004 election, every state imitate the Florida system of computerizing, centralizing and purging their voter rolls. So we’re going to take the fix that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris engineered, and we’re going to run that across the country, and we’re going to have 50 Katherine Harrises with their fingers on the registration buttons. Hustler: Recently Walden O’Dell, the CEO of Diebold voting machines, promised to deliver votes to Bush. PALAST: The CEO of Diebold, who has become one of Bush’s big donors, promised at a fund-raiser to help deliver the vote to Bush in Ohio. I hope that it gives someone pause about using his machines, but apparently not. Hustler: Don’t the Democrats see this as their own doom? PALAST: I spoke with Terry McAuliffe, the head of the Democratic Party. He’s overwhelmed. He says that they don’t have the money or research ability to uncover what’s going on. But there’s a second sinister little side to this: All politics is local, and this is going to give one heck of a lot of power to Democratic secretaries of state. We have one political party in America; it’s called the party of the incumbents. This is one way for incumbents of both parties to lock themselves into position. In the state of Illinois, the Democrats are thrilled to have control over the voter registration in Chicago. The Republicans are letting the Democrats drive the getaway car in this voter heist. Hustler: So it’s not being overly alarmist to say that the fix is in for 2004, and that Bush will be President again? PALAST: I’m not saying Bush has locked up the vote; I’m just saying that if he loses it, the winner’s going to have to win a lot more than 50%. You can steal some of the votes some of the time, but you can’t steal all the votes all the time. Hustler: What can the average American citizen do about this? PALAST: There’s a petition campaign being run by Martin Luther King III to undo this lynching by laptop. It’s black voters who are going to be targeted; we know that from Florida. We have a petition at www.GregPalast.com. Fifty thousand people have already electronically signed it. It will be sent to Mr. Ashcroft, and then it will be used by congressmen who still have the balls to fight this thing. Every computer expert in the country is saying that to Gatesify our system is just bonkers. [New Jersey Congressman] Rush Holt has at least said, "Let’s do the most basic thing, which is to have a receipt printed out [on] which you can see how you supposedly voted, and you can put that in a separate lock box so that we could test and tally the paper ballots against the computer ballots as an absolute necessity." He’s talking about requiring the testing of these machines. Believe it or not, there is no testing of these machines. That’s really dangerous stuff. There’s no open source code. Hustler: The machine manufacturers don’t show the code because they say it’s proprietary, like the secret ingredients in Coca-Cola. PALAST: One of the horrible things about this business is that we don’t know when elections have been stolen. You know if you’ve been mugged on the street, but with these mystery machines, we don’t know. Go to Las Vegas, and the machines are tested by the government and locked up, have special keys and are tamperproof. Here we get shaken up about a slot machine in Vegas, but we have no such legal protections guaranteed to us with the voting machines. Democracy is not a game. PETER COYOTE vs. VOTE FRAUD Peter Coyote has appeared in more than 70 films, including E.T. and Erin Brokovich. What most moviegoers don’t know is that ever since the 1960s, when he was a founding member of the Diggers (an anarchist group that provided food, housing and medical aid to the runaways who fled to San Francisco during the Summer of Love), Coyote has been involved in politics. He was the chairman of the California State Arts Council for three years, and is currently a board member of the Baykeepers, an environmental organization dedicated to preserving the San Francisco Bay. Coyote also narrates a commercial, written by Greg Palast and produced by StandUpNow.org, about election fraud. The actor/activist sat down with America’s Magazine to share his research on the frighteningly tamper-friendly computer voting machines. Hustler: How did you become involved with the voting-machine issue? COYOTE: I’m an out-of-work actor; I have a lot of time on my hands. After 9/11, I started reading about 15 newspapers a day, mostly [those of] our allies overseas. I started an e-mail newsletter—sending these articles around to people—that [circulated] to about a thousand people. Some of them were newspaper and TV men. After about a year and a half, the list got too unwieldy. I passed it on to somebody, but I began to concentrate on the issue of voter fraud. Because I had this e-mail list, people started sending me things, and I heard about these two recent elections. There was Max Cleland’s November 2002 election in Georgia, where a Vietnam War hero, an amputee and a favorite in his district, was suddenly and mysteriously overthrown in a surprise election. Even the FEC [Federal Election Commission] has called that election fraud. But they can’t figure out how it was done, because the computerized voting machines are private, and the software is proprietary; so companies do not have to show their software to people. Most people don’t know that there’s no federal agency that supervises the software of voting machines. Hustler: What was the other election that drew your attention? COYOTE: The one in Nebraska. Chuck Hagel defied all straw polls, all voter polls, all everything, and suddenly won his U.S. Senate election in a kind of surprise ballot. It turns out that he [had previously] owned the voting-machine company. It was the major Republican upset in the November elections. When Hagel ran against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, he won with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska. So 80% of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines, put in place by his company, built by that company, programmed by that company. Hustler: How do the computers change the votes? COYOTE: It only takes about 30 lines of code to write a voting program. It’s not a real big deal. You can run a voting machine that will look like it’s verifying your name and your address, and at the end of the day, you’re voting for Osama bin Laden. You can program some of these machines by modem. In any case, they’re turned over to these corporations, and the corporations tell you who won the election. The last election-law revision basically ended exit polls and paper ballots; so there’s going to be no way to go back, as there was in Florida, and count the vote. What amazed me is how asleep at the switch the Democrats and the American people are on this issue. It’s just counterintuitive to think that the software that governs a national political election is the private property of a corporation. You don’t know how it’s created. You don’t know what it does, and the only reason they need to write 200,000 lines of code is basically to hide what it is they’re doing. Hustler: Have you had any success getting the word out? COYOTE: I had breakfast the other day with [Congresswoman] Nancy Pelosi and [Senator] Barbara Boxer, and they didn’t seem to understand that there was no federal supervision of the voting machines. They asked me for the information, which I forwarded to them. I find that scary as shit. BEV HARRIS – Black Box Voting A mild-mannered publicist turns into a fearless political investigator. During the 2000 Presidential election, a veterans’ group hired Bev Harris’s public relations firm to post copies of George W. Bush’s embarrassing military record on the Internet. On the Thursday before election day, the firm distributed a press release directing people to the online documents. Within 30 minutes, the Web site was hacked and completely disabled. Troubled by this incident, Harris began an investigative journey, which led her to unsettling information on who was in control of the voting machines and how easily these machines could be manipulated. Since then, Harris has dedicated her life to exposing the dangers of computerized, corporate-owned voting machines. Her book, Black Box Voting (Plan Nine Publishing), details her findings. Hustler: What evidence do you have that at least some of the 2002 elections were fixed? HARRIS: We have approximately 85 cases. For example, in Scurry County, Texas, during this last election, it was actually the election workers themselves who didn’t think that the results sounded right. They still had a paper trail in that case, and they took it upon themselves to look at that. They discovered that it had given the election to a Republican, and actually it was a Democrat who won, and he won by a landslide. Hustler: Can you give us other examples of problematic elections? HARRIS: In Alabama, in 2002, the Democratic governor won, and the polls closed. The observers went home, and in the morning, lo and behold, 6,300 votes had changed, and they handed the election to the Republican challenger. Nobody to this day has explained what happened to those 6,300 votes. What we’re talking about is doing a proper audit. The key to auditing is simple: You want to compare two independent sources of data, and they should match. The key word is independent. The paper ballot that the voter verifies is one source; the machine tally is another source. What they’ve done is taken away one source, the paper ballot, making the system impossible to audit. Even the machines that still have paper ballots nowadays can’t be audited because many states have passed laws that prohibit us from comparing the paper ballot to the machine tally. Hustler: Do these "glitches" always favor Republicans? HARRIS: Not always, but it seems to trend that way. Hustler: How does the vote-rigging work? HARRIS: I would look first toward the remote communication attack point—the modems, the wireless capabilities. If you can get through with modems or wireless communications, you don’t need physical access to the system, and that gives you access to do just about anything. The next thing you look at are what kinds of back doors are programmed into the software. With the Diebold system, for example, a back door is available using a Microsoft Access database. I have a written communication from one of the head programmers in which he describes doing end runs around the voting system using the back door they’ve had in the system for ten years. Hustler: Do you have any proof that elections are purposely rigged? HARRIS: We do have evidence that the mechanisms are in place to do that. For example, it is possible to program a touch-screen machine so that you push the option for one candidate, and it registers for the other. There’s actually many examples where voters reported just that. In both Florida and Texas, that happened a lot, but they would always blame that on a screen calibration error. Hustler: Tell us about the two largest voting machine companies. HARRIS: ES&S [Election Systems and Software] was originally formed by two brothers: Todd and Bob Urosevich. Todd Urosevich still works for ES&S in Omaha. Bob Urosevich spun off and started Global Election Systems, which was acquired in January 2002 by Diebold. Before that, Diebold had only manufactured ATMs, safe-deposit boxes and so forth. These two companies essentially have two brothers involved in top management. But it doesn’t appear that Diebold really folded in Global Election Systems. I bring this up because people can’t believe that Diebold would be so stupid as to do what I’m going to tell you they did. Diebold keeps the code to their machines really secret; not even a citizens’ group is allowed to audit what is in that program. It’s considered proprietary. However, they were parking their files on a publicly available Web site that anybody could access without a password, and it was findable through [search engine] Google. It begs the question of why, if it’s so secret that even the public can’t scrutinize it, do they stick it on a site that any hacker can find? Hustler: Did anybody go to that site and get that? HARRIS: I downloaded the complete set of election files and put it in a safe-deposit box. Since then I’ve found out it’s been downloaded by people all over the world, including some of Diebold’s competitors. Hustler: So people are presumably going to look at this code and see what it says? HARRIS: Right. There were 40,000 files. They were of the most sensitive type you could possibly get. They included the hardware and software specifications for both the touch-screen and the optical-scan machines, the construction drawings, the protocols for testing, actual testing procedures and testing results. It had actual election files, actual ballot configurations, the entire source-code tree. It had interesting file names—like one file name we noticed right away was called "Rob Georgia." Hustler: What does "Rob Georgia" signify? HARRIS: We thought, Is Rob a name or a verb? Inside the Rob Georgia file were a set of three folders. In one of the folders, it said, "Place these files in the GEMS Folder.” Now, GEMS is the vote-counting program itself. GEMS stands for Global Election Management Systems. A vote-counting program has to go through certification, and you are not allowed to just make changes to this thing after the fact. You have to certify it and use exactly the version that was certified. So it’s sort of a concern when you see "place these files in the GEMS Folder." Hustler: That was done after the program was certified? HARRIS: Yes. In fact, they changed the program at least five times after certification. Georgia changed the program on all 22,000 machines shortly before the election, and nobody ever looked at what was on the new program. Hustler: How do you know that? HARRIS: We interviewed Rob, whom the file was named for. Rob was a technician who handled intake for the voting machines in the state of Georgia. Rob explained to us that they have van loads of people driving around the state, slapping program changes on the machines. He said, after what he witnessed, he has absolutely no faith in the machines counting his votes correctly. He was told to put program changes on the machines by Diebold. Hustler: Who won the Georgia election? HARRIS: There were several upsets. They all benefited the Republicans, and they were huge upsets. There was a senator that was considered an absolute shoo-in. His name is Max Cleland. He’s a war veteran who’s a triple amputee. He was defeated by Saxby Chambliss. Cleland was favored to win with 56%, and he actually lost by 11%. They also elected Sonny Perdue, the first Republican governor in 135 years. African-American candidates ended up doing poorly with their own constituents. Hustler: There was no uproar about it in the papers? HARRIS: I think people were just stunned. In our current news environment, not enough coverage is being given to this issue. You guys are an exception, but many reporters just take the voting machines’ PR sheet and use that to rebut things instead of going to check. I think we could parade a rigged voting machine out there and documents that prove it, and most news outlets would not cover it. The next step needs to be the courts and a Congressional investigation. COMMERCIALS WITH A CONSCIENCE Video producer and activist Jacalyn Kane is creating a series of commercials aimed at counteracting the recent rightward turn America has taken. Kane’s most recent spot, which addresses voter fraud, was written by Greg Palast and narrated by actor Peter Coyote. "I started to realize that this country was being hijacked by this administration and that our democracy, our freedom of speech, our civil liberties, and even our right to vote were being jeopardized," says Kane. "I also realized that the media was being bought, owned and operated by the right wing, and, pretty systematically, they were doing away with any opinions that didn’t agree with this administration. So from that, I came up with the concept that we would create our own commercials and actually buy the media to express our opinions. That’s where this series of commercials with a conscience came from." The first spot, "Voice of the People," served as an antidote to the deluge of hawkish messages presented by the mainstream media. The commercial, which ran locally in Los Angeles on CNN, A&E and VH1, featured Americans from diverse backgrounds, including musician Michelle Shocked, stating their cases for peace, civil liberties and dissent’s vital role in a democracy. The commercial was meant to show that you can love this country and be patriotic without necessarily being in favor of perpetual war. The third commercial will tackle free-speech issues. Each commercial features the Web site of Kane’s organization (StandUpNow.org), where visitors can obtain more information. |