Hacking Democracy (2006) Movie Script
America,
the world's greatest
democracy
and at its heart,
the vote,
the will of the people.
But how do you know if the vote
is counted correctly?
And if you don't know,
then what do you have?
Democracy?
Translation and subtitling:
docsPD
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DE
US
DEM
USU
DEMO
USUR
DEMOC
USURP
DEMOCR
USURPA
DEMOCRA
USURPAD
DEMOCRAC
USURPADA
DEMOCRACIA
USURPADA
This is the story of a small
group of citizens
led by a grandmother
from Seattle.
They went on a journey
to ask a simple question:
How does America
count its votes?
What they found
was secrecy,
votes in the trash,
and how to change
the course of History.
If... when people
realize
what's really
going on...
there's no way we'll allow
this to continue.
In 2000,
Al Gore lost the presidential
election in Florida,
amidst the chaos and arguments
over how to recount the votes.
But it didn't occur to anyone
to ask
how the computers
counted the results.
VOLUSIA COUNTY
FLORIDA
When the sun set
on election night,
an official noticed
something very strange,
a sign that the heart of American democracy was in danger.
In Volusia County, Florida,
an election computer tallied Al Gore's totals
incorrectly.
He got negative votes.
It showed
a negative sign
before the votes
it had subtracted from Gore.
It wasn't like it was
trying to hide it,
it said: "minus 16,022 votes."
How could a computer,
which was supposed
to protect our votes,
count incorrectly to assign
negative votes to a candidate?
Either it was a mistake,
or someone tried
to rig the election.
There was an investigation
into the negative votes
and it was established
that the problem
could not have been due
to a machine malfunction,
because only the totals for
the presidential election were affected.
It seemed that a second
memory card
might have been
put into the computer.
The memory cards
contain the votes,
but this second card
had disappeared
so they couldn't
analyze it.
The origin of the negative votes was never proven,
but some engineers thought
it might have been an attempt
to rig the election.
But the truth will never be known.
The software that tallied
those votes
belonged
to Global Election Systems.
In 2002,
it was bought
by the company Diebold.
The software
is a trade secret.
It's against federal
and state law
to examine what's inside
the Diebold voting machines.
I was the chief technical advisor
to the Secretary of State,
of the largest state
in the United States,
and I was not allowed to examine
the software used by Diebold,
or any other voting system vendor.
To this day, I have not been allowed to examine
that software.
Software like this is installed in over 30 states.
If someone tampers with it, or it malfunctions,
elections can be won by the wrong people.
If that happens,
hundreds of representatives, judges, and other officials,
could hold offices they were not elected to.
Democrat or Republican,
it affects us all.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON STATE
Bev Harris lives with her family in Seattle.
A writer, advertising agent, and grandmother,
she knew nothing about computer programming,
or about election systems,
but when her county bought a new touch-screen system,
she started asking questions.
The answers she got revealed a system in crisis.
I had a life before I got into this,
and I never thought about becoming an activist or advocate,
but sometimes something comes into our lives
and we know that if we don't do it, maybe nobody will
and then maybe I don't want to pass that on to my children.
I put three words into a news search engine,
"voting machines" and "failure",
and I found dozens and dozens of elections
that were miscounted by the machines.
And around that time I thought we really had a problem.
What Bev had discovered
was that she could not effectively trust
the election results generated by voting machines.
In Louisiana,
Susan Bernecker, a Republican candidate,
filmed the proof
when she went to check
her results
on a touch-screen computerized voting system.
This is where I came
on the day
the warehouses
were opened to the candidates
for inspection.
So I came here
with an old school friend...
he took out his camera...
then I asked them to show me
how the machine worked
and I started
"playing" with the machine.
And that's when I pressed the button
that represented my name...
and then I looked down and saw on the screen
Mr. Gianbelluca's name
when I had pressed
Susan Bernecker.
Should we repeat?
Do it again, yes.
Okay.
Here we go again.
I'm pressing Bernecker...
and Gianbelluca comes up.
So we started testing
down the line,
we tested probably
fifteen machines,
and I said, "You know what?
We don't need to test any more!"
That's when I said:
"My God, this is terrible!"
"We can't
count our votes?"
"Then how will we know
that this is correct?"
Since the vote itself is secret,
it's rare to have documentary evidence
of machines making mistakes.
But Susan's experience is not an isolated problem.
Computers count about 80% of the votes in America.
It's the counties
that run the elections
and buy
the voting machines,
so the manufacturer and model
vary from place to place,
but there are two
main models.
On a touch-screen machine,
the software counts
the selections we make on the screen.
Optical scan machines
read a ballot on which you voted.
Presidential Election
November 2004, Walpole, New Hampshire
Seven PM.
The polls are closed.
The votes themselves,
are stored on the computers' memory cards.
This is the voter unit.
This unit is very important
and goes directly into our bag.
These memory cards are taken to a central computer,
sometimes called a central tabulator,
which reads the votes, adds them up
and then declares the winner.
The problem is that you can't see
a computer doing the vote count.
So how do you know it counted them correctly?
Stanford University
Palo Alto, California
Suppose we didn't have computers,
and when we went to vote
the voting booth was separated by a curtain
and there was a guy behind the curtain who would mark your vote.
In other words, we'd just state our preference,
he'd mark your vote
and when you were done, you'd leave without being able to see the ballot.
Most people in their right mind wouldn't trust this process.
The guy behind the curtain could be incompetent,
he could mishear your vote and mark it wrong,
or it could be that he didn't like your political affiliation
and would prefer your vote to go to someone else.
In electronic voting machines,
you don't have a guy inside the machine marking what's dictated,
but you have many people who are involved in programming the software
and many people who could have "touched" the software
before it was installed on that machine.
If one of those people put something malicious in the software
and it gets distributed to all the machines,
then that person can be responsible for changing,
possibly, tens of thousands of votes,
even hundreds of thousands across the country.
That's a very dangerous situation.
You know, I started looking into these voting machines
and one of the reasons I became so curious
was that the way they work is secret.
The companies that make them keep it secret.
None of the computer scientists can examine the code,
because the code was supposed to be secret.
The certification labs that examined it
keep the process of what they do secret,
and even the election officials who buy the equipment
are contractually forbidden from examining and seeing how it works.
SEATTLE
January 23, 2003
What happened next really changed my life.
I was looking for technicians
who might be able to answer some of my questions,
and while looking for them, I stumbled onto an obscure website.
The site was an old predecessor
to the Diebold election systems website.
And I clicked on a link
and that link took me to an area that wasn't like a page
but more like a library or a file system on the Internet,
and it contained a lot of different files,
just like you see on a computer,
and inside those were more files, which contained more files,
and the files were astounding.
It was things like...
the software specifications,
the software itself,
the hardware designs,
the user manuals,
the source code, in some cases.
It was the crown jewels of the Diebold election systems.
Bev didn't know,
but what she had found
was a computer program called GEMS.
GEMS, programmed by Diebold,
It accounts for about 40% of the votes in America.
So I started downloading these files...
and all night...
I kept downloading files all weekend.
There were so many files
it took me
about forty hours to download them all.
From then on,
I knew I'd be working on this project for a long time.
Until then,
only the voting machine companies
knew how American elections were really counted.
When Bev downloaded the Diebold software,
the wall of secrecy began to crumble.
Diebold Headquarters
North Canton, Ohio
The Diebold company claimed Bev had stolen the software
from their FTP on the Internet.
The FTP was an unfortunate situation, I have to admit that.
It was a situation where the information was available,
it was captured,
which was our fault, we made a mistake,
we admit it readily.
Will it happen again? No, it won't.
I had never seen software code in my life,
but as a writer, one of the things I learned to do is ask a lot of questions
and learn as much as I can about the subject.
I must say I didn't want to go forward with it, I thought:
"Maybe I can cover this story without having to learn how it works."
But that's not what happened, I really had to learn how it worked.
After discovering the files,
I kind of brought together several computer scientists,
or programmers, who would help me understand it.
And Avi Rubin,
conducted an amazing study with three of his colleagues.
I got a call saying the Diebold code was on the internet,
that Bev Harris had found it on the Diebold page itself,
and if I wanted to analyze it, and I said, "Sure."
I was very excited about the opportunity
to analyze the Diebold code,
and I think it was the first opportunity
someone from outside had to see what goes on inside these electronic voting machines.
Dr. Rubin discovered that you could manipulate an election
without needing to know how the system worked.
"We discovered significant and widespread security vulnerabilities..."
The problem
that Bev discovered is a significant security flaw,
and it paves the way
for people to seriously manipulate elections
in a way that's very difficult to detect.
But it wasn't just the Diebold machines that were a concern.
Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold
hold the largest share of the market,
in fact,
ES&S and Diebold alone hold about 80% of the electronic voting market.
The state of Maryland spent $55 million
on a Diebold election system.
They asked IT consultants Raba Technologies to test them.
Raba was able to breach the machines in about ten seconds.
So what did they spend the $55 million on?
Accuracy and security and equipment reliability.
Again, there's a feeling...
Well, it's more than a feeling.
These scientists breached the machine.
I'll tell you, from what I read in the Raba report,
and I read it very carefully,
is that the steps they took,
and how they claimed they affected the machine,
in a real election environment would be virtually impossible.
Most states require
that voting systems be tested by independent authorities,
or ITAs.
But if the machines were tested,
So why are there so many security flaws?
And why can they count votes backwards?
It seems I have friends in private industry
working for these companies and working in government,
who I don't know, I don't even know who they are,
who know that something is wrong.
They're disturbed by what they see
and they want people to know what's going on.
What I got, and these are hard to get,
are two reports.
One is on VoteHere,
the other is on Diebold's GEMS system.
They're both from CIBER,
which is an independent auditing authority.
They contain these extensive tables
where they check all the different regulations
and the FEC guidelines,
and they have check after check,
meaning it was approved, approved, approved...
They're all the same.
And we get to the last page...
and there's a check in the other column.
There was something that wasn't tested.
And what wasn't tested was...
system security!
This is the test
that tells us if these things can be tampered with.
And what it says here is:
"Penetration analysis not reviewed by ITA software."
Bev founded BlackBoxVoting.org,
a non-profit organization
dedicated to protecting consumers in elections.
She published the results of her investigations
on her website.
Andy Stephenson,
a candidate for Secretary of State in Washington,
read her findings and decided to contact her.
I was still running
and my
reaction was...
"Bleep",
I'm screwed!
Bev and I couldn't get answers
from our public representatives,
even though we kept pestering them.
It was absolutely
impossible.
So we decided...
to get the answers
ourselves.
Bev and Andy joined forces.
They wanted to know why the voting equipment
wasn't being tested for security
and why it was counting
votes incorrectly.
We went to meet Shawn Southworth,
in Huntsville,
Alabama.
He's the examiner
of equipment and software
for all the major voting machine producers.
Do what you do best, dear.
Andy was equipped
with a small camera.
He and Bev
wanted to make sure
that their conversation
with Shawn Southworth
was properly recorded,
word for word.
I'm looking for Shawn Southworth.
- Are you?
- Yes.
Hello, I'm Bev Harris.
I have some questions...
I don't test all these things, Ciber does.
Ciber is the one that's accredited.
You have to ask them these questions.
No,
I really have to talk to you,
because your name is
on all the documents.
Everything we do is within the FEC guidelines.
It's what we do.
We write a report,
we test the software,
we review the code,
to see if it's within the FEC standard
and then
we write a report.
We don't certify...
we don't say:
"This is the best software you've ever seen in your lives."
We wrote that report...
How do you deal with something that accepts negative votes?
We don't.
You just write the report?
Do you write in your report that this is a cause for concern?
You should be talking to the people we write the reports for.
We can't release our reports to anyone...
My question is, regarding the negative votes,
because we know that happened.
Do we put things in terms like that? No!
I don't recall ever issuing a report that said...
Because every time we write a report,
the system has already passed testing,
and the vendors aren't going to want a report that has anything negative in it.
So, they'll test and test
until everything is just right,
until it's all up to standard.
Only then do we write a report.
So, if Ciber claims the machines
passed accuracy and security tests,
then why are they counting votes backward,
and why can they be hacked in ten seconds?
What people are asking is, "Why should we trust these machines?"
I think the main reason is because everything is tested
before it's distributed for an election.
I know I sound like a broken record saying this over and over,
but it's a very important step.
Bev continued her cross-country journey.
It was clear that official records weren't going to reveal anything,
so Bev started dumpster diving
at the voting machine companies
and their clients, the counties.
She was joined in her "dumpster diving" campaign
by Kathleen Wynne,
an activist from Cleveland, Ohio.
Exchange...
Who knows.
My God,
that was funny.
It smells
really good.
It's a shot in the dark,
it's like going shopping,
you never know what you'll
find until you go...
open the bag and say:
"Great... nothing",
but this presents itself
as a possibility.
I think what
we want to do
is go to a place where
we can be undisturbed,
behind a supermarket
or something like that.
Bev and Kathleen
made dozens of raids.
It's legal.
When you put documents
in the trash in public areas
it's perfectly legal to go get them,
because you're no longer protecting them.
We wouldn't have
to do this
if our system
wasn't secret
and hadn't been handed over
to private companies.
And unfortunately,
the work they do in secret
is about our votes,
from the citizens of America.
On July 11, 2004,
during a raid
on Diebold's trash,
in McKinney,
Texas,
Kathleen found some
of Diebold's internal records.
This is part of the material
we found in McKinney, Texas,
in Diebold's trash.
I found invoices.
And I was curious, when I saw that
on the invoices the first item
was money that
Diebold was owed
by the Republican Committee
of the 8th District.
This is interesting, because it's not
a polling office
that owes Diebold money,
which would make sense,
because they buy
voting machines,
it's a Republican political committee
paying Diebold.
We have the right
to ask:
"Why are you collecting from a Republican committee?"
Bev and Kathleen don't know what this item meant.
What is known is that Diebold,
and some of its executives,
were major Republican fundraisers.
In 2003,
Walden O'Dell, Diebold's CEO,
wrote a fundraising letter
promising to deliver Ohio's votes to George W. Bush.
"committed to helping Ohio next year"
"deliver its electoral votes to the President."
It's important that your company be impartial, isn't it?
Yes.
So why did your CEO say:
"I am committed to delivering Ohio's votes to George W. Bush in 2004?"
That quote, which appeared in a letter,
is something he regrets.
It was a situation where his personal preference
overshadowed business interests,
and he's committed to maintaining greater discretion
in all matters related to those kinds of activities,
because of that statement.
People talk about ties between parties and voting companies,
and they're right!
That said,
we also see that it's not that linear.
We have the state of Maryland and the state of Georgia
with Democrats advocating for Diebold's system
and it's Republicans fighting against it in those states,
and even in my county,
Seattle, King County, Washington,
it's Democrats promoting these systems
and Republicans who are somewhat skeptical.
CALIFORNIA
March 2004
The new battleground was California,
the center of the computer industry.
And the Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley,
was getting worried about security.
Well, in 2003,
Kevin Shelley discovered that one of the counties
was using uncertified software...
and ordered an audit of the voting machines in all counties
in California,
and found that none of them were using certified software.
They later admitted they were aware of the law,
but even knowing the law, they chose to ignore it,
but even knowing the law, they chose to ignore it
and made these changes without prior authorization,
which is a direct violation of state law.
It was the first time I realized
the lack of integrity of Diebold as a company.
Diebold was called to account by the State of California.
At stake were deals worth millions of dollars
and Diebold was forced to put its president,
Bob Urosevich, on trial.
As you know,
about a year ago,
a version of the source code for Diebold's TSS system
got out of your control
and a few months later it was investigated by...
a group led by Avi Rubin,
by Professor Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University,
and they wrote a report
that found numerous and serious vulnerabilities
in the analyzed code.
I'd like to know your reaction to those reports
before we go into a little more detail.
Basically, the code was stolen.
Code that contained keywords
and our encryption technology.
I'm not a rocket scientist,
but let me tell you
if someone steals my house keys,
the first thing I'd probably do is change the lock.
- And that's what we did.
- I apologize.
As you know, the code wasn't stolen,
it was left by your company on a public FTP.
The code was stolen from our FTP and we think...
- You know that.
- Okay.
The base code was exposed.
The key is currently public.
What you did, or your team did,
was build a big, complex building,
put locks on all the doors,
use the same key for all the locks,
and then put a picture of the key on display.
This fell far below minimum security standards...
But for Bev, there was a more fundamental problem than security.
Could the vote count be trusted to Diebold?
Number one issue: Diebold.
We have a company that lies.
Yes, I'm saying it: they lie!
They said this morning they had made
all the software changes to fix the various flaws,
which would never have been discovered
if I hadn't discovered your files on your website.
But,
there's something called a "release note",
it's a legal document,
it's something that must present everything that was and wasn't changed,
when you release a new version.
I got the release notes for GEMS...
and they didn't fix any of the problems.
These errors were never fixed.
I don't know what to say!
How can you have a company say
they want to have secret software that no one,
not even
the county clerks
who are here to testify for you, are allowed to check.
And when you look at the code, you find flaws
and then they say, "You have no idea what you're talking about."
So, they hand it over to scientific panels,
who in turn find flaws and say:
"Don't worry about it, we've already fixed it."
When that's a lie!
Bob Urosevich, the CEO of Diebold,
submitted this declaration defending Diebold's voting systems,
also known as "Desy."
The Desy understands that the SOS,
that is, the Secretary of State, and the voting panel
are disappointed by the fact
that the inventory report from R&G Associates
identified inadequate and uncertified software
and they are analyzing the Desy in order to recognize
that this should not have happened.
To be clear,
there were no improper intentions, or motive on the part of Desy,
to give rise to this situation.
I want to make it very clear that from the beginning,
these allegations and this report
stating that Diebold deceived,
are not true and have no basis.
A few days later,
Kevin Shelley, the Secretary of State of California,
announced the consequences for Diebold.
I am revoking the license of Diebold's TSS system,
banning its use in the four counties where it was installed.
Furthermore,
I have taken another initiative,
and I have the letter here, freshly signed,
to ask the Attorney General
to prosecute Diebold criminally and civilly in this matter,
based on the discovery of fraudulent acts.
We will not tolerate
deceptive tactics like those perpetrated by Diebold!
Do not try to deceive
California voters, because there will be consequences if you do!
The state moved forward with a civil action against Diebold,
but never charged them criminally.
The lawsuit was eventually settled with a payment by Diebold,
of $2.6 million.
Bev was clearly hitting the industry's profitability.
And she received legal threats.
It was really a difficult time
and it's the kind of thing that can destroy a marriage.
I was very lucky that my husband was absolutely on my side, because...
here we were looking at each other...
not only did we not have money,
but we could be sued by the vendors
for thinking their equipment has to be secret,
and we could lose everything.
And he simply said:
"You know, my family fought for the right to vote,
my husband is African-American,
my family fought for the right to vote for six generations
and we're not stopping now."
In California,
it was only the touchscreens that were decertified.
The central tabulation software, GEMS,
was still in use.
The central tabulator is like
the machine that controls all the others.
It collects all the votes
and all the companies, not just Diebold,
have this central tabulator.
This is because of the way we vote,
we vote in individual jurisdictions that are spread out,
and there has to be one machine that unifies all these jurisdictions,
and tally them up
and declare the winner.
Bev wanted to find out
if GEMS
was actually keeping
the votes secure.
So she turned to computer security expert,
Dr. Hugh Thompson.
I was at this huge computer security
and hacking conference,
and I'm approached
by a grandmotherly type,
who says to me:
"I have access
to the tabulation software
from one of the largest electronic voting producers on the planet."
I said, "That's very interesting."
And then she says,
"Can you take a look at it?"
I tell you the thing
that shocked me
was how easily the vote totals could be changed.
Imagine:
you can go into a ballot box
and essentially rewrite history,
and there's no record of you
having rewritten history,
and the only record of history itself
is what was modified.
And that to me
is pretty scary.
Bev and Hugh developed a way
to demonstrate GEMS' insecurity.
She was invited to appear,
with her computer expert,
on national television
with a former presidential candidate,
Governor Howard Dean.
Okay, Bev, show me how to do this.
Well, what we have here is the
central tabulation computer.
In a voting system,
you have all these voting machines
from all the precincts.
All those machines
"feed" into one machine
so that it can
tally the votes.
So if you were going to do something
that you shouldn't to a voting machine,
would it be more convenient
to do it to the four thousand machines,
or just to the central machine and deal with
all the others at once?
The GEMS program,
it's a central tabulation program.
I'll put in the password here.
We're in.
This is the official program that the county supervisors confiscated.
As we can see here, Howard Dean has 1,000 votes
and Lex Luther has 500.
He's beating Lex Luther...
Two to one. Yes.
And unfortunately, Tiger Woods doesn't have any votes yet.
Let's close this out.
I was just showing you the legitimate way to view the vote count,
which, of course, you can't tamper with.
Go to the 'Start' menu, and I'll show you something sneaky.
I want you to go to 'My Computer' and click there...
and you'll see...
Go to the 'C' drive.
And go to 'My Programs'.
Go to 'Central Tabulator Votes'
and then go to 'Candidate Totals',
which is that table.
With you, we have 800 votes for you and 400 votes for Lex Luther.
Let's swap them.
We'll put 400 there
and give 100 votes to Tiger.
Let's see what happened.
We go back to GEMS the legitimate way...
And as you can see,
Howard Dean has only 500 votes,
Lex Luther has 900,
and Tiger Woods has 100 votes.
We just changed an election, and it only took 90 seconds.
Diebold and election officials across the United States
kept insisting that their systems were secure.
They said that despite the breach that Bev committed on GEMS,
there were checks and balances,
and that inconsistencies in the vote totals
would be detected in a real election.
This happened just two months
before one of the closest presidential elections ever.
Those checks and balances were about to be tested.
Oh, my God! You're getting so big!
I feel fine, thank you.
Let me go vote first.
Let's go.
Let me see if I can follow the instructions...
The world watches our great democracy at work.
I'm going to put you down for a second, sweetie.
It's that magical moment
when the greatest democracy on the face of the planet
shows the world how we work.
There would be nothing better for our system
than for the election to be conclusively resolved tonight,
so that...
I think it'll be me...
so that I can continue to lead this country...
The politicians said everything was fine,
but it wasn't.
The machines weren't just insecure,
they malfunctioned, leaving thousands unable to vote.
And now...
nobody knows.
On Election Day, in 2004,
we, along with many other organizations,
had a voter hotline
where people could call and explain the problems they were having.
We received over 200,000 calls
and many of those people left a recording about what they went through.
When I voted,
it jumped from the box I touched to the box above.
They said half the machines were broken.
There was one voting booth! One!
For three thousand people!
Seven and a half hours in line to vote.
And they put two machines in another area for only three hundred people
and gave us two machines for three thousand people!
They have many more in the richer communities
and there are no lines there.
I haven't even reached the first of the three rooms I have to wait in.
The line goes out into the street.
Four or five hours waiting, it's not feasible!
It's not possible to do that!
Women with children having to wait in the rain on the street.
There were many people who ended up not being able to vote,
because they couldn't stand in those lines.
There were many elderly people there.
It's not the people who make the choice.
It's all rigged!
All rigged!
A calamity is happening
regarding how elections are conducted in this country,
and it results in lower voter turnout
and potentially less accuracy
in who gets elected, or what decisions are made
in the voting areas.
As soon as they closed the jurisdictions,
the election workers changed the machines to "report mode",
signed the results
and took the memory cards to the central tabulation computers.
America waited for the computers
to give the official results.
...let's go to John first.
Karen, you seem very excited...
John, tell us what you know.
No Republican has won the White House without winning Ohio,
No Republican has won the White House without winning Ohio,
that's a clich, we've repeated it several times,
but it turns out to be true.
They always said "Yes", Wisconsin and Ohio.
If you look at the current provisional results,
the last one came in a few minutes ago,
I believe Senator Kerry has a slight lead in both states.
ELECTION NIGHI didn't turn on the TV
to watch
the election results
and I didn't turn on the radio.
Instead, I sat here filling out
three thousand
"freedom of information requests"
to go to every county
in the United States
trying to get the internal records
of these computers,
knowing we wouldn't get them
for weeks after the election,
and they would probably be certified and they'd tell us:
"Forget it.
Move on."
And we would never know
if our election was controlled
by 100 million voters,
or by one person sitting
in their grandma's basement.
BlackBoxVoting
needed the records
of all the activity
on the voting machines,
so they could conduct
a investigation for the people.
They wanted the vote count to be independent
of partisan politicians.
November 3, 2004
In America, it's vital that every vote counts
and that every vote
is counted,
but the outcome should be decided by voters,
not by a prolonged
legal process.
I wouldn't give up
this fight
if there was
a chance of winning it,
but now it's clear
that even when all the provisional votes are counted,
and they will be,
there won't be a sufficient number of votes
for us to win
in Ohio.
And therefore, we cannot win this election.
People were stunned.
John Kerry had promised
to challenge the machines
and had assembled a network of lawyers
to protect the votes.
And then,
Kerry stopped any possible investigation by conceding defeat,
less than twelve hours after the polls closed.
Cliff Arnebeck,
an election lawyer from Ohio,
spoke with John Kerry shortly after.
A call came from Senator Kerry to the hotel room,
where we were meeting with Reverend Jackson,
Reverend Jackson put his phone on speaker,
and we began to talk.
The first part of the conversation
was a dialogue between counsel and Kerry,
where Kerry revealed that in New Mexico,
whatever the demographics of the jurisdiction,
if the votes were being counted by optical scan machines,
they were counting the votes for Bush.
This is,
for anyone familiar with the situation,
this means Kerry knew about fraud in that election!
And the optical scanners are the clue?
Yes, what he said...
was that the optical scanners were being manipulated
to manufacture a result for Bush,
contrary to the votes that the voters were entering.
So this is not our conspiracy theory,
this is not something we have to prove to Kerry,
it was Kerry who told us this as a done deal!
Once Kerry conceded defeat,
the incredible resources that he had gathered
for potential post-election litigation,
he was out of the game.
Kerry admitted defeat,
even though the results came from software
that he knew could be manipulated,
and independent polls had predicted his victory.
So it became clear that citizens would have to investigate the election.
FLORIDA
November 15, 2004
Bev and BlackBoxVoting
decided to start in Volusia County, Florida,
where Al Gore had received his negative votes in 2000.
Bev wanted to start by checking the printed results
from each voting machine.
I think our election went extremely well
and I'm very happy, because it was my last election,
I'm retiring on December 31st.
So you can imagine how I was praying
that the election would go smoothly.
I have a question.
These aren't copies of the signed ones,
these are new copies.
One of the things
that we requested
were the results tapes from the voting machines,
copies of them,
signed by the election supervisor on election day,
which was November 2nd.
But the date
was November 15th, and they were freshly printed just for us, obviously.
So what I was given was not at all what I had requested.
Let me check with them.
Okay.
...the original machine tapes are still in the warehouse,
or did you bring them here?
In the warehouse?
They're in the warehouse.
We went to the Volusia County warehouse,
because we learned that's where the actual vote tapes,
or the results tapes from the voting machines,
would be.
And we wanted to go there
unannounced,
because we wanted to see
what they were doing with them.
If you add up all
the ballot tapes
and there's a discrepancy
with the official results,
then you know there was
an error or vote tampering.
Call Lana
and the Police Department!
Get on that
and call the press too.
Ballots.
Sealed ballot envelopes.
Ballot tapes.
We have a public records request for these.
I don't like the fact that they're
being sent to the trash.
Show me a ballot.
This is happening because of
one sample ballot!
You see these?
Call the police and Lana.
I'm going to formally make
a public records request
for everything in
this bag,
so we can analyze it
and return it.
Then we'll leave.
You're going to get that trash,
aren't you?
Sure.
Need bags?
I'm going to keep these ballot tapes for which
I have a public records request
and which the county
has been stonewalling us on.
You didn't get that ballot tape in that bag.
Yes, I did.
And I filmed it.
Let me see it.
No.
I'll give it back.
No.
It's not the only one,
I found others.
You're basically delivering
a mouse from a mountain.
You know, when you do things
secretly, that's what...
There's no secrecy.
I'm going to your workplace
and ask to see everything?
You're a public employee
and this is from an election.
There's no secrecy,
you can look.
Don't worry,
that's what we'll do.
There's nothing there
for you to find...
you know,
there's no revelation here,
But if that brings you money, feel free.
Nobody's making money, we're doing an audit.
These aren't blank tapes, they have votes on them.
So we'll take all of these and make copies of them.
These were found in the warehouse, in the trash,
and these are signed vote tapes.
Signed by the election officials.
Throwing out vote tapes is against federal law.
They have to be kept for at least 22 months after an election.
It's hard to imagine they'd throw something like this out without noticing,
but we did, and that's what matters.
Oh, "account."
The county didn't want to investigate,
they stuck to their version that the election had gone off without a hitch,
so there was no need.
But we also have a significant anomaly.
I don't know what kind of anomaly you're referring to,
so I don't agree that there is an anomaly.
The vote tape that was signed and was found in the trash.
I would have thought that as the election supervisor
you'd be very concerned about this, frankly.
You can't throw out vote tapes from November 2nd
that are signed by six election officials
and put them in the shredder!
I think we all get that.
Bev decided to check the vote tapes Deanie had given her,
and compare them to the signed originals.
We asked for the signed vote tapes and they didn't give them to us,
and now we're looking at them and they're not the same as the ones you gave us.
So...
This is a big discrepancy. Okay.
On 2-15-A-00...
Signed?
Signed.
The number of votes for Bush is 520
and on A-01 it's 211.
And that's a big, big discrepancy.
It's a difference of hundreds of votes
between what we were given and what was signed.
Okay, we'll return them.
Yes, that one, that's fine.
So which one are you checking now?
7-23-A-01.
Meanwhile, in the back offices of the county,
two attentive local residents were investigating.
It's amazing.
Hi, my name is Susan Pynchon
and I'm the executive director
of the "Coalition for Fair Elections in Florida"
and I'm going through the trash of the supervisor of elections office
in DeLand, Florida.
Oh my God, look at this!
I'll be right back.
Bravo!
These are vote tapes
and one of these tapes
is the one that was missing this morning.
This is crazy, they found the missing tape...
...in the trash.
I'm in Volusia County, Florida,
home of the total negative vote.
A third of the original records
were missing or incomplete,
so, once again, the votes remained secret.
If Volusia County were a bank
and threw away documents that added up to money instead of votes,
the FBI would have investigated immediately.
But the FBI didn't show up,
and while BlackBoxVoting was able to demonstrate the secrecy,
nobody really knew what the results had been.
Our democracy could end.
We won't have a republic, it won't be recognizable,
if we don't get rid of the secrecy.
It wasn't created to be a secret system,
it became a secret system,
and if we don't reopen this, and quickly,
we'll never see what's going on again.
We give it up, we lose it,
we're going to have to go back and reclaim it,
by any means necessary.
Recount in Ohio!
In Ohio,
citizens were angry
claiming the elections had been fraudulently counted
and that voters were illegally prevented from voting.
They demanded a recount.
In the end,
it was the Green Party presidential candidate,
David Cobb, who decided it was time to make a stand.
I launched a recount
to investigate the allegations of voter suppression and fraud
that were pouring in.
This was an opportunity for BlackBoxVoting
to really learn how the votes were counted.
And Kathleen returned to her hometown,
Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
Since the recount took place in December and January,
there was snow, storms, and traffic,
and we would laugh and say:
"If this is what we have to do
to get our democracy back, we'll do it."
Even though we'd rather be home by the fire.
Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County,
is the largest jurisdiction in Ohio,
with about a million voters,
big enough to swing the presidential election.
A swing county, in a swing state.
Why did you get up so early today?
And what are you going to do today?
We're going to count the votes
and make sure they're counted correctly.
The reason I bought a camera
was to have irrefutable proof.
I never wanted to be misinterpreted, or misquoted, again,
so this way there would be no question.
Good morning, everyone. How are you?
Let me just introduce you to two people.
One of those people is Jacqui Maiden, who is our election coordinator.
Our vote supervisor, who is Katy Dreamer...
Cuyahoga was still using punch cards
counted by a computer with secret software.
The only way to verify the results from this computer
was to count the votes by hand.
However, under Ohio law,
you have to count a random 3% sample first.
You only need to count all the votes
if that sample doesn't match the computer's results.
Tell me how you feel about this today.
It's exciting, as you said, it's part of history.
We do a lot of recounts,
so for us, it's nothing new.
It's just for the public to see.
Recounts aren't just for the public to see.
The public has the responsibility to verify
that the election results are correct,
after all, it's their vote.
Almost immediately,
observers suspected someone had tampered with the ballots.
It looks like all the Bush and Kerry votes
are grouped together.
So they may have undergone pre-sorting.
Those ballots were tampered with in some way,
so much so that they were grouped.
And I have no idea how that happened,
Nobody was able to answer that question for me.
We have two more hours of work counting the ballots.
That's all?
And we're going to keep running them through the tabulation machine,
they're starting to inspect the voter books,
and everything is going very well.
And I was able to film all the election officials saying:
"Everything is going well. Everything is going perfectly."
Whatever they say...
They did something to make sure of that.
Later, the county prosecutor accused
the staff of secretly counting a large number of jurisdictions,
before the public recount.
Then they set aside the ballots that didn't match,
giving citizens a 3% sample
that wasn't random and wasn't legal.
What is the process by which the 3% of jurisdictions...
It's only 3%. It's a random choice
- to get the 3% - How do you choose the random choice?
We just pick.
- We just want to get to that number. - Okay.
Who is the person who makes that decision?
It's Try Burn and her staff, and our staff.
So it's not really random, is it?
Our random, is our random, okay?
- And we have the option of choice. - Yes.
And we always choose.
This department has always chosen which jurisdictions would be used.
Jacqui Maiden later stated that she followed "usual procedures"
when pre-ordering the ballots,
however, she also stated that she was unaware
that any jurisdictions that didn't match had been set aside,
and she did not believe that had happened.
But the other 97% of the ballots were never recounted
and nobody knows if the software counted those votes correctly.
The recount is nothing but a riddle,
The recount is nothing but a charade,
it's a complete
and total waste of time,
it's a bit of theater,
as it were,
and it was done,
in my opinion,
to make sure there would never
be a real recount,
but more importantly,
to make sure there would never
be an investigation
into the underlying allegations
of voter suppression
and election fraud.
Mr. President,
the certificate
of the electoral vote
from the recognized
and great state of Ohio,
appears to be regular
in form and authenticity
and therefore George W. Bush,
from the state of Texas,
received 20 votes
for President,
and Dick Cheney,
from the state of Wyoming,
received 20 votes
for Vice President.
For what purpose
does the gentleman from Ohio rise?
I said, "I object to the vote of Ohio."
And before they could ask me, I said:
"And I have the support
of a Senator!".
There had not been an objection
to the presidential vote in Congress
in over a century,
and it was the recognition
of the failures
and the denial of citizens' rights in Ohio.
Did the Senator sign
the objection?
The Senator signed
the objection.
An objection
presented in writing
and signed by a Representative and a Senator
meets the law.
I raised this objection because I am convinced,
that we as a whole,
should have a formal and legitimate debate
on electoral irregularities.
I raised this objection to debate the process
and protect the integrity
of the people's true will.
When I made the decision,
along with Senator Barbara Boxer,
to challenge the Ohio vote,
it seemed like I had shot someone in the head
and wanted something...
something terrible.
The problem we face
with this debate
is that it serves
to plant the insidious seeds of doubt
in the electoral process.
They accuse the President, about whom we were told
he was apparently a "zero" with computers,
of personally overseeing the development
of vote-stealing software.
We were all also elected
under the same rules and regulations that we are debating today.
I don't know if we help
the process... by casting doubt on what all those people do
who work in elections across the United States.
All those in favor of "yes" or "no" please stand.
There is a quorum.
The "yes" and "no" votes are recorded.
Members will cast their votes electronically.
Although the Ohio election was ratified by Congress,
politicians had been forced to look at a system
that serves them and not the people.
Tragically, around the same time,
Andy Stephenson received the news that he had cancer.
He died in July.
Maybe this is the legacy I leave.
Maybe I leave this for people to remember me
so that when I'm gone,
when it's time to meet my Creator
I will have...
a little piece I left behind that people can point to and say:
"Yes. He was here!"
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA
February 2005
In Tallahassee, Florida,
the elections supervisor, Ion Sancho,
wanted to be absolutely sure
that when his computers declared a winner,
it was because it was the will of the people.
The vendors have too much power
in the election arena.
Election officials are really
overly dependent on the vendors.
The vendors control the type of technology
that can be used in a state.
We are essentially hostages to the financial desires
of the private interests
who run the most public of our procedures:
public elections.
Ion asked BlackBoxVoting
to analyze his Diebold optical scanner system,
who in turn invited the computer security expert,
Harri Hursti, from Finland.
This is the first time
we will be analyzing the machines...
the actual machines...
It's a real system
that was actually used in real elections.
So it's exciting.
Welcome to Tallahassee.
- Hello. - Thank you.
Harri Hursti. Nice to meet you.
Ion Sancho.
This is where we count the votes on election night.
This is Thomas James. Thomas.
How are you?
One of the things the vendor told us
was that people wouldn't be able to access this,
that every time you logged in,
the system would record it.
Dr. Hugh Thompson and Harri Hursti
believed they could alter vote totals without being caught.
Hugh tried to hack GEMS,
the vote-counting computer program.
He used an election that was held at a local high school.
Nadiyah Smith had come in second with 322 votes.
They decided to make her the winner.
So I go into this election file...
and when I do, it asks me for a password,
but I have no idea what the password is.
But Hugh had written a program
that automatically looked up Nadiyah's vote totals,
and then changed them to 5,000.
When they went back to the results page,
Nadiyah had won,
but the computer showed no evidence of fraud.
I'm very concerned about the system's failure
when I realize they can cleverly get around the system
and bypass the password.
But Hugh could be caught,
if the final totals in GEMS
were compared to the original printouts.
Harri realized all the votes are stored on a memory card
before the totals are printed.
So if you can hack the memory cards...
you can control an election.
To not be detected, you have to be very close to the source of the information...
and besides that, the only way
was the memory card.
Harri wanted to find out what exactly was inside
the Diebold voting machine.
So he bought a memory card reader online,
and just a few days later
he discovered the cards didn't just contain votes,
there was a program, or executable code.
Well, if someone had told me
that in this system there was a "living thing",
a mutable, executable program
stored in the same place as the data,
which is the most protected in the system, I would have said:
"You must have misunderstood, you're crazy or lying."
Harri wrote a report for BlackBoxVoting
warning that this program, hidden on the memory card,
could be used to alter the outcome of an election.
"...the mother of all security flaws..."
What happened
was that Diebold issued a report denying the fact.
Diebold sent letters
to public officials across America
denying that there was any executable code
on the memory cards.
Back in Cuyahoga County
in Ohio, the site of the infamous recount,
the chairman of the Election Commission, Bob Bennet,
was about to invest $20 million
in Diebold's systems.
It's an independent system. The votes are encrypted
so if anyone tries to manipulate the election results,
the system shuts down immediately.
In other words, there's built-in protection in the system.
Sorry, that was very kind.
So far, it's going very well.
Thank you, sir.
Bob Bennet was also the chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio,
the party Diebold had been fundraising for.
Citizens were present to record, observe,
and hopefully make a difference.
Among them, Kathleen and her schoolmate, Victoria Lovegreen.
I'd like to know basically why...
what's the rationale behind your decision?
Because even by your own criteria
Diebold doesn't win.
It's a bad decision and it will...
it will come back to bite you, because you're already in trouble.
People don't trust Cuyahoga County!
They don't trust the recount here!
You're in trouble!
Right now, we're still in the process
of finalizing negotiations on the Diebold contract.
We made that selection.
It's not credible that we would back down unless something drastic happened
that would change our decision.
So Bev decided it was time to make something drastic happen.
Three months later, Diebold came back to town to finalize the sale.
Knowing Diebold was going to show up at a public meeting,
the next strategy was to go there
and film their chief engineer
saying that votes can't be altered on memory cards.
So my question to Diebold
would be, again:
"You have no idea what was done in these security tests,"
"or did you just say something that isn't true?"
I think this warrants a response from Diebold
to Mrs. Harris's question.
The question was about altering votes and whether they knew or not?
As far as I know...
since there is no...
executable program on the memory cards,
the votes on the memory cards cannot be altered.
Could you remind us if you're an engineer?
No, I'm not an engineer,
but I work with our engineering team, actually...
Pat, can you come up here?
Hi, I'm Pat Green,
I'm director of research and development at Diebold.
Mrs. Harris, could you ask your question again?
The votes can be altered
using only a memory card?
No, I don't think the votes can be altered
using only the memory card.
That particular situation is detected by the software.
The report that was written, that I read,
supposes that something like that could be possible
but says they did not manage to prove or test it.
These are quite strong claims.
These are claims that we take as a challenge.
These are claims that we wanted to find out if they were true or not.
So Bev returned to Tallahassee
to see if the votes could be altered.
For Ion,
there was another reason to test the memory cards.
As one of Florida's most trusted election officials,
he had been appointed to oversee
the recount of the 2000 presidential election.
The recount might have uncovered
why Volusia County's computers counted backwards,
down by 16,022 votes.
But when the Supreme Court stopped that recount,
Ion was left with unanswered questions.
One of the reasons I'm interested in the Volusia County situation
and what happened there,
is that we in Leon County use an identical voting system,
the Diebold AccuVote 2000.
In the 17 years I've been an election official,
my experience tells me that that kind of subtraction
cannot occur accidentally.
Someone consciously tried
to affect that computer system,
and consciously tried
to perpetuate a fraud,
steal votes.
During her research,
Harri discovered that Diebold memory cards
actually allowed for negative votes.
What we're going to do here is modify a card
and then take it to the election supervisor,
to Ion Sanches' office,
hook it up like a real card from any election
to the real election system
and calculate the votes,
and this is the same system that's been used
in several previous elections.
And we'll see what power is in the ballot box...
this should just be an empty box containing the votes,
but it has more capabilities than that.
It's a fairly simple process,
you insert the card,
run the reprogramming program,
tell it where to find a scanner,
and it tells you exactly which file you want to insert...
and you're done.
What Harri did is a variation of "stuffing" the voting machine
before anyone has voted.
But this is always suspicious,
because you end up with more votes than voters.
So Harri used five negative votes for one candidate
and then gave the other five positive votes,
so that as people voted,
the total number of votes would always equal the total number of voters.
But would Harri be correct?
BlackBoxVoting returned to Tallahassee
for the ultimate test.
Bev asked Susan Pynchon, from Volusia County,
to observe.
She had also found evidence
of problems with the memory cards,
while going through the trash
from the Volusia County Supervisor of Elections.
This is from Mark Earley at Diebold, and it says:
"How did the number of failures on memory cards on election day"
"increase from the seventeen recorded, on November 3rd,"
"to twenty-five?"
I don't know if we'll ever know
why these memory cards failed,
or if...
You know, one of the big
doubts I have is:
"Did they really fail?"
or:
"Could they have been used
for other purposes?"
Hello. How are you?
- It's a pleasure to see you. - Good to see you, Susan.
Susan Bernecker, from Louisiana,
and Dr. Hugh Thompson,
also came to see what Harri was going to do.
- Hello, Dr. Thompson, how are you? - It's a pleasure to see you.
- It's always a pleasure to see you. - It's always a pleasure to see you, Kathleen.
Come in.
Well, let me tell you what we're going to do today.
We've set up
a mini-election...
but Harri Hursti,
since he served as technical advisor and knows how to do this,
we're going to ask him
to stay outside.
Let me introduce you
to my election staff.
To make sure
we haven't prepared any device
that has been
pre-modified,
pick a number, and then
we'll take that unit
"using
the memory card?"
I only "touched"
the memory card,
not the other parts
of the Diebold election system
that will be used today.
Just the memory card.
I can definitely
speak for myself and Harri
and say we'll vote "Yes."
Okay.
Then let the rest of us vote "No."
Two people,
you and Harri,
will vote "Yes,"
the rest of us
will vote "No,"
and then we'll tally
the ballots
to make sure that's
really the mark.
I'll say I'm wrong
and Diebold is right
and I'll say...
No,
they can't be violated.
It's impossible.
So I vote "No."
I'm going to film myself
voting.
Excuse me.
I'm going to mark
"No" on this ballot.
Hugh Thompson.
I'm going to mark this ballot
with a "Yes."
I've seen some pretty
concerning things.
Well, you're the only one left to vote,
Harri.
Okay.
I think it could happen,
so I vote
"Yes."
That'll be the second
"Yes."
Okay.
Here's the memory card
that I "touched."
Okay.
This is the only part you used
of the Diebold equipment?
That's correct.
Well,
thank you.
Let me take your ballot.
This card will go
into this slot.
The next activity the election official does on election morning
is to turn on the machine.
To "wake it up"
to receive votes.
When you do that,
this machine will produce what we call a "zero tape."
The machine is doing
a self-test analysis
and then it will spontaneously
boot up.
This is Harri's card
that's telling us
that there are zero votes
stored in memory.
Let me get the ballots.
We're going to insert
a "Yes" ballot.
We'll put in
another "No."
Seven,
and the last ballot
"No,"
eight.
Putting the finalizer card
in this machine
and telling it to turn off
its counting function
and perform
its reporting function,
will cause the voting machine
to print a tape
with the reading of the number
of votes it just read.
My God.
What is it,
what is it?
Seven "Yes"
and one "No."
Oh, my God!
Oh, my God!
Let me see.
Take the tape.
Seven people said
it could be violated...
- And we put...
- Six and two.
Six "No"
and two "Yes."
Oh, my God. Do you know what this means?
How do we know if Harri
just changed the report
and the votes on the memory card
are still the correct ones?
If that's the case,
when they're entered into GEMS
the results would be different.
Is that correct?
The only way to check that
is to put it into GEMS
and check
the total votes.
Do you think we should do that?
I think we should,
because I want to confirm,
for my
own personal analysis,
is this just
a superficial breach?
Right.
Correct, that's a good question.
Did we just change
the words on this paper?
And we're going to upload...
this memory card.
If I hadn't seen
what's behind this,
I would have no reason
not to certify,
I would have certified
this election
as the correct and accurate result of a vote.
Susan,
what does this mean to you?
It makes me want
to cry.
I'm sorry, but it makes me cry.
Why?
Why?
There are so many reasons.
Because there are people out there
who give their lives trying
to make our elections secure
and who are called
conspiracy theorists
and have their phones tapped,
and these vendors who lie
and say everything is fine,
and it's not fine!
And I cry, because...
I'll quote someone
I know who said:
"Our country is a country
that pretends to be another country."
How can this be happening
in our elections?
This really affects me.
I don't know how to describe
exactly what I saw here.
I think we,
as election officials,
need to be
a little more...
demanding of vendors
and the technical specifications
of this equipment.
The vendors are driving the process
of voting technology in the United States.
Right now, I'd prefer we focus on allowing citizens
to choose technology that meets their needs.
Diebold accused Ion of foolishness
and apparent negligence,
insisting that only authorized people
should test the security of their systems.
They said the breach was equivalent
to leaving your car unlocked,
with the windows open
and the keys in the ignition.
But scientists
from the University of Berkeley,
later confirmed
Harri's findings.
They discovered sixteen more security flaws
in Diebold's touch-screen machines.
ES&S and Sequoia claimed
their systems were secure,
and Diebold
continues to claim
they upgraded their software
to make it even more secure.
They also insist that their
electronic voting systems
are even more accurate
than their predecessors.
But now,
everyone is asking,
"How can votes be changed without leaving a trace?"
CLEVELAND, OHIO
December 23, 2005
However, Cuyahoga did not change
its position after the hearings
and spent
22 million dollars
on Diebold's touch-screen
and optical scan machines.
Translation and subtitling:
cab @ docsPDirection
Production
Narrator
Music
Researcher
Script
by Eng.Ali Almansouri
the world's greatest
democracy
and at its heart,
the vote,
the will of the people.
But how do you know if the vote
is counted correctly?
And if you don't know,
then what do you have?
Democracy?
Translation and subtitling:
docsPD
U
DE
US
DEM
USU
DEMO
USUR
DEMOC
USURP
DEMOCR
USURPA
DEMOCRA
USURPAD
DEMOCRAC
USURPADA
DEMOCRACIA
USURPADA
This is the story of a small
group of citizens
led by a grandmother
from Seattle.
They went on a journey
to ask a simple question:
How does America
count its votes?
What they found
was secrecy,
votes in the trash,
and how to change
the course of History.
If... when people
realize
what's really
going on...
there's no way we'll allow
this to continue.
In 2000,
Al Gore lost the presidential
election in Florida,
amidst the chaos and arguments
over how to recount the votes.
But it didn't occur to anyone
to ask
how the computers
counted the results.
VOLUSIA COUNTY
FLORIDA
When the sun set
on election night,
an official noticed
something very strange,
a sign that the heart of American democracy was in danger.
In Volusia County, Florida,
an election computer tallied Al Gore's totals
incorrectly.
He got negative votes.
It showed
a negative sign
before the votes
it had subtracted from Gore.
It wasn't like it was
trying to hide it,
it said: "minus 16,022 votes."
How could a computer,
which was supposed
to protect our votes,
count incorrectly to assign
negative votes to a candidate?
Either it was a mistake,
or someone tried
to rig the election.
There was an investigation
into the negative votes
and it was established
that the problem
could not have been due
to a machine malfunction,
because only the totals for
the presidential election were affected.
It seemed that a second
memory card
might have been
put into the computer.
The memory cards
contain the votes,
but this second card
had disappeared
so they couldn't
analyze it.
The origin of the negative votes was never proven,
but some engineers thought
it might have been an attempt
to rig the election.
But the truth will never be known.
The software that tallied
those votes
belonged
to Global Election Systems.
In 2002,
it was bought
by the company Diebold.
The software
is a trade secret.
It's against federal
and state law
to examine what's inside
the Diebold voting machines.
I was the chief technical advisor
to the Secretary of State,
of the largest state
in the United States,
and I was not allowed to examine
the software used by Diebold,
or any other voting system vendor.
To this day, I have not been allowed to examine
that software.
Software like this is installed in over 30 states.
If someone tampers with it, or it malfunctions,
elections can be won by the wrong people.
If that happens,
hundreds of representatives, judges, and other officials,
could hold offices they were not elected to.
Democrat or Republican,
it affects us all.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON STATE
Bev Harris lives with her family in Seattle.
A writer, advertising agent, and grandmother,
she knew nothing about computer programming,
or about election systems,
but when her county bought a new touch-screen system,
she started asking questions.
The answers she got revealed a system in crisis.
I had a life before I got into this,
and I never thought about becoming an activist or advocate,
but sometimes something comes into our lives
and we know that if we don't do it, maybe nobody will
and then maybe I don't want to pass that on to my children.
I put three words into a news search engine,
"voting machines" and "failure",
and I found dozens and dozens of elections
that were miscounted by the machines.
And around that time I thought we really had a problem.
What Bev had discovered
was that she could not effectively trust
the election results generated by voting machines.
In Louisiana,
Susan Bernecker, a Republican candidate,
filmed the proof
when she went to check
her results
on a touch-screen computerized voting system.
This is where I came
on the day
the warehouses
were opened to the candidates
for inspection.
So I came here
with an old school friend...
he took out his camera...
then I asked them to show me
how the machine worked
and I started
"playing" with the machine.
And that's when I pressed the button
that represented my name...
and then I looked down and saw on the screen
Mr. Gianbelluca's name
when I had pressed
Susan Bernecker.
Should we repeat?
Do it again, yes.
Okay.
Here we go again.
I'm pressing Bernecker...
and Gianbelluca comes up.
So we started testing
down the line,
we tested probably
fifteen machines,
and I said, "You know what?
We don't need to test any more!"
That's when I said:
"My God, this is terrible!"
"We can't
count our votes?"
"Then how will we know
that this is correct?"
Since the vote itself is secret,
it's rare to have documentary evidence
of machines making mistakes.
But Susan's experience is not an isolated problem.
Computers count about 80% of the votes in America.
It's the counties
that run the elections
and buy
the voting machines,
so the manufacturer and model
vary from place to place,
but there are two
main models.
On a touch-screen machine,
the software counts
the selections we make on the screen.
Optical scan machines
read a ballot on which you voted.
Presidential Election
November 2004, Walpole, New Hampshire
Seven PM.
The polls are closed.
The votes themselves,
are stored on the computers' memory cards.
This is the voter unit.
This unit is very important
and goes directly into our bag.
These memory cards are taken to a central computer,
sometimes called a central tabulator,
which reads the votes, adds them up
and then declares the winner.
The problem is that you can't see
a computer doing the vote count.
So how do you know it counted them correctly?
Stanford University
Palo Alto, California
Suppose we didn't have computers,
and when we went to vote
the voting booth was separated by a curtain
and there was a guy behind the curtain who would mark your vote.
In other words, we'd just state our preference,
he'd mark your vote
and when you were done, you'd leave without being able to see the ballot.
Most people in their right mind wouldn't trust this process.
The guy behind the curtain could be incompetent,
he could mishear your vote and mark it wrong,
or it could be that he didn't like your political affiliation
and would prefer your vote to go to someone else.
In electronic voting machines,
you don't have a guy inside the machine marking what's dictated,
but you have many people who are involved in programming the software
and many people who could have "touched" the software
before it was installed on that machine.
If one of those people put something malicious in the software
and it gets distributed to all the machines,
then that person can be responsible for changing,
possibly, tens of thousands of votes,
even hundreds of thousands across the country.
That's a very dangerous situation.
You know, I started looking into these voting machines
and one of the reasons I became so curious
was that the way they work is secret.
The companies that make them keep it secret.
None of the computer scientists can examine the code,
because the code was supposed to be secret.
The certification labs that examined it
keep the process of what they do secret,
and even the election officials who buy the equipment
are contractually forbidden from examining and seeing how it works.
SEATTLE
January 23, 2003
What happened next really changed my life.
I was looking for technicians
who might be able to answer some of my questions,
and while looking for them, I stumbled onto an obscure website.
The site was an old predecessor
to the Diebold election systems website.
And I clicked on a link
and that link took me to an area that wasn't like a page
but more like a library or a file system on the Internet,
and it contained a lot of different files,
just like you see on a computer,
and inside those were more files, which contained more files,
and the files were astounding.
It was things like...
the software specifications,
the software itself,
the hardware designs,
the user manuals,
the source code, in some cases.
It was the crown jewels of the Diebold election systems.
Bev didn't know,
but what she had found
was a computer program called GEMS.
GEMS, programmed by Diebold,
It accounts for about 40% of the votes in America.
So I started downloading these files...
and all night...
I kept downloading files all weekend.
There were so many files
it took me
about forty hours to download them all.
From then on,
I knew I'd be working on this project for a long time.
Until then,
only the voting machine companies
knew how American elections were really counted.
When Bev downloaded the Diebold software,
the wall of secrecy began to crumble.
Diebold Headquarters
North Canton, Ohio
The Diebold company claimed Bev had stolen the software
from their FTP on the Internet.
The FTP was an unfortunate situation, I have to admit that.
It was a situation where the information was available,
it was captured,
which was our fault, we made a mistake,
we admit it readily.
Will it happen again? No, it won't.
I had never seen software code in my life,
but as a writer, one of the things I learned to do is ask a lot of questions
and learn as much as I can about the subject.
I must say I didn't want to go forward with it, I thought:
"Maybe I can cover this story without having to learn how it works."
But that's not what happened, I really had to learn how it worked.
After discovering the files,
I kind of brought together several computer scientists,
or programmers, who would help me understand it.
And Avi Rubin,
conducted an amazing study with three of his colleagues.
I got a call saying the Diebold code was on the internet,
that Bev Harris had found it on the Diebold page itself,
and if I wanted to analyze it, and I said, "Sure."
I was very excited about the opportunity
to analyze the Diebold code,
and I think it was the first opportunity
someone from outside had to see what goes on inside these electronic voting machines.
Dr. Rubin discovered that you could manipulate an election
without needing to know how the system worked.
"We discovered significant and widespread security vulnerabilities..."
The problem
that Bev discovered is a significant security flaw,
and it paves the way
for people to seriously manipulate elections
in a way that's very difficult to detect.
But it wasn't just the Diebold machines that were a concern.
Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold
hold the largest share of the market,
in fact,
ES&S and Diebold alone hold about 80% of the electronic voting market.
The state of Maryland spent $55 million
on a Diebold election system.
They asked IT consultants Raba Technologies to test them.
Raba was able to breach the machines in about ten seconds.
So what did they spend the $55 million on?
Accuracy and security and equipment reliability.
Again, there's a feeling...
Well, it's more than a feeling.
These scientists breached the machine.
I'll tell you, from what I read in the Raba report,
and I read it very carefully,
is that the steps they took,
and how they claimed they affected the machine,
in a real election environment would be virtually impossible.
Most states require
that voting systems be tested by independent authorities,
or ITAs.
But if the machines were tested,
So why are there so many security flaws?
And why can they count votes backwards?
It seems I have friends in private industry
working for these companies and working in government,
who I don't know, I don't even know who they are,
who know that something is wrong.
They're disturbed by what they see
and they want people to know what's going on.
What I got, and these are hard to get,
are two reports.
One is on VoteHere,
the other is on Diebold's GEMS system.
They're both from CIBER,
which is an independent auditing authority.
They contain these extensive tables
where they check all the different regulations
and the FEC guidelines,
and they have check after check,
meaning it was approved, approved, approved...
They're all the same.
And we get to the last page...
and there's a check in the other column.
There was something that wasn't tested.
And what wasn't tested was...
system security!
This is the test
that tells us if these things can be tampered with.
And what it says here is:
"Penetration analysis not reviewed by ITA software."
Bev founded BlackBoxVoting.org,
a non-profit organization
dedicated to protecting consumers in elections.
She published the results of her investigations
on her website.
Andy Stephenson,
a candidate for Secretary of State in Washington,
read her findings and decided to contact her.
I was still running
and my
reaction was...
"Bleep",
I'm screwed!
Bev and I couldn't get answers
from our public representatives,
even though we kept pestering them.
It was absolutely
impossible.
So we decided...
to get the answers
ourselves.
Bev and Andy joined forces.
They wanted to know why the voting equipment
wasn't being tested for security
and why it was counting
votes incorrectly.
We went to meet Shawn Southworth,
in Huntsville,
Alabama.
He's the examiner
of equipment and software
for all the major voting machine producers.
Do what you do best, dear.
Andy was equipped
with a small camera.
He and Bev
wanted to make sure
that their conversation
with Shawn Southworth
was properly recorded,
word for word.
I'm looking for Shawn Southworth.
- Are you?
- Yes.
Hello, I'm Bev Harris.
I have some questions...
I don't test all these things, Ciber does.
Ciber is the one that's accredited.
You have to ask them these questions.
No,
I really have to talk to you,
because your name is
on all the documents.
Everything we do is within the FEC guidelines.
It's what we do.
We write a report,
we test the software,
we review the code,
to see if it's within the FEC standard
and then
we write a report.
We don't certify...
we don't say:
"This is the best software you've ever seen in your lives."
We wrote that report...
How do you deal with something that accepts negative votes?
We don't.
You just write the report?
Do you write in your report that this is a cause for concern?
You should be talking to the people we write the reports for.
We can't release our reports to anyone...
My question is, regarding the negative votes,
because we know that happened.
Do we put things in terms like that? No!
I don't recall ever issuing a report that said...
Because every time we write a report,
the system has already passed testing,
and the vendors aren't going to want a report that has anything negative in it.
So, they'll test and test
until everything is just right,
until it's all up to standard.
Only then do we write a report.
So, if Ciber claims the machines
passed accuracy and security tests,
then why are they counting votes backward,
and why can they be hacked in ten seconds?
What people are asking is, "Why should we trust these machines?"
I think the main reason is because everything is tested
before it's distributed for an election.
I know I sound like a broken record saying this over and over,
but it's a very important step.
Bev continued her cross-country journey.
It was clear that official records weren't going to reveal anything,
so Bev started dumpster diving
at the voting machine companies
and their clients, the counties.
She was joined in her "dumpster diving" campaign
by Kathleen Wynne,
an activist from Cleveland, Ohio.
Exchange...
Who knows.
My God,
that was funny.
It smells
really good.
It's a shot in the dark,
it's like going shopping,
you never know what you'll
find until you go...
open the bag and say:
"Great... nothing",
but this presents itself
as a possibility.
I think what
we want to do
is go to a place where
we can be undisturbed,
behind a supermarket
or something like that.
Bev and Kathleen
made dozens of raids.
It's legal.
When you put documents
in the trash in public areas
it's perfectly legal to go get them,
because you're no longer protecting them.
We wouldn't have
to do this
if our system
wasn't secret
and hadn't been handed over
to private companies.
And unfortunately,
the work they do in secret
is about our votes,
from the citizens of America.
On July 11, 2004,
during a raid
on Diebold's trash,
in McKinney,
Texas,
Kathleen found some
of Diebold's internal records.
This is part of the material
we found in McKinney, Texas,
in Diebold's trash.
I found invoices.
And I was curious, when I saw that
on the invoices the first item
was money that
Diebold was owed
by the Republican Committee
of the 8th District.
This is interesting, because it's not
a polling office
that owes Diebold money,
which would make sense,
because they buy
voting machines,
it's a Republican political committee
paying Diebold.
We have the right
to ask:
"Why are you collecting from a Republican committee?"
Bev and Kathleen don't know what this item meant.
What is known is that Diebold,
and some of its executives,
were major Republican fundraisers.
In 2003,
Walden O'Dell, Diebold's CEO,
wrote a fundraising letter
promising to deliver Ohio's votes to George W. Bush.
"committed to helping Ohio next year"
"deliver its electoral votes to the President."
It's important that your company be impartial, isn't it?
Yes.
So why did your CEO say:
"I am committed to delivering Ohio's votes to George W. Bush in 2004?"
That quote, which appeared in a letter,
is something he regrets.
It was a situation where his personal preference
overshadowed business interests,
and he's committed to maintaining greater discretion
in all matters related to those kinds of activities,
because of that statement.
People talk about ties between parties and voting companies,
and they're right!
That said,
we also see that it's not that linear.
We have the state of Maryland and the state of Georgia
with Democrats advocating for Diebold's system
and it's Republicans fighting against it in those states,
and even in my county,
Seattle, King County, Washington,
it's Democrats promoting these systems
and Republicans who are somewhat skeptical.
CALIFORNIA
March 2004
The new battleground was California,
the center of the computer industry.
And the Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley,
was getting worried about security.
Well, in 2003,
Kevin Shelley discovered that one of the counties
was using uncertified software...
and ordered an audit of the voting machines in all counties
in California,
and found that none of them were using certified software.
They later admitted they were aware of the law,
but even knowing the law, they chose to ignore it,
but even knowing the law, they chose to ignore it
and made these changes without prior authorization,
which is a direct violation of state law.
It was the first time I realized
the lack of integrity of Diebold as a company.
Diebold was called to account by the State of California.
At stake were deals worth millions of dollars
and Diebold was forced to put its president,
Bob Urosevich, on trial.
As you know,
about a year ago,
a version of the source code for Diebold's TSS system
got out of your control
and a few months later it was investigated by...
a group led by Avi Rubin,
by Professor Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University,
and they wrote a report
that found numerous and serious vulnerabilities
in the analyzed code.
I'd like to know your reaction to those reports
before we go into a little more detail.
Basically, the code was stolen.
Code that contained keywords
and our encryption technology.
I'm not a rocket scientist,
but let me tell you
if someone steals my house keys,
the first thing I'd probably do is change the lock.
- And that's what we did.
- I apologize.
As you know, the code wasn't stolen,
it was left by your company on a public FTP.
The code was stolen from our FTP and we think...
- You know that.
- Okay.
The base code was exposed.
The key is currently public.
What you did, or your team did,
was build a big, complex building,
put locks on all the doors,
use the same key for all the locks,
and then put a picture of the key on display.
This fell far below minimum security standards...
But for Bev, there was a more fundamental problem than security.
Could the vote count be trusted to Diebold?
Number one issue: Diebold.
We have a company that lies.
Yes, I'm saying it: they lie!
They said this morning they had made
all the software changes to fix the various flaws,
which would never have been discovered
if I hadn't discovered your files on your website.
But,
there's something called a "release note",
it's a legal document,
it's something that must present everything that was and wasn't changed,
when you release a new version.
I got the release notes for GEMS...
and they didn't fix any of the problems.
These errors were never fixed.
I don't know what to say!
How can you have a company say
they want to have secret software that no one,
not even
the county clerks
who are here to testify for you, are allowed to check.
And when you look at the code, you find flaws
and then they say, "You have no idea what you're talking about."
So, they hand it over to scientific panels,
who in turn find flaws and say:
"Don't worry about it, we've already fixed it."
When that's a lie!
Bob Urosevich, the CEO of Diebold,
submitted this declaration defending Diebold's voting systems,
also known as "Desy."
The Desy understands that the SOS,
that is, the Secretary of State, and the voting panel
are disappointed by the fact
that the inventory report from R&G Associates
identified inadequate and uncertified software
and they are analyzing the Desy in order to recognize
that this should not have happened.
To be clear,
there were no improper intentions, or motive on the part of Desy,
to give rise to this situation.
I want to make it very clear that from the beginning,
these allegations and this report
stating that Diebold deceived,
are not true and have no basis.
A few days later,
Kevin Shelley, the Secretary of State of California,
announced the consequences for Diebold.
I am revoking the license of Diebold's TSS system,
banning its use in the four counties where it was installed.
Furthermore,
I have taken another initiative,
and I have the letter here, freshly signed,
to ask the Attorney General
to prosecute Diebold criminally and civilly in this matter,
based on the discovery of fraudulent acts.
We will not tolerate
deceptive tactics like those perpetrated by Diebold!
Do not try to deceive
California voters, because there will be consequences if you do!
The state moved forward with a civil action against Diebold,
but never charged them criminally.
The lawsuit was eventually settled with a payment by Diebold,
of $2.6 million.
Bev was clearly hitting the industry's profitability.
And she received legal threats.
It was really a difficult time
and it's the kind of thing that can destroy a marriage.
I was very lucky that my husband was absolutely on my side, because...
here we were looking at each other...
not only did we not have money,
but we could be sued by the vendors
for thinking their equipment has to be secret,
and we could lose everything.
And he simply said:
"You know, my family fought for the right to vote,
my husband is African-American,
my family fought for the right to vote for six generations
and we're not stopping now."
In California,
it was only the touchscreens that were decertified.
The central tabulation software, GEMS,
was still in use.
The central tabulator is like
the machine that controls all the others.
It collects all the votes
and all the companies, not just Diebold,
have this central tabulator.
This is because of the way we vote,
we vote in individual jurisdictions that are spread out,
and there has to be one machine that unifies all these jurisdictions,
and tally them up
and declare the winner.
Bev wanted to find out
if GEMS
was actually keeping
the votes secure.
So she turned to computer security expert,
Dr. Hugh Thompson.
I was at this huge computer security
and hacking conference,
and I'm approached
by a grandmotherly type,
who says to me:
"I have access
to the tabulation software
from one of the largest electronic voting producers on the planet."
I said, "That's very interesting."
And then she says,
"Can you take a look at it?"
I tell you the thing
that shocked me
was how easily the vote totals could be changed.
Imagine:
you can go into a ballot box
and essentially rewrite history,
and there's no record of you
having rewritten history,
and the only record of history itself
is what was modified.
And that to me
is pretty scary.
Bev and Hugh developed a way
to demonstrate GEMS' insecurity.
She was invited to appear,
with her computer expert,
on national television
with a former presidential candidate,
Governor Howard Dean.
Okay, Bev, show me how to do this.
Well, what we have here is the
central tabulation computer.
In a voting system,
you have all these voting machines
from all the precincts.
All those machines
"feed" into one machine
so that it can
tally the votes.
So if you were going to do something
that you shouldn't to a voting machine,
would it be more convenient
to do it to the four thousand machines,
or just to the central machine and deal with
all the others at once?
The GEMS program,
it's a central tabulation program.
I'll put in the password here.
We're in.
This is the official program that the county supervisors confiscated.
As we can see here, Howard Dean has 1,000 votes
and Lex Luther has 500.
He's beating Lex Luther...
Two to one. Yes.
And unfortunately, Tiger Woods doesn't have any votes yet.
Let's close this out.
I was just showing you the legitimate way to view the vote count,
which, of course, you can't tamper with.
Go to the 'Start' menu, and I'll show you something sneaky.
I want you to go to 'My Computer' and click there...
and you'll see...
Go to the 'C' drive.
And go to 'My Programs'.
Go to 'Central Tabulator Votes'
and then go to 'Candidate Totals',
which is that table.
With you, we have 800 votes for you and 400 votes for Lex Luther.
Let's swap them.
We'll put 400 there
and give 100 votes to Tiger.
Let's see what happened.
We go back to GEMS the legitimate way...
And as you can see,
Howard Dean has only 500 votes,
Lex Luther has 900,
and Tiger Woods has 100 votes.
We just changed an election, and it only took 90 seconds.
Diebold and election officials across the United States
kept insisting that their systems were secure.
They said that despite the breach that Bev committed on GEMS,
there were checks and balances,
and that inconsistencies in the vote totals
would be detected in a real election.
This happened just two months
before one of the closest presidential elections ever.
Those checks and balances were about to be tested.
Oh, my God! You're getting so big!
I feel fine, thank you.
Let me go vote first.
Let's go.
Let me see if I can follow the instructions...
The world watches our great democracy at work.
I'm going to put you down for a second, sweetie.
It's that magical moment
when the greatest democracy on the face of the planet
shows the world how we work.
There would be nothing better for our system
than for the election to be conclusively resolved tonight,
so that...
I think it'll be me...
so that I can continue to lead this country...
The politicians said everything was fine,
but it wasn't.
The machines weren't just insecure,
they malfunctioned, leaving thousands unable to vote.
And now...
nobody knows.
On Election Day, in 2004,
we, along with many other organizations,
had a voter hotline
where people could call and explain the problems they were having.
We received over 200,000 calls
and many of those people left a recording about what they went through.
When I voted,
it jumped from the box I touched to the box above.
They said half the machines were broken.
There was one voting booth! One!
For three thousand people!
Seven and a half hours in line to vote.
And they put two machines in another area for only three hundred people
and gave us two machines for three thousand people!
They have many more in the richer communities
and there are no lines there.
I haven't even reached the first of the three rooms I have to wait in.
The line goes out into the street.
Four or five hours waiting, it's not feasible!
It's not possible to do that!
Women with children having to wait in the rain on the street.
There were many people who ended up not being able to vote,
because they couldn't stand in those lines.
There were many elderly people there.
It's not the people who make the choice.
It's all rigged!
All rigged!
A calamity is happening
regarding how elections are conducted in this country,
and it results in lower voter turnout
and potentially less accuracy
in who gets elected, or what decisions are made
in the voting areas.
As soon as they closed the jurisdictions,
the election workers changed the machines to "report mode",
signed the results
and took the memory cards to the central tabulation computers.
America waited for the computers
to give the official results.
...let's go to John first.
Karen, you seem very excited...
John, tell us what you know.
No Republican has won the White House without winning Ohio,
No Republican has won the White House without winning Ohio,
that's a clich, we've repeated it several times,
but it turns out to be true.
They always said "Yes", Wisconsin and Ohio.
If you look at the current provisional results,
the last one came in a few minutes ago,
I believe Senator Kerry has a slight lead in both states.
ELECTION NIGHI didn't turn on the TV
to watch
the election results
and I didn't turn on the radio.
Instead, I sat here filling out
three thousand
"freedom of information requests"
to go to every county
in the United States
trying to get the internal records
of these computers,
knowing we wouldn't get them
for weeks after the election,
and they would probably be certified and they'd tell us:
"Forget it.
Move on."
And we would never know
if our election was controlled
by 100 million voters,
or by one person sitting
in their grandma's basement.
BlackBoxVoting
needed the records
of all the activity
on the voting machines,
so they could conduct
a investigation for the people.
They wanted the vote count to be independent
of partisan politicians.
November 3, 2004
In America, it's vital that every vote counts
and that every vote
is counted,
but the outcome should be decided by voters,
not by a prolonged
legal process.
I wouldn't give up
this fight
if there was
a chance of winning it,
but now it's clear
that even when all the provisional votes are counted,
and they will be,
there won't be a sufficient number of votes
for us to win
in Ohio.
And therefore, we cannot win this election.
People were stunned.
John Kerry had promised
to challenge the machines
and had assembled a network of lawyers
to protect the votes.
And then,
Kerry stopped any possible investigation by conceding defeat,
less than twelve hours after the polls closed.
Cliff Arnebeck,
an election lawyer from Ohio,
spoke with John Kerry shortly after.
A call came from Senator Kerry to the hotel room,
where we were meeting with Reverend Jackson,
Reverend Jackson put his phone on speaker,
and we began to talk.
The first part of the conversation
was a dialogue between counsel and Kerry,
where Kerry revealed that in New Mexico,
whatever the demographics of the jurisdiction,
if the votes were being counted by optical scan machines,
they were counting the votes for Bush.
This is,
for anyone familiar with the situation,
this means Kerry knew about fraud in that election!
And the optical scanners are the clue?
Yes, what he said...
was that the optical scanners were being manipulated
to manufacture a result for Bush,
contrary to the votes that the voters were entering.
So this is not our conspiracy theory,
this is not something we have to prove to Kerry,
it was Kerry who told us this as a done deal!
Once Kerry conceded defeat,
the incredible resources that he had gathered
for potential post-election litigation,
he was out of the game.
Kerry admitted defeat,
even though the results came from software
that he knew could be manipulated,
and independent polls had predicted his victory.
So it became clear that citizens would have to investigate the election.
FLORIDA
November 15, 2004
Bev and BlackBoxVoting
decided to start in Volusia County, Florida,
where Al Gore had received his negative votes in 2000.
Bev wanted to start by checking the printed results
from each voting machine.
I think our election went extremely well
and I'm very happy, because it was my last election,
I'm retiring on December 31st.
So you can imagine how I was praying
that the election would go smoothly.
I have a question.
These aren't copies of the signed ones,
these are new copies.
One of the things
that we requested
were the results tapes from the voting machines,
copies of them,
signed by the election supervisor on election day,
which was November 2nd.
But the date
was November 15th, and they were freshly printed just for us, obviously.
So what I was given was not at all what I had requested.
Let me check with them.
Okay.
...the original machine tapes are still in the warehouse,
or did you bring them here?
In the warehouse?
They're in the warehouse.
We went to the Volusia County warehouse,
because we learned that's where the actual vote tapes,
or the results tapes from the voting machines,
would be.
And we wanted to go there
unannounced,
because we wanted to see
what they were doing with them.
If you add up all
the ballot tapes
and there's a discrepancy
with the official results,
then you know there was
an error or vote tampering.
Call Lana
and the Police Department!
Get on that
and call the press too.
Ballots.
Sealed ballot envelopes.
Ballot tapes.
We have a public records request for these.
I don't like the fact that they're
being sent to the trash.
Show me a ballot.
This is happening because of
one sample ballot!
You see these?
Call the police and Lana.
I'm going to formally make
a public records request
for everything in
this bag,
so we can analyze it
and return it.
Then we'll leave.
You're going to get that trash,
aren't you?
Sure.
Need bags?
I'm going to keep these ballot tapes for which
I have a public records request
and which the county
has been stonewalling us on.
You didn't get that ballot tape in that bag.
Yes, I did.
And I filmed it.
Let me see it.
No.
I'll give it back.
No.
It's not the only one,
I found others.
You're basically delivering
a mouse from a mountain.
You know, when you do things
secretly, that's what...
There's no secrecy.
I'm going to your workplace
and ask to see everything?
You're a public employee
and this is from an election.
There's no secrecy,
you can look.
Don't worry,
that's what we'll do.
There's nothing there
for you to find...
you know,
there's no revelation here,
But if that brings you money, feel free.
Nobody's making money, we're doing an audit.
These aren't blank tapes, they have votes on them.
So we'll take all of these and make copies of them.
These were found in the warehouse, in the trash,
and these are signed vote tapes.
Signed by the election officials.
Throwing out vote tapes is against federal law.
They have to be kept for at least 22 months after an election.
It's hard to imagine they'd throw something like this out without noticing,
but we did, and that's what matters.
Oh, "account."
The county didn't want to investigate,
they stuck to their version that the election had gone off without a hitch,
so there was no need.
But we also have a significant anomaly.
I don't know what kind of anomaly you're referring to,
so I don't agree that there is an anomaly.
The vote tape that was signed and was found in the trash.
I would have thought that as the election supervisor
you'd be very concerned about this, frankly.
You can't throw out vote tapes from November 2nd
that are signed by six election officials
and put them in the shredder!
I think we all get that.
Bev decided to check the vote tapes Deanie had given her,
and compare them to the signed originals.
We asked for the signed vote tapes and they didn't give them to us,
and now we're looking at them and they're not the same as the ones you gave us.
So...
This is a big discrepancy. Okay.
On 2-15-A-00...
Signed?
Signed.
The number of votes for Bush is 520
and on A-01 it's 211.
And that's a big, big discrepancy.
It's a difference of hundreds of votes
between what we were given and what was signed.
Okay, we'll return them.
Yes, that one, that's fine.
So which one are you checking now?
7-23-A-01.
Meanwhile, in the back offices of the county,
two attentive local residents were investigating.
It's amazing.
Hi, my name is Susan Pynchon
and I'm the executive director
of the "Coalition for Fair Elections in Florida"
and I'm going through the trash of the supervisor of elections office
in DeLand, Florida.
Oh my God, look at this!
I'll be right back.
Bravo!
These are vote tapes
and one of these tapes
is the one that was missing this morning.
This is crazy, they found the missing tape...
...in the trash.
I'm in Volusia County, Florida,
home of the total negative vote.
A third of the original records
were missing or incomplete,
so, once again, the votes remained secret.
If Volusia County were a bank
and threw away documents that added up to money instead of votes,
the FBI would have investigated immediately.
But the FBI didn't show up,
and while BlackBoxVoting was able to demonstrate the secrecy,
nobody really knew what the results had been.
Our democracy could end.
We won't have a republic, it won't be recognizable,
if we don't get rid of the secrecy.
It wasn't created to be a secret system,
it became a secret system,
and if we don't reopen this, and quickly,
we'll never see what's going on again.
We give it up, we lose it,
we're going to have to go back and reclaim it,
by any means necessary.
Recount in Ohio!
In Ohio,
citizens were angry
claiming the elections had been fraudulently counted
and that voters were illegally prevented from voting.
They demanded a recount.
In the end,
it was the Green Party presidential candidate,
David Cobb, who decided it was time to make a stand.
I launched a recount
to investigate the allegations of voter suppression and fraud
that were pouring in.
This was an opportunity for BlackBoxVoting
to really learn how the votes were counted.
And Kathleen returned to her hometown,
Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
Since the recount took place in December and January,
there was snow, storms, and traffic,
and we would laugh and say:
"If this is what we have to do
to get our democracy back, we'll do it."
Even though we'd rather be home by the fire.
Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County,
is the largest jurisdiction in Ohio,
with about a million voters,
big enough to swing the presidential election.
A swing county, in a swing state.
Why did you get up so early today?
And what are you going to do today?
We're going to count the votes
and make sure they're counted correctly.
The reason I bought a camera
was to have irrefutable proof.
I never wanted to be misinterpreted, or misquoted, again,
so this way there would be no question.
Good morning, everyone. How are you?
Let me just introduce you to two people.
One of those people is Jacqui Maiden, who is our election coordinator.
Our vote supervisor, who is Katy Dreamer...
Cuyahoga was still using punch cards
counted by a computer with secret software.
The only way to verify the results from this computer
was to count the votes by hand.
However, under Ohio law,
you have to count a random 3% sample first.
You only need to count all the votes
if that sample doesn't match the computer's results.
Tell me how you feel about this today.
It's exciting, as you said, it's part of history.
We do a lot of recounts,
so for us, it's nothing new.
It's just for the public to see.
Recounts aren't just for the public to see.
The public has the responsibility to verify
that the election results are correct,
after all, it's their vote.
Almost immediately,
observers suspected someone had tampered with the ballots.
It looks like all the Bush and Kerry votes
are grouped together.
So they may have undergone pre-sorting.
Those ballots were tampered with in some way,
so much so that they were grouped.
And I have no idea how that happened,
Nobody was able to answer that question for me.
We have two more hours of work counting the ballots.
That's all?
And we're going to keep running them through the tabulation machine,
they're starting to inspect the voter books,
and everything is going very well.
And I was able to film all the election officials saying:
"Everything is going well. Everything is going perfectly."
Whatever they say...
They did something to make sure of that.
Later, the county prosecutor accused
the staff of secretly counting a large number of jurisdictions,
before the public recount.
Then they set aside the ballots that didn't match,
giving citizens a 3% sample
that wasn't random and wasn't legal.
What is the process by which the 3% of jurisdictions...
It's only 3%. It's a random choice
- to get the 3% - How do you choose the random choice?
We just pick.
- We just want to get to that number. - Okay.
Who is the person who makes that decision?
It's Try Burn and her staff, and our staff.
So it's not really random, is it?
Our random, is our random, okay?
- And we have the option of choice. - Yes.
And we always choose.
This department has always chosen which jurisdictions would be used.
Jacqui Maiden later stated that she followed "usual procedures"
when pre-ordering the ballots,
however, she also stated that she was unaware
that any jurisdictions that didn't match had been set aside,
and she did not believe that had happened.
But the other 97% of the ballots were never recounted
and nobody knows if the software counted those votes correctly.
The recount is nothing but a riddle,
The recount is nothing but a charade,
it's a complete
and total waste of time,
it's a bit of theater,
as it were,
and it was done,
in my opinion,
to make sure there would never
be a real recount,
but more importantly,
to make sure there would never
be an investigation
into the underlying allegations
of voter suppression
and election fraud.
Mr. President,
the certificate
of the electoral vote
from the recognized
and great state of Ohio,
appears to be regular
in form and authenticity
and therefore George W. Bush,
from the state of Texas,
received 20 votes
for President,
and Dick Cheney,
from the state of Wyoming,
received 20 votes
for Vice President.
For what purpose
does the gentleman from Ohio rise?
I said, "I object to the vote of Ohio."
And before they could ask me, I said:
"And I have the support
of a Senator!".
There had not been an objection
to the presidential vote in Congress
in over a century,
and it was the recognition
of the failures
and the denial of citizens' rights in Ohio.
Did the Senator sign
the objection?
The Senator signed
the objection.
An objection
presented in writing
and signed by a Representative and a Senator
meets the law.
I raised this objection because I am convinced,
that we as a whole,
should have a formal and legitimate debate
on electoral irregularities.
I raised this objection to debate the process
and protect the integrity
of the people's true will.
When I made the decision,
along with Senator Barbara Boxer,
to challenge the Ohio vote,
it seemed like I had shot someone in the head
and wanted something...
something terrible.
The problem we face
with this debate
is that it serves
to plant the insidious seeds of doubt
in the electoral process.
They accuse the President, about whom we were told
he was apparently a "zero" with computers,
of personally overseeing the development
of vote-stealing software.
We were all also elected
under the same rules and regulations that we are debating today.
I don't know if we help
the process... by casting doubt on what all those people do
who work in elections across the United States.
All those in favor of "yes" or "no" please stand.
There is a quorum.
The "yes" and "no" votes are recorded.
Members will cast their votes electronically.
Although the Ohio election was ratified by Congress,
politicians had been forced to look at a system
that serves them and not the people.
Tragically, around the same time,
Andy Stephenson received the news that he had cancer.
He died in July.
Maybe this is the legacy I leave.
Maybe I leave this for people to remember me
so that when I'm gone,
when it's time to meet my Creator
I will have...
a little piece I left behind that people can point to and say:
"Yes. He was here!"
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA
February 2005
In Tallahassee, Florida,
the elections supervisor, Ion Sancho,
wanted to be absolutely sure
that when his computers declared a winner,
it was because it was the will of the people.
The vendors have too much power
in the election arena.
Election officials are really
overly dependent on the vendors.
The vendors control the type of technology
that can be used in a state.
We are essentially hostages to the financial desires
of the private interests
who run the most public of our procedures:
public elections.
Ion asked BlackBoxVoting
to analyze his Diebold optical scanner system,
who in turn invited the computer security expert,
Harri Hursti, from Finland.
This is the first time
we will be analyzing the machines...
the actual machines...
It's a real system
that was actually used in real elections.
So it's exciting.
Welcome to Tallahassee.
- Hello. - Thank you.
Harri Hursti. Nice to meet you.
Ion Sancho.
This is where we count the votes on election night.
This is Thomas James. Thomas.
How are you?
One of the things the vendor told us
was that people wouldn't be able to access this,
that every time you logged in,
the system would record it.
Dr. Hugh Thompson and Harri Hursti
believed they could alter vote totals without being caught.
Hugh tried to hack GEMS,
the vote-counting computer program.
He used an election that was held at a local high school.
Nadiyah Smith had come in second with 322 votes.
They decided to make her the winner.
So I go into this election file...
and when I do, it asks me for a password,
but I have no idea what the password is.
But Hugh had written a program
that automatically looked up Nadiyah's vote totals,
and then changed them to 5,000.
When they went back to the results page,
Nadiyah had won,
but the computer showed no evidence of fraud.
I'm very concerned about the system's failure
when I realize they can cleverly get around the system
and bypass the password.
But Hugh could be caught,
if the final totals in GEMS
were compared to the original printouts.
Harri realized all the votes are stored on a memory card
before the totals are printed.
So if you can hack the memory cards...
you can control an election.
To not be detected, you have to be very close to the source of the information...
and besides that, the only way
was the memory card.
Harri wanted to find out what exactly was inside
the Diebold voting machine.
So he bought a memory card reader online,
and just a few days later
he discovered the cards didn't just contain votes,
there was a program, or executable code.
Well, if someone had told me
that in this system there was a "living thing",
a mutable, executable program
stored in the same place as the data,
which is the most protected in the system, I would have said:
"You must have misunderstood, you're crazy or lying."
Harri wrote a report for BlackBoxVoting
warning that this program, hidden on the memory card,
could be used to alter the outcome of an election.
"...the mother of all security flaws..."
What happened
was that Diebold issued a report denying the fact.
Diebold sent letters
to public officials across America
denying that there was any executable code
on the memory cards.
Back in Cuyahoga County
in Ohio, the site of the infamous recount,
the chairman of the Election Commission, Bob Bennet,
was about to invest $20 million
in Diebold's systems.
It's an independent system. The votes are encrypted
so if anyone tries to manipulate the election results,
the system shuts down immediately.
In other words, there's built-in protection in the system.
Sorry, that was very kind.
So far, it's going very well.
Thank you, sir.
Bob Bennet was also the chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio,
the party Diebold had been fundraising for.
Citizens were present to record, observe,
and hopefully make a difference.
Among them, Kathleen and her schoolmate, Victoria Lovegreen.
I'd like to know basically why...
what's the rationale behind your decision?
Because even by your own criteria
Diebold doesn't win.
It's a bad decision and it will...
it will come back to bite you, because you're already in trouble.
People don't trust Cuyahoga County!
They don't trust the recount here!
You're in trouble!
Right now, we're still in the process
of finalizing negotiations on the Diebold contract.
We made that selection.
It's not credible that we would back down unless something drastic happened
that would change our decision.
So Bev decided it was time to make something drastic happen.
Three months later, Diebold came back to town to finalize the sale.
Knowing Diebold was going to show up at a public meeting,
the next strategy was to go there
and film their chief engineer
saying that votes can't be altered on memory cards.
So my question to Diebold
would be, again:
"You have no idea what was done in these security tests,"
"or did you just say something that isn't true?"
I think this warrants a response from Diebold
to Mrs. Harris's question.
The question was about altering votes and whether they knew or not?
As far as I know...
since there is no...
executable program on the memory cards,
the votes on the memory cards cannot be altered.
Could you remind us if you're an engineer?
No, I'm not an engineer,
but I work with our engineering team, actually...
Pat, can you come up here?
Hi, I'm Pat Green,
I'm director of research and development at Diebold.
Mrs. Harris, could you ask your question again?
The votes can be altered
using only a memory card?
No, I don't think the votes can be altered
using only the memory card.
That particular situation is detected by the software.
The report that was written, that I read,
supposes that something like that could be possible
but says they did not manage to prove or test it.
These are quite strong claims.
These are claims that we take as a challenge.
These are claims that we wanted to find out if they were true or not.
So Bev returned to Tallahassee
to see if the votes could be altered.
For Ion,
there was another reason to test the memory cards.
As one of Florida's most trusted election officials,
he had been appointed to oversee
the recount of the 2000 presidential election.
The recount might have uncovered
why Volusia County's computers counted backwards,
down by 16,022 votes.
But when the Supreme Court stopped that recount,
Ion was left with unanswered questions.
One of the reasons I'm interested in the Volusia County situation
and what happened there,
is that we in Leon County use an identical voting system,
the Diebold AccuVote 2000.
In the 17 years I've been an election official,
my experience tells me that that kind of subtraction
cannot occur accidentally.
Someone consciously tried
to affect that computer system,
and consciously tried
to perpetuate a fraud,
steal votes.
During her research,
Harri discovered that Diebold memory cards
actually allowed for negative votes.
What we're going to do here is modify a card
and then take it to the election supervisor,
to Ion Sanches' office,
hook it up like a real card from any election
to the real election system
and calculate the votes,
and this is the same system that's been used
in several previous elections.
And we'll see what power is in the ballot box...
this should just be an empty box containing the votes,
but it has more capabilities than that.
It's a fairly simple process,
you insert the card,
run the reprogramming program,
tell it where to find a scanner,
and it tells you exactly which file you want to insert...
and you're done.
What Harri did is a variation of "stuffing" the voting machine
before anyone has voted.
But this is always suspicious,
because you end up with more votes than voters.
So Harri used five negative votes for one candidate
and then gave the other five positive votes,
so that as people voted,
the total number of votes would always equal the total number of voters.
But would Harri be correct?
BlackBoxVoting returned to Tallahassee
for the ultimate test.
Bev asked Susan Pynchon, from Volusia County,
to observe.
She had also found evidence
of problems with the memory cards,
while going through the trash
from the Volusia County Supervisor of Elections.
This is from Mark Earley at Diebold, and it says:
"How did the number of failures on memory cards on election day"
"increase from the seventeen recorded, on November 3rd,"
"to twenty-five?"
I don't know if we'll ever know
why these memory cards failed,
or if...
You know, one of the big
doubts I have is:
"Did they really fail?"
or:
"Could they have been used
for other purposes?"
Hello. How are you?
- It's a pleasure to see you. - Good to see you, Susan.
Susan Bernecker, from Louisiana,
and Dr. Hugh Thompson,
also came to see what Harri was going to do.
- Hello, Dr. Thompson, how are you? - It's a pleasure to see you.
- It's always a pleasure to see you. - It's always a pleasure to see you, Kathleen.
Come in.
Well, let me tell you what we're going to do today.
We've set up
a mini-election...
but Harri Hursti,
since he served as technical advisor and knows how to do this,
we're going to ask him
to stay outside.
Let me introduce you
to my election staff.
To make sure
we haven't prepared any device
that has been
pre-modified,
pick a number, and then
we'll take that unit
"using
the memory card?"
I only "touched"
the memory card,
not the other parts
of the Diebold election system
that will be used today.
Just the memory card.
I can definitely
speak for myself and Harri
and say we'll vote "Yes."
Okay.
Then let the rest of us vote "No."
Two people,
you and Harri,
will vote "Yes,"
the rest of us
will vote "No,"
and then we'll tally
the ballots
to make sure that's
really the mark.
I'll say I'm wrong
and Diebold is right
and I'll say...
No,
they can't be violated.
It's impossible.
So I vote "No."
I'm going to film myself
voting.
Excuse me.
I'm going to mark
"No" on this ballot.
Hugh Thompson.
I'm going to mark this ballot
with a "Yes."
I've seen some pretty
concerning things.
Well, you're the only one left to vote,
Harri.
Okay.
I think it could happen,
so I vote
"Yes."
That'll be the second
"Yes."
Okay.
Here's the memory card
that I "touched."
Okay.
This is the only part you used
of the Diebold equipment?
That's correct.
Well,
thank you.
Let me take your ballot.
This card will go
into this slot.
The next activity the election official does on election morning
is to turn on the machine.
To "wake it up"
to receive votes.
When you do that,
this machine will produce what we call a "zero tape."
The machine is doing
a self-test analysis
and then it will spontaneously
boot up.
This is Harri's card
that's telling us
that there are zero votes
stored in memory.
Let me get the ballots.
We're going to insert
a "Yes" ballot.
We'll put in
another "No."
Seven,
and the last ballot
"No,"
eight.
Putting the finalizer card
in this machine
and telling it to turn off
its counting function
and perform
its reporting function,
will cause the voting machine
to print a tape
with the reading of the number
of votes it just read.
My God.
What is it,
what is it?
Seven "Yes"
and one "No."
Oh, my God!
Oh, my God!
Let me see.
Take the tape.
Seven people said
it could be violated...
- And we put...
- Six and two.
Six "No"
and two "Yes."
Oh, my God. Do you know what this means?
How do we know if Harri
just changed the report
and the votes on the memory card
are still the correct ones?
If that's the case,
when they're entered into GEMS
the results would be different.
Is that correct?
The only way to check that
is to put it into GEMS
and check
the total votes.
Do you think we should do that?
I think we should,
because I want to confirm,
for my
own personal analysis,
is this just
a superficial breach?
Right.
Correct, that's a good question.
Did we just change
the words on this paper?
And we're going to upload...
this memory card.
If I hadn't seen
what's behind this,
I would have no reason
not to certify,
I would have certified
this election
as the correct and accurate result of a vote.
Susan,
what does this mean to you?
It makes me want
to cry.
I'm sorry, but it makes me cry.
Why?
Why?
There are so many reasons.
Because there are people out there
who give their lives trying
to make our elections secure
and who are called
conspiracy theorists
and have their phones tapped,
and these vendors who lie
and say everything is fine,
and it's not fine!
And I cry, because...
I'll quote someone
I know who said:
"Our country is a country
that pretends to be another country."
How can this be happening
in our elections?
This really affects me.
I don't know how to describe
exactly what I saw here.
I think we,
as election officials,
need to be
a little more...
demanding of vendors
and the technical specifications
of this equipment.
The vendors are driving the process
of voting technology in the United States.
Right now, I'd prefer we focus on allowing citizens
to choose technology that meets their needs.
Diebold accused Ion of foolishness
and apparent negligence,
insisting that only authorized people
should test the security of their systems.
They said the breach was equivalent
to leaving your car unlocked,
with the windows open
and the keys in the ignition.
But scientists
from the University of Berkeley,
later confirmed
Harri's findings.
They discovered sixteen more security flaws
in Diebold's touch-screen machines.
ES&S and Sequoia claimed
their systems were secure,
and Diebold
continues to claim
they upgraded their software
to make it even more secure.
They also insist that their
electronic voting systems
are even more accurate
than their predecessors.
But now,
everyone is asking,
"How can votes be changed without leaving a trace?"
CLEVELAND, OHIO
December 23, 2005
However, Cuyahoga did not change
its position after the hearings
and spent
22 million dollars
on Diebold's touch-screen
and optical scan machines.
Translation and subtitling:
cab @ docsPDirection
Production
Narrator
Music
Researcher
Script
by Eng.Ali Almansouri