Accidental Blogger

A little over a year ago during the run up to the 2006 elections, Sujatha posted an article detailing the vulnerability of the new e-slate voting system in use for the last few years. The article described how easily the system could be tampered with by introducing malicious programs into the memory card of the machines. Now it appears that one doesn’t need computer savvy hackers to change the results in voting machines. It can be done manually – by election officials.

A front page article in Wednesday’s Houston Chronicle reported that during the special elections held on November 6, 2007, one Houston Harris County election administrator, Johnnie German, was able to access the county’s computer system and add votes to the previously submitted total. German did this before several witnesses and his intentions were fair. Voters in some precincts had received faulty ballots during early voting days. Their e-slates were missing certain referendums and amendmends. Those voters had to use an additional parallel ballot to register their opinions. The mistake was corrected by election day although the early votes on the parallel ballots were not recorded on the main election computer.  German wished the final results to correctly reflect the early votes. Instead of counting the ballots separately, he tapped into the main computer by using a series of passwords and an "encryption key" and added the early votes manually. The outcomes of the referendums were not affected by the change and as I said, German did all this before witnesses – his own assistant and two poll observers from both major political parties. This is the first time that the possibility and practice of manually altering the result on an election computer has come to light. (That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened before.) It has been ascertained in this case that the election official had no partisan agenda. But what if all was not above board and an official did indeed have less than honorable intentions?  Now we know that tampering is possible and no witnesses need be present. 

Johnnie German admitted he was nervous as he used high-security codes to tap into the Harris County elections computer system last week and change some of the results manually.

The system was in good hands as the votes were counted from the sprawling Nov. 6 contests. German is the county’s respected administrator of elections, and there were witnesses present as he corrected the vote totals on a sales tax referendum for a fire/ambulance district in the Cypress-Fairbanks area of northwest Harris County.

But German’s late-night deed, said by officials to be a first-time event in the six years Harris County has used the eSlate voting system, has rekindled the debate about whether the newest electronic methods for counting votes should be trusted.

What German graphically demonstrated was that with the proper physical and informational access, one person can alter the results of an election in a county of 1.8 million registered voters …..

Shocking observation

The county Web site already showed that all precinct totals had been counted; three sheriff’s deputies who guarded the counting process on the fourth floor of the County Administration Building in downtown Houston had been sent home.

Also in the locked, glass-walled room were Republican Kaufman and John R. Behrman, a computer expert and longtime election observer representing the Democratic Party. He said he considers Kaufman’s staff the most knowledgeable election computer administrators on the continent and does not question their motives.

But Behrman said he was shocked when he saw German use a series of passwords and an "encryption key" — a series of numbers on a nail file-size computer memory storage device — to reach a computer program that said "Adjustment."

"A hundred percent of precincts reporting, and everything had been distributed to the press," he said. "Then and only then did I see how they were going to do this, and frankly I never thought it was possible.

"Basically it turns out, without regard to any ballots that have been cast, you can enter arbitrary numbers in there and report them out in such a way that, unless you go back to these giant (computer) logs and interpret the logs, you wouldn’t know it has been done."