Down for the Count by Andrew Gumbel

Author:Andrew Gumbel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620971697
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2016-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

10

MIRACLE CURE

I always say, out of something bad, something good happens.

—Theresa LePore, Palm Beach County elections supervisor1

There are many ways to manipulate paper elections, but the scope of such an attack is limited to one precinct or one county. . . . The danger of a software attack is that, while it takes a little more skill (but nothing extraordinary), it can affect hundreds of counties simultaneously.

—David Jefferson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory2

When Palm Beach County’s elections supervisor Theresa LePore was struggling with her abortive post-election recount in November 2000, her reputation in as many tattered pieces as the chad littering the counting-room floor, a reporter asked how much it would cost to install a new voting system. “A lot of millions,” she answered sharply. “And if you go to a new system, it has its own inherent set of problems.”3

Five months later, however, LePore was in Riverside County, California, to observe the nation’s first county-wide touchscreen computer voting system and fell instantly in love.4 The Sequoia Pacific AVC Edge machines, she enthused, did almost all the work—for voters who could flit from race to race and double-check their choices on a summary screen before giving final approval, and for election administrators who didn’t have to count or tabulate anything. Best of all, no chad and, because the machines used no paper, no recounts.

LePore was not the only one to be impressed. Riverside’s registrar of voters, Mischelle Townsend, had attracted national attention with her seemingly prescient decision to go all-electronic. “If the U.S. State Department is looking for a way to restore America’s good name,” Wired News enthused, “it ought to let the world know about Mischelle Townsend’s bold experiment.”5 Townsend was happy to bask in the glory. “I’ve been counting my blessings for the last 24 hours that I’m not Theresa LePore,” she crowed at one point during the Florida recount fiasco.

Neither LePore nor Wired News reporter Farhad Manjoo (soon to evolve into a thoughtful and trenchant critic of electronic voting) knew that election night in Riverside had been a near disaster. A couple of hours after the polls closed, the tabulation software overloaded and started deleting votes from the tallying system instead of adding them.6 Sequoia sent in an emergency resuscitation team and claimed to have put everything right, but when the dust settled, one candidate for a local school board who had been comfortably in the lead when the machines went down found herself unaccountably trailing. Bernadette Burks demanded an explanation but received none.7 Townsend told her there had been no computer crash, only a problem with a server that needed to be “manually expanded” after it reached capacity. Townsend refused to acknowledge even that Burks had been ahead in the count, although her own figures clearly showed that she was.8 The election, Townsend liked to tell people, had been “flawless.”

“Flawless” was the catchword LePore used to cajole the Palm Beach County commissioners into spending $14.4 million on their own Sequoia system. The new touchscreens were deployed in time for the March 2002 local elections, and they, too, failed at the first hurdle.

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