George,

There is a focus on voting machine fraud that others here are ignoring. It's by far the most important threat. It's the threat to electronic voting machines, whether or not they leave a paper trail.

It takes only a small handful of collaborators recruited within Diebold or another voting machine manufacturer to swing a national presidential election. No one else's cooperation or participation is needed because no one else is involved. Here's how it can happen.

These machines are controlled by complex instruction chips, just like any other in/out capable data processor. People, not robots, write these instructions. And people can be recruited.

It is possible to create a rogue chip containing the instruction to, for example, switch one out of every ten votes for candidate A to candidate B. This would create a 20% swing of the vote in any machine that had this chip. If machines with this chip were distributed to states with a history of close elections, it could help candidate B get those winner-take-all electoral votes. The election in that state could be stolen. No one would or could know it happened.

And a paper trail is also open to rogue control. Marking the paper is determined by the instruction set. Only if the voter actually sees his mark as the tape passes under a window can he have confidence it was correctly recorded.

The rogue chip would look identical to the real chip. No one outside a team of collaborators at Diebold need know of the alternate chip, not even the far east chip maker. A competent chip would be programmed to delete its rogue code at some point late in the day and replace it with the real code. Post-election examination of the instruction set would find nothing amiss.

Experts have done the math. Merely five rogue machines out of every hundred machines shipped to swing states - 5% - could determine the outcome in those states. That's a few night's work at the Diebold plant swapping chips. Is that a door we are willing to open by going to electronic voting?

Rey Barry (electronic mail, August 27, 2005)