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September 26, 2006
Mr. Jann Wenner
Editor and Publisher
Rolling Stone
1290 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10104 - 0298
Subject: "Will The Next Election Be Hacked?"
Mr. Kennedy should have made serious efforts to verify the validity of his article's sources and assertions. He did not even contact Diebold Election Systems for comment. In doing so, he would have learned that his so-called whistleblower undermines his own case, and the claims he makes fail to hold up under bright light of the truth.
The whistleblower in this article was not involved in the system implementation in Georgia for the duration he claims. On July 23, 2002, the Georgia Secretary of State's office directly requested that Mr. Hood be removed from his duties as a voter outreach instructor because of poor performance. This request is clearly documented in a letter from the Secretary of State's office, which is attached.
After a review of the facts provided below, we believe you will come to the determination that this story falls short of serious journalistic standards.
We're in the business of supporting our democracy, so our credibility and independence is imperative. While we're reluctant to be perceived as entering the political fray, we feel compelled to address in a vigorous and factual fashion these false accusations, which foster fear.
Mr. Hood, a.k.a. the whistleblower, was a contractor for Diebold in Georgia and was to conduct a voter outreach program in the state of Georgia. However, as stated in a letter dated July 23, 2002, the Secretary of State's office requested the removal of Chris Hood from his role working in the state. The letter reads, in part:
"In light of the limited timeframe, resources and opportunities that we have to contribute to the success of the nation's largest electronic voting deployment, we are requesting that a more appropriate resource be provided to support a fully coordinated voter education effort. With that perspective in mind, it is our position that Mr. Hood and his organization are not providing maximum benefit in their services to the State of Georgia in our efforts to help educate Georgia voters about the new voting system. Therefore, we respectfully request that Diebold Election Systems, Inc., review the current assignment of resources and make the appropriate changes necessary for the State of Georgia to achieve its voter education goals." Michael Barnes, Assistant Director of Elections.
Immediately upon receiving this letter, Diebold Election Systems removed Mr. Hood from his responsibilities within the state. He no longer contributed to the implementation process in Georgia. Yet the allegations contained in Mr. Kennedy's article make it appear as if Mr. Hood were there and working with the system on a daily basis.
For example, Mr. Hood mischaracterizes the "patch." The patch was an operating system modification, not a modification to the tabulation system as implied in this article. This modification was not completed and available for installation until after August 8, 2002, at least two weeks after Mr. Hood was removed from his position in Georgia. Clearly, his reference "We ran the election" is not factual.
There are additional errors and inconsistencies in Mr. Hood's claims and throughout Mr. Kennedy's article:
"We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it did not do," Hood says. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."
First of all, Mr. Hood was not even working on the project at the time. Secondly, the election review panel within the state of Georgia reviewed the operating system software before implementation. It was not done covertly, as alleged by Mr. Hood.
"It was an unauthorized patch."
Again, this statement is wrong. Modifications to the operating system of the units did not require federal certification. However, complete logic and accuracy testing on every unit was implemented by the respective jurisdictions following insertion of the modification to insure system accuracy.
"Diebold also illegally installed uncertified software in machines used in the 2004 presidential primaries."
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Diebold Election System software used during the 2004 presidential primary was certified by the Federal Election Commission organization and/or approved by the chief election official within each respective state.
"Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998."
Diebold's ethics policy restricts top executives of the company and all members of the election system division from participating in fundraising activities. This was instituted in June of 2004.
"Diebold not only failed to follow up on most of the recommendations, it worked to cover them up. Michael Werthheimer, RABA"
A series of security enhancements have been added to the Diebold touch screen machines based on the RABA report. They include: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 128-bit data encryption, dynamic passwords, and digitally signed memory card data.
"That year (2004), Diebold would count the votes in half of Ohio's counties."
Not a single Ohio jurisdiction deployed Diebold Election Systems' touch screen system during the 2004 presidential election. None. Zero. Two of Ohio's eighty-eight counties used the Diebold Election Systems paper ballot optical scan system. The larger of the two counties, Lucas County, overwhelmingly voted for John Kerry. The article contains additional fabricated information.
"The three counties with the most discrepancies -- Broward, Palm Beach and Miami Dade -- were also the most heavily Democratic."
None of these three counties use Diebold Election Systems voting equipment.
As regards the Princeton study referenced in the article, our response to this deeply flawed report can be found at the following address: http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/pdf/princetonstatement.pdf
"On September 12th, in Maryland's first all-electronic election, voters were turned away from the polls because election officials had failed to distribute the electronic access cards needed to operate Diebold machines."
An election official's human error of not loading voter access cards into the supply bags for the precincts is now absurdly being portrayed as a system-related problem. This issue is analogous to an election official forgetting to send paper ballots to a precinct. It is human error -- not system error.
"Electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better."
The author of the Cal Tech/MIT study, Charles Stewart III, who is also quoted in the Rolling Stone article indicates in this report that with the implementation of new voting equipment and procedures, "this works out to a recovery of one million 'lost votes' between 2000 and 2004." This certainly indicates a dramatic improvement in voting accuracy.
"A government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County."
The ESI report was proven to be in error by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, as archived election data exactly matched official election results once the errors of the ESI report were identified by the board and corrected. As an example, 17 year old and curbside votes were not included in the studies' analysis, but of course were included in the official election totals. The Cuyahoga County Board meeting minutes disclose this fact.
"The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems" (date referenced is May 2002).
The Global Election Systems acquisition was completed by Diebold on January 22, 2002.
Don't the readers of Rolling Stone deserve a better researched and reported article than the one penned by Mr. Kennedy? We think so. We hope that after reviewing this letter Rolling Stone will agree.
Sincerely,
David Byrd
President
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responds:
The inaccurate and misleading statements in Diebold's response begin with the very first sentence. Not only did I make every effort to verify the accuracy of my sources, I made sure that researchers from both Rolling Stone and my own office contacted Diebold for comment. As readers of the article can confirm for themselves, several responses from the company are included in the piece.
Diebold then attempts to smear Chris Hood, the whistleblower who witnessed first-hand the company's practices during the 2002 election. Citing a letter from the Georgia Secretary of State's office, Diebold claims it "removed Mr. Hood from his responsibilities within the state" in July because of "poor performance." The letter, however, did not prevent Diebold from sending Hood to Maryland, where it relied extensively on him to help roll out its machines for the election that fall. Nor did it prevent Diebold from awarding Hood a contract to continue his work for the company through the 2004 election -- more than two years after his supposedly "poor performance" in Georgia.
As I reported, the company failed to receive proper certification from the state for the "patch" it made to its voting machines. But Diebold is correct in noting that Hood was not present in Georgia in August 2002, as stated in my article. Hood was mistaken in recalling the exact date that he was ordered by Diebold president Bob Urosevich to make an unauthorized patch: The alterations he made actually began several weeks earlier, in July of that year, during a time in which Diebold concedes that Hood was still working for the company in Georgia. I regret the error, and the online version of my article has been revised to reflect the correction.
Diebold is also correct on one other point: Its machines were used to count the votes in nearly half of Ohio's counties in 2005 -- not, as stated in the article, in 2004. Again, I regret the error and have revised the online version accordingly.
On every other point in its response, however, Diebold is misleading or flat-out wrong. In its most ridiculous sleight of hand, the company asserts that none of the three counties in Florida with the most discrepancies during the 2004 election used Diebold machines. That is absolutely correct. What the company neglects to mention is that my article never suggests that they did. I note only that all three counties used electronic voting machines -- which experts from the University of California concluded may have improperly awarded as many as 260,000 of the state's votes to Bush.
Diebold offers similar non-denials regarding its generous campaign contributions to Republicans, its failure to follow-up on most of the recommendations in the RABA report, and the fact that it got into the election business only a few months before it began rolling out voting machines in Georgia. It calls the Princeton study and the Cuyahoga County report "deeply flawed" and "proven to be in error," even though its criticisms of them have failed to undercut their alarming conclusions. And it dismisses September's primary disaster in Maryland as "human error" -- despite the fact that the catastrophe was created, in no small part, by its own failure to properly test its software and to provide it to the state in time to train poll-workers.
In one of its few direct denials, Diebold insists that all of the software it deployed during the 2004 presidential primaries was fully certified. Yet officials in California banned Diebold machines from four counties that year after the company failed to properly secure and certify its equipment. Diebold not only agreed to pay the state $2.6 million for making false statements about its certification, but Urosevich himself conceded at a public hearing that the company's actions resulted in the disenfranchisement of untold numbers of voters.
Indeed, what is most striking about the company's response to my article is what it fails to deny. As I documented in my article, hackers can easily rig electronic voting machines to fix an election -- and can design their tampering to go undetected. This represents a grave threat to the integrity of our elections. If Diebold were really committed to the "bright light of truth," as it insists, it would move immediately to equip all of its machines with paper receipts that can be verified by voters and recounted by officials in the event of vote rigging or equipment malfunction. Without such transparency, our votes remain in the hands of Diebold and other private companies -- and our democracy remains at risk.