No election snags, director says: Absentee ballots on time, security measures in place

By Keith Ervin
Seattle Times staff reporter

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King County's election director says all absentee ballots for next Tuesday's election were mailed to voters on schedule, and he is keeping in place new election-security procedures aimed at preventing manipulation of computers that tabulate votes.

The on-time mailing of more than 470,000 absentee ballots is a marked contrast to last year's general election, when 400,000 went out late.

This year's ballots were mailed out the required 20 days before the election, and voters began returning completed ballots last week, said Dean Logan, director of records, elections and licensing services.

Logan, former state elections director, was appointed to manage King County elections after absentee-ballot snafus led to the firing of elections superintendent Julie Anne Kempf and the resignation of her boss, Bob Roegner.

The Metropolitan King County Council, which had been scheduled to confirm Logan's appointment yesterday, delayed action until after the election. The council's labor, operations and technology committee has recommended approval of Logan's appointment.

Absentee ballots For questions about King County absentee ballots, call 206-296-VOTE or 206-296-1608.

Logan said last week he was satisfied that the county's electronic vote-tabulating computer is safe from both internal tampering and outside hacking because of safeguards he instituted before the September primary.

Logan upgraded security because of growing concerns about the possibility of tampering with election results in electronic vote-counting systems.

The GEMS computer system, which is used in King County and many other counties and states, was cited as needing significant security measures in a widely publicized Maryland study that found "high-risk vulnerabilities" associated with the system and the touch-screen voting machines being purchased by Maryland.

GEMS and Maryland's touch-screen machines are produced by Diebold Election Systems, based in McKinney, Texas.

Concerns about King County's system grew when an internal Diebold e-mail, circulated last month on the Internet, said the county was "famous" for accessing the GEMS election database through a separate software program, Microsoft Access.

The e-mail, which the company claims was stolen by a computer hacker, gave added credence to claims by Renton author Bev Harris that the election database could be altered by someone surreptitiously using Access.

Logan last month ordered the removal of Access and all other nonelection software from the main vote-tabulating computer and a backup computer, both of which are stored in a locked room.

Logan also had the computers reprogrammed so they can be used only when two authorized employees use their individual passwords at the same time. The safeguards were aimed mostly at preventing someone from internally tampering with election results.

Logan said the county's electronic-voting results are not vulnerable to external Internet hackers because the system is not connected to any other computers or to any phone lines. And he said voting results are not transmitted over a modem on the day of the election.

Logan and David Elliott, acting elections director for the state Office of the Secretary of State, said county computer programmers had sometimes taken the unorthodox approach in past years of using Access database software to work with the GEMS election database. That allowed them to produce election reports that would display data in ways not possible using GEMS software alone.

Logan and Elliott said a programmer also used Access to enter candidate information from another computer into GEMS for preparation of ballots without retyping all the information. Elliott said the programmer who entered the candidate information "ended up being a hero with his co-workers because they didn't have to do all this data entry."

Diebold told Logan in a letter last week that county computer programmers' use of Access to work with election data didn't violate state guidelines and didn't pose a security risk because the work was done on a backup computer.

However, Diebold sales representative and program manager Steve Knecht said company officials "strictly recommend" that users of the GEMS system access its database only through the GEMS software rather than through other programs such as Access. Logan had asked Knecht for a formal response to concerns about security of GEMS and other Diebold products.

Science Applications International Corp., which conducted Maryland's study of touch-screen voting machines and GEMS computers, said that if someone exploited vulnerabilities in that state's election system, "significant impact could occur on the accuracy, integrity, and availability of election results."

In contrast to Maryland's all-electronic system, King County voters fill in the bubble on optical-scan ballots, and the paper ballots are used for manual recounts when a candidate wins with a margin of less than one-quarter of 1 percent.

Critics of electronic voting are pushing for laws that would require electronic voting machines to print out voter-verified paper records of all votes.

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com

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