2002 Georgia general election

In 2002, Georgia experienced many shocking Republican upsets, seeing popular Democrats like Senator Max Cleland defeated. Many attributed this to a political sea change for the GOP after 9/11. But 2002 was also the year that paperless Diebold touchscreens were introduced to the state of Georgia, leaving the vote in the hands of a private corporation and impossible to verify.

Pre-election polls

The Democratic incumbents were consistently ahead in pre-election polls. Senator Max Cleland led by double digits for most of the campaign. While his margin slipped due to a barrage of negative campaigning by the GOP, Cleland was still ahead by 2-5% as election day approached. Yet the official results saw Cleland defeated by 7%, at least a 9% GOP gain over the polls. Governor Roy Barnes was decisively ahead in pre-election polling the entire time, maintaining a 9% lead right before election day. Yet Barnes lost by 7% on election day, an even-larger GOP shift of about 16% from the polls.

Issues

Strange GOP upsets

Georgia's 2002 election saw popular Democrats being defeated in poll-defying GOP landslides. The Republican upsets were a shock to political observers. Not only did the results defy the polls to an extreme degree, in favor of Republicans each time, they seemed to defy logic. Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran, was apparently trounced by his GOP opponent Saxby Chambliss, who ran ads calling him unpatriotic for opposing the Iraq War. And Roy Barnes, widely projected to win the governorship in a landslide, instead lost it in one to Sonny Perdue.

Voting patterns at the county level were also anomalous. The August primary revealed the partisanship of each county through the numbers of Democratic and Republican ballots cast. Georgia's heavily-Republican areas in the north gave Cleland 14% more votes than the primaries would indicate, and the heavily-Democratic areas in the south gave Chambliss 22% of the vote than the primaries would indicate.

Privatized election

Diebold, the corporation supplying the voting machines, enjoyed total control over the 2002 Georgia election. In order to get the machines deployed in time, Secretary of State Cathy Cox agreed to let Diebold take over Georgia's election system. Diebold ran every aspect of the process: setup of the machines, access to the warehouses, ballot preparation, and training of poll workers. With free reign over the election, Diebold had a gaping window of opportunity to tamper with the voting machines. The state's only role was testing the machines, which would have been virtually useless for catching fraud.

Illegal patches

During the run-up to the election, Diebold applied numerous uncertified patches to the voting machines. This was a flagrant violation of the law; all changes to voting machine software had to get recertified before being used. The company went to great lengths to hide these illegal patches from the state.

Chris Hood, a Diebold contractor, recalled a suspicious incident in July. Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, personally flew in from Texas to deliver a software patch. The Diebold workers were instructed to apply it without telling any state personnel, as it was an uncertified patch. Hood and his team covertly applied the patch early in the morning at warehouses in DeKalb and Fulton counties (the two largest in the state, and Democratic strongholds). Hood was struck by the oddity of Bob Urosevich being personally involved with the Georgia deployment, and how the patch didn't fix the clock issue it was allegedly meant to.

Rob Behler, another Diebold contractor in Georgia, corroborated Hood's account of a clock fix patch. It was, in fact, a statewide patch, beyond DeKalb and Fulton counties where Hood personally worked. Behler also spoke about several other uncertified patches from Diebold, which Hood was aware of too. In a rush to make the machines work, Diebold was installing patches on the system up until election day. The programmers writing them intentionally kept the code from the certification labs, and Behler was ordered not to tell the state's voting machine security expert that uncertified patches were being installed. When Behler told the expert, Dr. Brit Williams, that they were doing so, Diebold executives (including Bob Urosevich) angrily reprimanded him.

The illegal patches were also kept secret from SoS Cathy Cox, although she inadvertently found out. She wrote Bob Urosevich to confirm an uncertified patch on August 8, a patch Diebold admitted to without addressing its legality. Cox angrily threatened to withhold funding, and Hood believes she settled for some payoff from Diebold to drop the matter. Though Dr. Williams initially denied knowledge of any patches, he later testified that an August 8 patch was illegally applied.

Diebold's secretive behavior, which prevented anyone from reviewing its patches, and the odd involvement of Bob Urosevich heighten suspicion that the voting machines were rigged. If Diebold did conspire to rig the election, there were no absolutely safeguards in place to stop them. Nobody else saw what the patches did, and there was no paper trail.

rob-georgia.zip

The Georgia patch files were distributed on a Diebold FTP server. Programmers would upload the patches to the FTP site, and the field technicians would download them onto memory cards to be installed on the touchscreens. Bev Harris came across the Diebold FTP site in her investigations, and seeing it was unsecured, downloaded the files. She saved several of the Georgia patches, but one file's name stuck out: rob-georgia.zip.

rob-georgia.zip was believed by Chris Hood and Rob Behler to be the clock fix, though it turned out to be a GEMS patch instead. It replaced language files and AccuBasic scripts on the central tabulators. The word "rob" further fed the suspicion over whether the election was stolen. Bev Harris checked if any Diebold employees named Rob worked in Georgia, which would innocuously explain the name. Diebold denied it, but Rob Behler then came forward for an interview with her. However, the rob-georgia.zip files were created on June 4, and Behler was hired in mid-late June, indicating the name might not refer to him after all.

Aftermath

The shock Republican upsets over Max Cleland and Roy Barnes delivered Georgia into Republican hands. A major strategic objective of Karl Rove succeeded as Georgia became a GOP stronghold in the South. And all of this coincided with the introduction of unauditable electronic voting machines, subject to a secretive corporation that had unchecked control over their software. Georgia's 2002 election altered the state's political destiny and marked one of the first fronts in the electronic hijacking of democracy. HAVA's mandate would expose other states to the same opportunity.

See also

• KSU Center for Election Systems

External links

• Bev Harris interviews
  • Bev Harris, "Georgia/Diebold Voting Machine Investigation IVs", 2003/02/17
  • Interviews with James Rellinger, Joe Richardson, Michael Barnes, Guy Lancaster, Kerry Martin, and Josh Gardner
  • Interview with Dr. Britain Williams
• Progressive Populist, "CLAIM: DIEBOLD 'PATCHED' GA. UPSET", 2003: "Opinion polls in Georgia on the eve of the 2002 general election showed Democratic incumbent Gov. Roy Barnes leading by 9-11 points and Sen. Max Cleland ahead of his Republican challenger by 2-5 points, so it was a shock on election night when the returns showed Barnes losing to Republican Sonny Perdue, 46 to 51 percent, a swing of as much as 16 points from the last opinion polls, and Cleland losing to Saxby Chambliss by 46 to 53 percent, a last-minute swing of 9-12 points. Pundits credited a surge of "angry white men" punishing Barnes for removing the Confederate symbol from the state flag, but the London Independent noted in a special investigative report on Oct. 14 that a demographic breakdown published by the Georgia Secretary of State showed no such surge of white men; the only subgroup showing a modest increase in turnout was black women."
• Vanity Fair, "The Election" by Michael Shnayerson, 2004/04
• Heather Gray, "Georgia's “Faith-Based” Electronic Voting System: Something's Rotten in the State", 2004/11/09
• Black Box Voting, "Are The Lights Going Out In Georgia?", 2005/07/18
  • "In a press conference today, congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) revealed problems with Diebold system and procedures in Georgia. Rumors are also swirling about a reported federal lawsuit filed by Mr. Sam Barber of American Computer Technologies, Inc. (ACT) against Diebold.
    
    Barber's lawsuit reportedly contends that he was thrown off the assignment when Diebold realized he intended to test the equipment properly. According to the Diebold memos and information from Bev Harris's Feb. 2003 interview with ACT contractor Rob Behler, assigned to assist with setup and acceptance testing, what resulted was a fiasco of uncertified patches and cobbled-together machine fixes."
  • "A "Punch list" obtained by voting integrity organization CountTheVote.org reveals multiple problems, including an uncertified August 8 2002 patch. The document indicates multiple problems with machine functionality. It is dated Dec. 3, 2002 (one month after the 2002 general election)."
  • "The August 8 patch was supposedly not required to be certified, because (according to Georgia officials Michael Barnes and Brit Williams) it was to the Windows operating system, which does not require certification.
    
    This statement by Georgia officials does not hold water, however. The (foolish) waiver for certification applies only to "COTS" -- Commercial Off The Shelf software -- which must not contain any modifications.
    
    A recent examination of the Georgia patches and the drivers in the Windows CE system used in Georgia's touch-screens, performed for Black Box Voting by Harri Hursti, revealed that Diebold altered at least nine "drivers" -- components which can produce undesired and/or illicit changes almost impossible to detect. Among the drivers that were altered: The keyboard driver, a keyboard backlite driver, the PCMCIA card driver, the smartcard driver, the touchscreen driver, the printer driver."
  • "Other patches, including the 'rob-georgia' patch and the 6-28-02 patch, affected the GEMS central tabulator. These patches contained instructions to replace Accu-Basic files, which are used to write a program to the memory card which acts on the vote report from the ballot box in the optical scans, which were used in Georgia for absentee ballots. (See http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf) However, the Georgia version of the AccuBasic file was missing from both the rob-georgia and 6-28-02 patches, indicating that whatever was in that file, Diebold did not desire to overwrite it."
  • "This article pertains to ACT. Another MBE of interest is Ran Temps, of Cleveland Ohio, which accepted large payments from Diebold from Jan. 2004 thorugh June 2004 -- a time when very few Diebold systems were used in Ohio."
• Chris Hood background - originally known as Dieb-Throat
  • Maryland State Board of Elections meeting on 2003/11/20: "Ms. Widerman asked that Chris Hood from Diebold be permitted to discuss the status of the "Vote Where You Live" campaign. Also, Ms. Widerman asked that Mr. Hood be allowed to make his presentation at the beginning of the agenda."
  • Brad Friedman, "* EXCLUSIVE! * A DIEBOLD INSIDER SPEAKS!", 2006/09/15
  • Raw Story, "Diebold insider alleges company plagued by technical woes, Diebold defends 'sterling' record", 2005/12/06
  • Brad Friedman, "RAW STORY Splashes New DIEB-THROAT Exclusive!", 2005/12/06
  • DU thread on the role of Brett Kimberlin in the election integrity movement - from Larisa Alexandrovna: "oh, and he was also the same person who found Clint Curtis, and Diebthroat"
  • Velvet Revolution interview with Chris Hood on 2006/10/15
• Atlanta Progressive News, "Diebold Added Secret Patch to Georgia E-Voting Systems in 2002, Whistleblowers Say", 2006/09/28
• Rebecca Abrahams, "Diebold: The Untold Story", 2007/09/06
• Raw Story, "GOP cyber-security expert suggests Diebold tampered with 2002 election", 2008/07/18 (audio of press conference)
• Max Cleland belief on the fraud
  • As revealed on p.197 of Heart of a Patriot by Max Cleland, Cleland himself harbors suspicions that his Senate race was stolen, citing the unverifiability of the Diebold touchscreens and the suspicious last-minute patches done at the orders of Bob Urosevich, which did not fix the clocks as claimed
  • Atlanta Magazine, "Max Cleland's Long Road Home", 2009/10/01: "In your book, you talk about “below-the-radar chicanery” that helped ensure your defeat, that Diebold’s control over our electronic voting system basically cut out any oversight by Georgia election officials. Is there a part of you that thinks you actually won the election in 2002? No. But there’s a part of me that knows it was tampered with."
• Technical information
  • Black Box Voting, "The Georgia Patches", 2005 - links to http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/rob-georgia.zip (now dead) and gives the rob-georgia.zip password as Aquafina98
  • Archive of the homepage for a Diebold FTP files mirror - the site was http://users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/ and unfortunately none of the Diebold files are archived