War Talk by Arundhati Roy
Indian writer Roy's debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997), met with resounding critical acclaim and won the Booker Prize, but this writer of conscience has turned her attention to the real world ever since, turning herself into an electrifying political essayist. In her third volume of nonfiction, she valiantly addresses questions of power and its abuse, and powerlessness and its transformation via dissent and activism into a force for positive change. Roy dissects her country's violent religious conflicts, celebrates and mourns the seemingly lost legacy of Gandhi, and condemns India's gargantuan and environmentally unsound hydroelectric dam projects and the concomitant displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. She also discusses with invaluable clarity the mess in the Middle East, and presents razor-sharp interpretations of the U.S. government's foreign policy and the insidious influence of mega-corporations. So fluent is her prose, so keen her understanding of global politics, and so resonant her objections to nuclear weapons, assaults against the environment, and the endless suffering of the poor that her essay are as uplifting as they are galvanizing.

In 1988 Ronnie Dugger wrote the definitive article on computerized vote fixing. Much of what we saw in Florida in 2000 was covered in his article, almost as though someone used it as a guide. It's never before been on the web since it predates the internet.
But here it is, digitized.

Post a link to it from your site.
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Alllie  (alllie@newsgarden.org)

By Ronnie Dugger

(Txt Version)

The New Yorker, November 7, 1988

DURING the past quarter of a century, with hardly anyone noticing, the inner workings of democracy have been computerized. All our elections, from mayor to President, are counted locally, in about ten thousand five hundred political jurisdictions, and gradually, since 1964, different kinds of computer-based voting systems have been installed in town after town, city after city, county after county. This year, fifty-five per cent of all votes-seventy-five per cent in the largest jurisdictions-will be counted electronically. If ninety-five million Americans vote on Tuesday, November 8th, the decisions expressed by about fifty-two million of them will be tabulated according to rules that programmers and operators unknown to the public have fed into computers.

In many respects, this electronic conversion has seemed natural, even inevitable. Both of the old ways -- hand-counting paper ballots and relying on interlocked rotary counters to tabulate votes that are cast by pulling down levers on mechanical machines -- have been shown to be susceptible to error and fraud. On Election Night, computers can usually produce the final results faster than any other method of tabulation, and so enable local officials to please reporters on deadlines and to avoid the suspicions of fraud which long delays in counting can stimulate.

Recently, however, computerized vote-counting has engendered controversy. Do the quick-as-a-wink, computerized systems count accurately? Are they vulnerable to fraud, as well, even fraud of a much more dangerous, centralized kind? Is the most widely used computerized system, the Votomatic, which relies on computer punch-card ballots, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters?

It appears that since 1980 errors and accidents have proliferated in computer-counted elections. Since 1984, the State of Illinois has tested local computerized systems by running many thousands of machine-punched mock ballots through them, rather than the few tens of test ballots that local election officials customarily use. As of the most recent tests this year, errors in the basic counting instructions in the computer programs had been found in almost a fifth of the examinations. These "tabulation-program errors" probably would not have been caught in the local jurisdictions. "I don't understand why nobody cares," Michael L. Harty, who was until recently the director of voting systems and standards for Illinois, told me last December in Springfield. "At one point, we had tabulation errors in twenty-eight per cent of the systems tested, and nobody cared."

Robert J. Naegele, who is the State of California's chief expert on certifying voting systems and is also the president of his own computer consulting firm, has been hired by the Federal Election Commission (F.E.C.) to write new voluntary national standards for computerized vote-counting equipment and programs. Last spring, in San Francisco, at a national conference of local-election officials, I asked Naegele whether computerized voting as it is now practiced in the United States is secure against fraud.

He pointed a thumb at the floor. "When we first started looking at this issue, back in the middle seventies, we found there were a lot of these systems that were vulnerable to fraud and out-and-out error," he said.

I asked him whether he regarded as adequate the typical fifty-five-ballot "logic-and-accuracy public test" that is conducted locally on the Votomatic computerized punch-card vote-counting system-which about four in ten voters will use on November 8th-and he said, "No."

The old mechanical machines prevent citizens from "overvoting"-voting for more candidates in a race than they are entitled to vote for-but the Votomatic systems do not. Not only can people using these systems overvote but election workers, if they are dishonest, can punch extra holes in ballots to invalidate votes that have been correctly cast or to cast votes themselves in races the voter has skipped. In the 1984 general election, about a hundred and thirty-seven thousand out of a total of 4.7 million voters in Ohio did not cast valid ballots for President-mostly, according to Ohio's secretary of state, because of overvoting. The computerized punch-card voting system is "a barrier to exercise of the franchise," and causes "technological disenfranchisement," Neil Heighberger, the dean of the College of Social Sciences at Xavier University, in Cincinnati, concluded in a recent study he made of the subject.

A federal judge, William L. Hungate, ruling last December on a lawsuit in St. Louis, declared that the computerized punch-card voting system as it has been used in that city denies blacks an equal opportunity with whites to participate in the political process. The suit was filed by Michael V. Roberts, a black candidate for president of the Board of Aldermen who in March of last year had lost to a white by a fourth of one per cent in a city election in which voting positions on ballots in the black wards were more than three times as likely not to be counted as those in white wards. Roberts, who was joined in the suit by the St. Louis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, contended that computerized voting is such a relatively complex process that it is tantamount to a literacy test, and literacy tests have been prohibited by federal law as an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. Judge Hungate found that in four local elections since 1981 voting positions had not been counted by the computerized system on anywhere from four to eight of every hundred ballots in black wards, compared with about two of every hundred in white wards (and also found that in the March, 1987, election the computerized returns from six per cent of the precincts had "irreconcilable discrepancies"). The evidence indicated that the computer had passed over the uncounted positions because of either overvoting or undervoting, which is failing to cast a vote in a race. The Judge ordered officials to count by hand all ballots that contained overvotes or undervotes and to intensify voter education in the black wards, but the city appealed, arguing that the racial differential does not always hold true in the city's elections. The Missouri secretary of state, Roy Blunt, called the order to recount the ballots by hand unfair and said that it could "make punch-card voting unworkable."

In Pueblo, Colorado, in 1980, suspicions about the vote-counting on punch-card equipment led to an investigation by a computer expert, but nothing was proved. In Pennsylvania, in 1980, two of three examiners recommended that the Votomatic punch-card system marketed by Computer Election Services (C.E.S.), of Berkeley, California, be rejected, on the ground that it was fraud-prone, but the secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania approved it anyway. In Tacoma, Washington, in 1982 and 1987, in the only known local referendums on computerized voting, citizens' crusades, led by a conservative Republican, Eleanora Ballasiotes, that focused on the vulnerabilities of computers to fraud resulted each time in the voters' three-to-one rejection of the systems that their local officials were about to buy. A group of defeated Democratic candidates in Elkhart, Indiana, sued local election officials in 1983, alleging that computer-based irregularities had occurred in a 1982 election; they have since lost three lawsuits, and a fourth one continues. In Dallas, Terry Elkins, the campaign manager for Max Goldblatt, who in 1985 ran for mayor, came to believe, on the basis of a months long study of the surviving records and materials of the election, that Goldblatt had been kept out of a runoff by manipulation of the computerized voting system. The attorney general of Texas, Jim Mattox, was impressed by the charges and conducted an official investigation of them. Dallas authorities have declared that since there is no evidence of criminal behavior the case is closed, but Mattox has refused to close it. "I do not think that there were adequate explanations for the anomalies," he told me, in Austin.

COMPUTER programmers working for the private companies that sell election equipment write their programs in higher computer languages or the intermediate assembly language, and these are translated or compiled into the binary language of ones and zeros which computers understand. The original programs, which are centrally produced, are commonly called "source codes;" only a few local governments own and control the source codes that are used in their jurisdictions. According to Jack Gerbel, a founder of C.E.S., who has sold more computerized vote-counting equipment than any other individual in the country, about half the time the companies' programmers also write the codes that "localize" (or "initialize") vote-counting systems for the specific elections of each jurisdiction. The source and local codes together tell the computers how to count the votes. Local public tests may or may not adequately test the local codes, but, as Naegele said, they do not test the source codes.

The election-equipment companies, which thus both sell and program the computers that tabulate public elections, have long contended, in and out of court, that they own the source codes and must keep them secret from everyone, including the local officials who conduct elections.

n 1985, Jack Kemp (no relation of the congressman), the president of C.E.S., which was then the leading election-equipment company in the country, warned in so many words that an outsider who got the company's source code could compromise elections with it. Through an affidavit that Kemp furnished for a lawsuit in Charleston, West Virginia, the company affirmed that the security of the vote-counting in C.E.S.equipped jurisdictions depended in large measure on its retention of the secrets of the code, and that there would be "a grave risk" to this security if the defeated candidates were permitted to see the code. "The significance of the company's proprietary interest in its software is incalculable from our perspective," Kemp asserted.

That significance is incalculable from the voter's perspective, too. Insofar as source codes have not been opened to examination on behalf of the public-and most have not-instructions to computers on how to count votes appear to have become a trade secret. Only a few states have demanded copies of the source codes, and only in the last year or two have any states examined them. Thus most of the local officials who preside over computerized elections do not actually know how their systems are counting the votes, and when they officially certify that the election results are correct they do not and cannot really know them to be so.

After systems that use computer punch cards as ballots have counted the votes, manual recounts of the holes in the punch cards can be demanded, provided the cards have not yet been destroyed by local officials-as is permitted by most local laws after a specified period of time. But in a new computerized system, "direct-recording electronic" (D.R.E.), which is becoming more widespread, there are no individual ballots, and, the way these new machines are now being used in many jurisdictions, recounts are impossible, for the program destroys the electronic record of each voter's choices the instant after it counts them.

The dominant company now in the sale and programming of computerized vote-counting systems for public elections, Cronus Industries, of Dallas, is better known as its sole and wholly owned subsidiary, the Business Records Corporation (B.R.C.). Cronus/ B.R.C. has accused the R. F. Shoup Company, of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania-one of its rivals for a fortymillion-dollar voting-equipment order from New York City-of infringing B.R.C. patents in the very D.R.E. vote-counting machine, the Shouptronic, that Shoup is trying to sell to New York. In a lawsuit filed last November in Philadelphia, Cronus, on whose equipment between thirty and forty-five million votes will be counted this year, has also sought to discredit Shoup, on the basis of a 1979 conviction of Ransom Shoup II, the president of the company, of two federal felonies-conspiracy and obstruction of justice-in connection with an F.B.I. investigation of an election in Philadelphia that had been counted on mechanical-lever machines.For these offenses, Ransom Shoup was fined ten thousand dollars and given a three-year suspended sentence. Counterattacking, the Shoup firm, whose equipment will tabulate an estimated million and a half votes on November 8th, has accused Cronus of reaching for "a virtual monopoly on the entire business of supplying voting equipment for use in political elections in the United States" and has alleged that the Cronus vote-counting systems that are in use "inherently facilitate the opportunity for various ... forms of fraud" and "create new and unique opportunities for fraudulent and extremely difficult-to-detect manipulation and alterations with respect to election results."

In 1985 and 1986, Cronus bought Computer Election Systems and also eight smaller election-equipment and election-printing firms, while selling off three other subsidiaries, thereby transforming itself, in eighteen months, from a small conglomerate of disparate industrial businesses into the titan of the computerized-vote-counting business.

Cronus is now responsible for most C.E.S. systems that are still in service and for a computer-based "mark-sense" voting system that B.R.C. has sold in the past few years. B.R.C. also sells computerized voter-registration systems; election supplies, including, this year, perhaps a hundred and sixty million punch-card ballots; election assistance and service; and other computerized information services for local governments. C.E.S. used to take pride in publicizing the millions of votes cast on its machines (a total of three hundred and fifty million between 1964 and 1984), and after Cronus bought C.E.S., in 1985, C. A. Rundell, Jr., then the chairman and chief executive officer of Cronus, told a reporter that his company had about forty per cent of the election-service market.But when I asked Rundell earlier this year how many votes Cronus systems will count in 1988 and in which jurisdictions, he refused to say. "We certainly are not going to provide you with a list of customers and the kinds of systems they have," he declared. "We've got to ask how much competitive intelligence we divulge to our competition." He did volunteer that the total for votes counted by Cronus systems was below thirty-five million. Officials at R. F. Shoup, however, seeking to prove that Cronus is a monopoly, charge that Cronus systems will count fifty or sixty million votes on November 8th. In any case, Cronus and C.E.S. systems are used by the voters in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Seattle, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.

On Election Day, about one in every three American voters still pulls down the lever on an old thousand-pound mechanical-lever machine, and about one in every nine still marks the old-fashioned paper ballot that is counted by hand. In the past two years, however, more than eighty United States counties have abandoned lever machines, and more than ninety have abandoned paper ballots, the replacements being in most cases either D.R.E. or mark-sense systems. In mark-sense systems, which are also called "optical-scan," computers employing light or electrical conductivity count votes that have been cast on ballots with pencils or markers. Mark-sense is now used by about eight per cent of the voters; a multi-punch-card, count-the-holes computer system called Datavote, which is sold by Sequoia Pacific Systems Corporation, of Exeter, California, is used by about four per cent; and electronic D.R.E. systems, the newest computerized voting technology, are used by about three per cent. "The election business is shifting into the mark-sense and the electronic [D.R.E.] stuff," according to Richard J. Stephens, the president of a small election company in Escondido, California, who has been in the field since 1966. "The punch-card systems will remain out there, but B.R.C. is not trying to sell punch-card anymore-it's selling mark-sense now."

THE private business of counting votes in public elections can be realistically understood only as a small, if extremely important, segment of the computer industry itself, and thus a business that has both the strengths and the weaknesses of the over-all industry. The computer industry's strengths-astoundingly vast and rapid computational power, the automation of trillions of transactions have been well known for some time, but the weaknesses have come to be understood only lately. In recent years, the vulnerability of computers to tampering and fraud has become a commonplace in many industries. Computer operators do not leave fingerprints inside a computer, the events that occur inside it cannot be seen, and its records, and printouts can be fixed to give no hint of whichever of its operations an operator wants to keep secret. The practical problem of the computer age is invisibility. Hackers-adventurous programmers-penetrate corporate and governmental computers for fun and jimmy the programs in them for gain. "Electronic cat burglars" have stolen billions of dollars from banks and other businesses-a billion a year by a recent estimate of the American Bar Association. By means of computer fraud employees have raised their salaries and students have raised their grades. Caltech students printed out more than a million entry blanks for a McDonald's contest and won a Datsun station wagon. Employees of a federal agency diverted tens of thousands of dollars to nonexistent employees. In the infamous 1973 Equity Funding Corporation fraud, company officials and other employees typed into their computers names of about sixty-four thousand people who didn't exist as holders of more than two billion dollars' worth of life-insurance policies that didn't exist but were "resold" to reinsurers. "Electronic dead souls," the writer Thomas Whiteside has called these fabricated customers.

Whether or not elections have ever been stolen by computer before, some citizens and some officials are asking if it could happen in the future. Could a local or state office or a seat in the United States House of Representatives be stolen by computer? Might the outcome of a close race for a United States Senate seat be determined by computer fraud in large local jurisdictions?Since, under the state-by-state, winner-take-all rules of the electoral college, a close Presidential election can be decided by relatively few votes in two or three big states, could electronic illusionists steal the Presidency by fixing the vote-counting computers in just four or five major metropolitan areas?Could people breaking into or properly positioned within a computerized-vote counting company, acting for political reasons or personal gain, steal House or Senate seats, or even the White House itself?

Randall H. Erben, the assistant secretary of state in Texas, who served as special counsel on ballot integrity to President Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1984 and, in 1986, headed a similar group for Governor Bill Clements, of Texas, told me in Austin, "I have no question that somebody who's smart enough with a computer could probably rig it to mistabulate. Whether that has happened yet I don't know. It's going to be virtually undetectable if it's done correctly, and that's what concerns me about it." Willis Ware, a Rand Corportion computer specialist, warned those attending a 1987 conference on the security of computer-tabulated elections, "There is probably a Chernobyl or a Three Mile Island waiting to happen in some election, just as a Richter 8 earthquake is waiting to happen in California." The chief counsel of the Republican National Committee, Mark Braden, told me that he has yet to see a proved case of computer-based election fraud, but added, "People who work for us who know about computers claim that you could do it."

Some officials concerned with elections think about the unthinkable in their field; namely, the stealing of a Presidential election by computer fraud in the vote-counting in metropolitan areas of key states. Steve White, the chief assistant attorney general of California, said to me last spring in Sacramento, "It could be done relatively easily by somebody who didn't necessarily have to be all that sophisticated. Given the importance of the national election, sooner or later it will be attempted. There is a real reluctance to concede the gravity of the problem."

Jim Mattox, the Texas attorney general, while discussing Cronus/B.R.C./ C.E.S., exclaimed to me in dismay a year ago, One thing is clear: one company in the United States should not have as big an impact on elections as this company has got. Nobody should have in a democracy. The right to vote is too sacred."

COMPUTERS can be ordered to transfer votes from one candidate to another, to add votes to a candidate's total, to determine an outcome in accordance with a specified percentage spread. All the computer experts I have spoken with agreed that no computer program can be made completely secure against fraud.Where they differed was in their characterizations of this fact. Local election officials and election equipment-company specialists, executives, and salesmen usually took the position that state certification procedures and local logic-and-accuracy tests provide enough security for reasonable assurance that elections are honestly counted. The independent computer specialists I interviewed were divided, generally speaking, into two camps. One, led by Roy Saltman, of the National Bureau of Standards, Robert Naegele, and Lance Hoffman, of George Washington University, sees local-election theft by computer as possible, but stresses the fact that no case of program tampering has been proved. This camp attributes the manifold problems of computerized vote-counting entirely or almost entirely to inadequacies in the administration of elections and insufficient testing of the equipment, and regards the theft of the Presidency by computer as, in effect, impossible. The other, led by the Pennsylvania voting-systems examiner Michael Shamos and the computer specialists Howard Jay Strauss, of Princeton, and Peter G. Neumann, of S.R.I. International, a nonprofit research institution in Menlo Park, California, emphasizes the ease of concealing theft by computer "without a trace;" characterizes local elections as very vulnerable to fraud; and regards the theft of the Presidency by computer as entirely possible.

Should citizens delegate the job of vote-counting to technicians? Most people do not know enough about computers to be able to tell what is happening during computerized vote-counting, even if they are looking straight at the card readers and computers. In Dallas last year, during a conference of citizens concerned about this issue, David T. Stutsman, an Indiana attorney with experience in contested-election cases, said, "In traditional elections, the people in your neighborhood, your neighbors, had the responsibility and the legal duty to supervise an election. They counted the votes. The precinct officials don't count the votes anymore. The power-that is, political power-has gone to the venders, to the venders' representatives, and to the people that operate those machines." He also said, "You're putting more power in the hands of fewer people."

Demands for much stricter security in computerized elections appear to be gaining adherents in many quarters. Sometime after the November election, results the National Clearinghouse on Election Administration, a grandly named four-person office in the F.E.C., will publish voluntary, but potentially influential, national standards for the security and accuracy of computerized elections. In a late-summer draft, the Clearinghouse proposed that the election-equipment companies place their source codes in escrow, the idea probably being that in the event of seriously disputed election results the codes could be obtained and examined by representative's of the public.

THE evolution from counting paper ballots one at a time to counting as many as a thousand punch-card ballots a minute occupied about seventy years-a period that can be seen as having opened in 1892, when lever voting machines first appeared. Four years later, Joseph P. Harris, the inventor of the Votomatic system, was born, on a farm in North Carolina. In the First World War, Harris was a flying instructor, and afterward he helped pay for his doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago by flying the mail between Chicago and Cleveland in open-cockpit planes. A favored student of Charles Merriam, who was seeking to develop a scientific basis for understanding politics, Harris became a teacher and a scholar who over four decades wrote many books on politics and elections. He refined and championed the process of permanent voter registration, and it was largely through his efforts that permanent registration replaced the earlier system of recurring reregistration. In the nine-teen-thirties, drawn to Washington by the New Deal, he served on committees advising President Roosevelt on economic-security and administrative management issues.

Early in his career, Harris saw for himself that the politicians in big cities stole votes easily. Touring voting places during a Chicago election in the nineteen-twenties, he spotted a shotgun at one precinct and also noted "a good deal of corruption that you could see." In a 1934 book, "Election Administration," he recounted the details of proved ballot-stuffing, repeat votes cast by paid drunks (sometimes fifteen or twenty times), and shameless miscounting in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, and he quoted Boss Tweed's testimony before the Board of Aldermen in New York City that he had routinely instructed his Tammany Hall men to "count the ballots in bulk, or without counting them announce the result in bulk, or change from one to the other, as the case may have been," and Tweed's further statements that "the ballots made no result; the counters made the result," and "I don't think there was ever a fair or honest election in the City of New York." During several summers in the nineteen-twenties, Harris supervised the installation of lever voting machines made by the Automatic Voting Machine Company, of Jamestown, New York (he gave up the job with A.V.M. because he felt that it tainted him somehow). He was struck by the machines' complexity, weight, and cost, but he also realized that the lever machines represented a big step forward in a long process. People had voted with kernels of corn or black and white beans in Massachusetts in the sixteen-forties, viva voce or by a show of hands in pre-Revolutionary times, and on paper ballots that they wrote out for themselves or had written out for them, then on printed ones, then on the secret and official printed "Australian" ballots that were adopted generally in the second half of the nineteenth century. When a voter using the mechanical machine presses down a lever beside a printed choice, the return of the lever to its original position causes a tenth of a turn on a tens counter, which is connected to a hundreds counter. A.V.M. was the first large firm in the field. Samuel R. Shoup, the grandfather of the president of the present R. F. Shoup Company, organized the principal rival to A.V.M., the Shoup Voting Machine Corporation (S.V.M.), in 1905.

By 1928, a lever machine was used by about one of every six American voters. In the early thirties, while he was a professor of political science at the University of Washington, Harris began to have constructed in the university's engineering shops a gizmo that he thought of as the application of the principle of the player piano to the mechanical voting machine. ("The computer was beyond my dreams," he said later.) One voted on Harris's device by depressing keys that made perforations in a paper roll, and in due course the machine would automatically count the perforations and print the results. A Seattle businessman went halves on it with Harris, and in 1934, after much difficulty, the moonlighting professor won a patent, but by then he understood that financially the project was far beyond him and his friends. He invited "the I.B.M.," as he called the International Business Machines Corporation, to develop and market his device, but, in 1937, the company turned him down. On the eve of the Second World War, he was still tinkering with the machine-considering entering votes on the paper roll as lead marks that could be read electrically, or even, as he wrote to I.B.M.'s director for market research in 1939, "on a punch card."

For Harris, as for nearly everyone, the war intervened, and he taught management and administration at a school for military officers. One day in the early nineteen-sixties, though, when he was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, a former student asked him if he had ever thought of using a standard I.B.M. computer punch card for vote-recording. "I hadn't, but I did," Harris wrote later; he had forgotten his own idea of 1939. Soon after he had been asked about the I.B.M. card, the election chief of Alameda County, California, complained to him that the lever voting machines could barely handle the current ballots, which kept growing longer. "Joe," he said, "what we need is some kind of a simple mechanical device that can be related some way to a computer." In that context, the election official talked about the I.B.M. Port-a-Punch, a hand-held device for punching out the rectangles on the I.B.M. card. "I started to think," Harris said later. After a cataract operation in 1962, as he lay bedridden for two weeks with pads taped over his eyes, he had a eureka experience: he suddenly visualized "a computer card in an inexpensive holder with a permanent election `book' pre-marked with candidates and issues."

The founding president of C.E.S., Robert P. Varni, told me what happened next. We were in his apartment in San Francisco, a twenty-third-floor Nob Hill penthouse looking out across the great sweep of the bay, the islands, and the bridges. "I was working for I.B.M.," he said. "One of my accounts was U.C. Berkeley. I got a call from Joe Harris. He asked about the I.B.M. Port-a-Punch. `I have an idea, and I'd like to borrow it for a while,' he said. He didn't want to buy it. It was an eight-dollar item. He wanted to borrow it, along with about a dollar and a half's worth of punch cards."

Assisted by William S. Rouverol, a retired professor, who was an engineer, Harris cobbled together his ingenious new device for computerized vote counting. "After a while," Varni went on, "he called and said, `I've done something interesting with that Port-a-Punch you lent me.' I went to his office and he showed me the first prototype of the Votomatic." Harris said later that he had derived the name of his invention from the Shine-O-Matic, a shoeshine machine he had read about in the Sunday paper.

Varni is now the trim, prosperous chairman of a firm that computerizes police and fire departments. As he recalled those early days, he often broke into a warm smile. Harris didn't know anything about computers and needed someone who did, so, in 1963, Varni sent him to Kenneth Hazlett, an athletic young man who was the foreman of the university's computer room. Hazlett had had only two years of higher education, at Oakland City College, but he had been introduced to tabulating machines during a two-year spell in the Navy, and after taking an I.B.M. course in programming he had begun teaching the skill to some of his staff at Berkeley.

"Joe Harris walked into my office with a handful of these Port-a-Punch cards and wanted to know if they'd go through a computer," Hazlett recalled. "I walked him outside my office to a small I.B.M. computer, and from the console I keyed in about a three instruction loop that would simply flush these cards through the card reader. And they went sailing through. Joe Harris just lit up!" Harris realized that he could use the cards themselves as ballots. He showed Hazlett a mockup of the prototype, and, Hazlett said, "I agreed to do him a real program." To produce and sell his invention, Harris then formed Harris Votomatic, Inc., with a quarter of a million dollars he raised from about two dozen of his colleagues at the university, including Hazlett, and from Varni. Having retired from teaching, he then began driving around the West trying to sell his invention.

Devising the early programs for what became the C.E.S. systems, Hazlett gave next to no attention to security against the kinds of fraud that could be concealed in the computerized system itself. "There are two problems," he told me last spring in his sunlit apartment in Corvallis, Oregon. "One is getting the system to work the way you want it to, and the other problem is avoiding fraud. We concentrated mainly on the first. Then, beyond that, we worked with county and state governments, cooperated in developing procedures for logic-and-accuracy-testing programs -which is running ballot cards having known votes through and verifying the totals that are produced, and even the counting by hand or machine of selected precincts post-election to look for fraud or error. And that's about all we can do."

Does Hazlett have confidence now in the security of computerized elections against fraud?

"Not a hundred per cent," he said. However, he added, he knew of no elections that had been stolen by computer.

Is a logic-and-accuracy test actually a test of a system's accuracy?

"Obviously it isn't as far as you could go in testing the program," Hazlett said. "It's a very simple test. If a programmer had the necessary programming tools, he or she could get around that kind of test-of course. Knowing that the deck is fifty-five cards, you could trigger some function to come into service after fifty-five cards. Use your imagination-there are any number of things you could do. It's not an easy problem."

According to Donald G. Baumer, an engineer who worked with Hazlett, both of them realized that the Votomatic counting system could be manipulated-for instance, through the toggle switches that were on the front of a Data General Nova computer -but it was assumed that nobody would do this, because anybody who tried it could be seen. In the workshop at his small election-equipment company, near San Francisco, Baumer explained, "The concept was to devise a program that no one could ever get to - you would have to be a knowledgeable person, you would have to have the source code, and you would be very visible, standing in front of a computer throwing switches."

As Harris got older, he realized that he could not wheel around the country selling Votomatics forever. Managers who were looking for new products had taken over Varni's unit at I.B.M., and in 1965-Varni having disclosed his investment-I.B.M. bought the assets and patents of the Harris Votomatic and became for four years the nation's principal computerized-election-equipment company. Harris served I.B.M. as a paid consultant throughout the period.

"Glitches"-the term that company people seem to prefer for errors and accidents in computer elections-began to emerge in those earliest years. For example, in May, 1968, in Klamath County, Oregon, candidates' positions on the ballots were rotated in the precincts to avoid giving any candidate the unfair advantage of the top position everywhere, but the ballots got mixed up, and voters in more than a fourth of the precincts punched out rectangles for candidates they did not mean to vote for. Harris said later that as the new system became controversial, I.B.M. responded in some communities "by instructing its staff to describe the machine as the Harris Votomatic," not I.B.M.'s.

In Los Angeles County in the June, 1968, Presidential primary, deputy sheriffs were to carry voted punch cards from the precincts to two regional counting centers-one on Third Street, and the other at the I.B.M. Service Bureau Corporation, on Wilshire Boulevard, next door to the Ambassador Hotel. However, after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot that night at the Ambassador, police cordoned off a four-block area around the scene, and the tapes containing the totals from the Third Street center could not be brought into the I.B.M. building. The counting was not completed until nine o'clock the next morning. Reporters were irritated by the delay, and officials at I.B.M. began to wonder seriously about the risks of the election business, which, comparatively speaking, was providing only a small profit.

That November, in Missoula County, Montana, in the national contest between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, another difficulty arose. Joseph H. Chowning, who was an I.B.M. salesman then, told me not long ago, "Through a programming error in a few precincts, ballots cast for Nixon were counted for Humphrey or vice versa." In traditional Republican strongholds, Nixon was defeated, while Democratic redoubts went for him. In a precinct where both paper and punchcard ballots were used, Nixon swept the paper ballots, but the computer voted for Humphrey by a landslide. The error was caught immediately, Chowning said, but he and an I.B.M. publicrelations man had to fly to Missoula to dispel the unease.

One other event, a singular one, came to Chowning's attention about this time. "Just before or after the 1968 election, there was an article or editorial in a small suburban Chicago newspaper that came out and said that the reason I.B.M. was in the business was to make Thomas Watson President of the United States," he recalled, referring to the chairman of I.B.M. "I'm guessing, but I'm sure it went right straight to Mr. Watson's desk." Ken Hazlett, too, has a vague memory of this. "I wondered at the time if T. J. Watson was interested in running for President," he told me.

Chowning went on, "Here I.B.M. had a product that guaranteed two or three per cent of its gross income and eighty to ninety per cent of its publicity, not all of it favorable." I.B.M. got out of the vote-counting business. By 1969, it had licensed five voting equipment companies to sell the Votomatic: two in Illinois, one in New York, one in Tulsa, and C.E.S., which was founded by Varni and three other I.B.M. men-Chowning, Jack Gerbel, and Ken Hazlett (whom I.B.M. had hired to write programs for the Votomatic)-and which therefore had the great advantage of its executives' association with I.B.M.'s reputation.

Varni and his team at C.E.S. had a good run. By 1976, nearly seventeen million voters-more than a fifth of all those voting for President that year-entrusted their election decisions to C.E.S. counting systems.

The C.E.S. Votomatic punch-card system "has probably had more effect on the country than almost any other product," Varni said to me. Although today it is generally regarded as an outmoded technology, it is by far the most widely used method of counting votes by computer. The Votomatic is based on the assignment of a tiny, numbered pre-perforated rectangle on a standard eighty-column, twelve-row I.B.M. punch card to each candidate and the assignment of other rectangles to the "yes" and "no" positions on each question to be voted on. This punch card, covered with numbers but displaying no names of candidates and none of the propositions to be voted on, is the ballot. The vote recorder, which is the Votomatic, is a spined booklet listing the choices of the day in writing and mounted over a plastic mask that is designed to prevent voters from punching out any holes but the ones they are supposed to be able to punch. The voter slides the punch card underneath the booklet and then fits two holes near the top of the card onto two posts that are intended to keep the card properly aligned under the booklet. Alongside the choices printed on each page, arrows point to holes that match numbered rectangles on the underlying card. The voter turns the pages and, using a simple stylus attached to the device by a chain, punches out the rectangles that, as holes in the punch card, express his or her choices.

After the polls close, stacks of the voted punch cards are fed into card readers, in each precinct or in one central counting place, depending on the preference of the officials of the jurisdiction. A blower in each reader creates an air-stream and fluffs up some of the cards at the bottom of the stack; a pump creates a vacuum; and a spinning cylinder attached to the pump seizes a ballot and flings it past a light whose beam flicks through each punched-out hole, the cards whizzing through the reader at a rate of up to a thousand a minute. If the spinning cylinder doesn't grab two ballots at a time, if the minute punched-out rectangles of cardboard have separated properly from the cards, and if the computer underneath and connected to the card reader has been programmed correctly, the computer then quickly and accurately tabulates the votes; that is, it counts according to its location each pinpoint of light that twinkles through a card for a millisecond.

The punched-out scraps, which have come to be called "chad," are supposed to be forced between two vertical rubber strips underneath the ballot and into a chad box. Sometimes, however, a chad does not break completely free from the card and becomes a "hanging chad," and sometimes voting-hole rectangles are merely indented by the voter's stylus. "Hanging chad has been with us since the invention of the Votomatic," Hazlett told me. C. A. Rundell, of Cronus, informed me during an interview in his office in Dallas last fall that because of the chad problem, and also because of wear and tear on the ballots, vote totals may not change the first time ballots are run through the card reader, and probably won't the second time, but the third or fourth time they may change, "and then you've lost your audit trail." The inexact science of divining what the voter intended in the case of a mere indentation or whether the card reader counted a hole that was partly or wholly blocked by a hanging chad has been called "chadology."

Presumably, most of the elections counted by the C.E.S. systems went smoothly ("People don't want to read about a good election," Jack Gerbel told me in September), but the company did have problems. In the 1970 primary in Los Angeles, voters in some precincts voted for the wrong candidates because of incorrect rotations; in other precincts ballot pages were missing. A computer program did not record totals on a hundred of its counters. Ballot cards jammed in the card readers and had to be duplicated by election workers-clerks were seen poking holes in punch cards with pencils. The central computer stopped or was stopped six times during the counting; and it was discovered only after the counting that more than five hundred precincts had been overlooked.

In 1970, the election commissioners in St. Louis, who were considering buying the Votomatic system, asked the accounting firm Price Waterhouse to evaluate it, with devastating results. Security controls on the Votomatic would be "more easily subject to abuse" than those on the mechanical machines in place, the firm said. Candidates' names could be misaligned with the rectangles on the ballot "by manipulation of the ballot book pages' printing or positioning, by manipulating the positioning of the punched card used to record the vote, or by manipulation of the program used to tabulate the vote," the report continued. "It is possible to write a program in such a way that no test can be made to assure that the program works the way it is supposed to work.... It is possible to set card readers to misread the information punched into the cards. It is possible to have instructions in computer memory to call in special procedures from core, tape, or disk files to create results other than those anticipated. . . . There is no practical way to assure accuracy of the proposed computer tabulation short of complete duplicate processing on third party computers with reproduced ballot card decks and third party control programs."

Gerbel, who was taking over the C.E.S. sales effort in major jurisdictions, responded with a long recitation of the customary tests and safeguards, and also emphasized the system's acceptance in fifteen states, discounted "information supplied by competitors," and concluded, "For six years, the personnel of C.E.S. have answered the comments made in this report by conducting successful Votomatic elections."

IN 1977, C.E.S. was bought out by Hale Brothers Associates, a San Francisco investment company controlled by Prentis Cobb Hale, Jr.When his family acquired C.E.S., through a "friendly cash offer," for twelve million dollars, Prentis Hale, an influential Republican who was given to partridge-hunting with General Franco in Spain, was best known as the Hale in Carter Hawley Hale (C.H.H.) -the nation's seventh-ranking chain of department stores and the largest chain in the West. The year Hale bought the election company, C.H.H. earned fifty million dollars on sales of a billion and a half dollars.

A couple of years later, C.E.S. survived an investigation by the antitrust division of the justice Department. "We became the target of a criminal grand jury," David L. Dunbar, the company's president at that time, told me recently. The investigation lasted more than a year, and the company turned over a whole file cabinet of records to the justice Department. The investigation was dropped very early in 1981-in January or February, Dunbar recalled, adding, "I used to kid people we had to get Ronald Reagan elected to get this thing killed."

As the eighties opened, C.E.S. was the unchallenged leader in the business of computerized vote-counting equipment. In 1980, C.E.S. systems were in place where about thirty-five million Americans were registered to vote, and they counted about three out of ten of the votes that were cast in the United States. Two years later, C.E.S. equipment tallied thirty-six per cent of the votes in the country. As of November 6, 1984, nine out of twenty votes, 44.2 per cent-were counted on C.E.S. equipment in a thousand and nineteen jurisdictions in forty states. To put this a different way, the electronic technology made and marketed by one small company housed in an industrial building near San Francisco Bay counted the votes that were cast in more than sixty-four thousand precincts where almost forty-seven million Americans were registered to vote.

The period 1977 through 1986, when C.E.S. for the most part dominated the computerized-election business, was a time of technical mishaps and rising suspicion. A precursor of the serious breakdowns that lay ahead had occurred in a legislative race in Los Angeles in 1976. The outcome was reversed twice-once by a machine recount, the second time by holding every one of the hundred thousand ballots up to a light and counting the holes one by one. "Hanging chad" and "bulging chad," as the indented tabs were sometimes called, were blamed for shifts of tens of votes in both directions.

In 1978, a candidate for comptroller of the State of Illinois refused to believe he had lost Madison County by a large margin, and it turned out, according to Michael Hamblett, a member of the Chicago Board of Elections, that the totals had "flipped-here was a computer flip-flop."

That same year, in a statewide recount for secretary of state of Ohio (which Mark Braden, the present general counsel of the Republican National Committee, helped to conduct), only sixteen votes changed out of about three million. But overvoting on punch-card ballots was beginning to trouble Ohioans. Anthony Celebrezze, Ohio's secretary of state, estimating that about fifty-five thousand voters had had their votes invalidated in this way, asked, "Are they being partially disenfranchised by some peculiarity of the equipment itself"

In El Paso, Texas, the winner of a 1978 school-board race, Marvin Gamza, was deprived of his victory when the computer failed to count votes cast for him in three precincts, because ballot layouts from an earlier election had been used in them. Suspicions were voiced that the mistake had been deliberately left uncorrected, and the federal judge who heard the case, John H. Wood, was angered when he learned, from the television news one night, that some of the relevant ballots had been burned. He concluded that "a willful effort" had been involved in the error, rejected the claim of the putative winner, and installed Gamza on the school board.But Judge Wood was overruled on appeal, because Gamza had filed his protest too late. "The winner lost," said Malcolm McGregor, Gamza's lawyer, but McGregor doubted whether the mixing up of the layouts was premeditated, because, he said, "a baboon would not have tried to steal the election that way."

In 1980, computerized vote-counting faltered seriously in a number of jurisdictions across the country. A study by the city clerk of Detroit concluded that in a primary conducted on the C.E.S. punch-card system, which the city had just installed, votes on one out of every nine ballots cast had been invalidated-fifteen thousand in all because people had tried to vote in two parties' primaries.

In that same year, when a mark-sense system sold by Martel Systems, of Costa Mesa, California, was used for the first time in Orange County, California, a Republican stronghold, there was a four-day delay in the count. On Primary Night, more than fifty precinct-level memory cartridges had broken down, and-because of programming errors, it was explained-the computers had given about fifteen thousand Democratic-primary votes meant for delegates for Jimmy Carter or Edward Kennedy to delegates for Lyndon LaRouche and Jerry Brown.

Montana law permits voters to demand paper ballots, and in Missoula (where votes for Humphrey and Nixon had been interchanged in 1968) as many as thirty per cent of the voters chose to vote this old-fashioned way. Still in this same year, 1980, card readers broke down in jurisdictions in Michigan, Arkansas, Indiana, and Utah. In Salt Lake City, a central card reader started "putting out jumbled numbers on about three out of every hundred ballot choices," according to a news report. In a township in Ohio, two tax proposals were switched; the voters would have taxed themselves five times as much as they wanted to if the error hadn't been discovered after the voting. In Custer County, Nebraska, the county clerk said that a count on a C.E.S. system concerning a school-closing issue showed more people voting than were registered. The computer had also refused to read some ballots and had read only parts of others. In Bradenton, on the Florida Gulf Coast, a seventh of the county's precincts had to be counted twice, because "soggy, warped, and mangled ballots" occasionally jammed the computers. Directly across the panhandle, at Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic, new computerized machines counted Democratic ballots well enough but refused to accept Republican ones. "It was awfully strange," the supervisor of elections, James Brooks, was quoted as saying. "Those damn machines must have been built by the Democrats."

In San Antonio, Texas, in perhaps the most consequential breakdown in 1980, it was discovered that the C.E.S. program that counted votes in the Presidential election in Bexar County could not tally more than nine thousand votes for any race, so the computers had not counted many of the votes cast for Ronald Reagan and two other Republican candidates. The official post-election canvass found that sixteen-hundredths of a per cent fewer total votes were cast than had been reported on Election Night, whereupon the San Antonio Express noted, "As San Antonio moves into the computer age, the slogan of the universal suffrage movement becomes, `One man, 0.9984 vote.' " The recount dragged on for several weeks, with local politicians pointing fingers at each other. Mike Greenberg, a columnist for the Express, learned that election officials had taken unmarked ballots home overnight. "Even already marked ballots could be tampered with," he went on to say, continuing, "Anybody with a straightened-out paper clip could punch out a few more holes to either spoil a ballot with the `wrong' votes or cast `right' votes in races ignored by the legitimate voter." In due course, Bexar County returned to lever machines.

A candidate for the school board in Carroll County, Maryland, in 1984, T. Edward Lippy, finished third, with about six thousand votes. When, in obedience to state law, the voted C.E.S.-system ballots were taken to an adjoining county to be recounted on a different computer system, about twelve thousand five hundred uncounted votes were found, and it was learned that in fact about nineteen thousand citizens had voted for Lippy. He was proclaimed the winner. The error was explained as a slip-up by a local data-processing official. ("It was my mistake," he said.) He had inadvertently replaced the correct C.E.S. provided program with a test program that would not count two votes if they were punched in one column on the ballot, and most of the voters who favored Lippy had also voted on a home-rule proposition in the same column with the numbered rectangle assigned to votes for Lippy. The wrong program had also cost President Reagan more than two thousand votes in the first count. A standard pre-election test had not caught the official's mistake; in a state without the requirement to double-check the count, it could have been missed.

In 1985, in Moline, Illinois, a candidate for alderman served for three months before a recount removed him from office. This mistake was laid to a slipping timing belt that had caused the card reader to fail to count a number of straight-party votes for the real winner. The apparently defeated candidate, it turned out, had actually won handily.

IN the fall of 1980, Michael Shamos, a computer scientist, law student, and businessman who was teaching at Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, and running a software company, saw an announcement on a computer bulletin board that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was looking for examiners for computerized-voting systems. He knew nothing about such systems, but the job sounded interesting, so he signed up and went to Harrisburg to examine the C.E.S. Votomatic system. "What I saw that day," he told me not long ago, "was hairraising and mind-boggling: antique, obsolete, unreliable technology packed with a systems approach that was even more unreliable."

We were talking in the upstairs study of Shamos's home in Pittsburgh. On the wall above his desk was a large Princeton University pennant. He has degrees in physics from Princeton and Vassar; an M.S. from American University in the technology of management; three degrees in computer science, including a doctorate, from Yale; and a law degree from Duquesne. Shamos continued, with feeling, concerning the Votomatic system, "Counting paper ballots is no picnic. I really thought hard about this. Am I being picky? I came to the conclusion that it's far worse than a paper ballot. After all, what is the rush? I for the life of me couldn't figure out why anybody would use this."

That November, Shamos presented to Pennsylvania's Bureau of Elections his evaluation of the C.E.S. election system. Punch-card technology was obsolete, his report stated. The C.E.S. system had not been modernized and was "a security nightmare, open to tampering in a multitude of ways," Shamos continued. "It is apparent that security was not taken seriously as an issue during the design of the Votomatic." The report went on to note that the ballot pages in the Votomatic booklet could easily be shuffled or replaced; blank punch-card ballots were easy to obtain; and the plastic seals on the boxes used to transport voted ballots for central counting were easily duplicated. Moreover, the system could not be verified without examination of its source code, yet C.E.S. had refused to produce that code; no effort had been made to restrict access to the control panels or the toggle switches on the computer, with which "any person can enter arbitrary numbers into the machine's counters;" and the counting program, loaded through a deck of punched cards, could be altered to change the counting "by inserting or deleting a single one of the cards or by transposing two of them."

Shamos now warned, "The following scenario is thus fully possible. A would-be election fixer enters a voting booth with a card concealed on his person that, when read by the tabulating computer, will reset its counters to values desired by the fixer. On leaving the booth, he presents this card, conveniently wrapped in its secrecy envelope, to an election official who, not being permitted to examine it, drops the `ballot' into a box. After the election, the card makes its way to the central counting facility where it is read by the computer. Instead of being counted as a vote or rejected by the system, the effect of this card is to change the current vote total for any candidate desired."

In a carefully worded paragraph headed "Concentration of Control at C.E.S.," Shamos noted, "All software used in the Votomatic machines is obtained in the form of secret card decks supplied by C.E.S. Without casting doubt on the integrity of C.E.S. in any way, nonetheless, the possibility exists that an unauthorized person may gain access to the central point from which these programs are distributed and alter them. The implications are frightening when it is remembered that one-quarter of all votes cast in the U.S. are counted by these programs."

Throughout the evaluation, Shamos wrote, C.E.S. "took the attitude that the Votomatic system has been in use for seventeen years, has been evaluated by more than thirty states, and has never been denied certification. In response to virtually every question regarding a deficiency, the vender responded by stating that the problem had been considered by a number of other jurisdictions and was found not to be serious.... The Votomatic system must be denied certification."

Pennsylvania assigns three examiners to inspect each voting system submitted for certification, but the decision about it is made not by them but by the secretary of the Commonwealth. One of the other examiners found the system acceptable. The third, C. Kamila Robertson, of the computer-science faculty at Carnegie-Mellon (who said that the voting booklet had come apart in her hands, and that "it would be easy to sabotage the computer in this system ... the switches are there for the switching"), agreed with Shamos. The secretary of the Commonwealth certified the system, but Shamos's report soon became one of the basic documents in the controversy over computerized vote-tallying.

THE precinct-level corruption that Joe Harris had witnessed in Chicago in the twenties was visible again in the 1982 election there, but now instead of repeat voters the precinct captains had repeat votes, as counted on the C.E.S. system. According to the report of a grand jury that investigated the 1982 election, and whose indictments led to fifty-eight convictions, ward committeemen appointed city employees as precinct captains, and these factotums either produced for the political machine on Election Day or lost favor with their patrons. The grand jurors reported, "One precinct captain and his son disregarded the actual ballots cast by voters and instead held their own fraudulent election after the polls closed by running two ballots through the voting machine. One ballot was a straight Democratic `punch 10.' That ballot was counted by the machine a total of one hundred and ninety-eight times. To make the results less suspect, they also counted a ballot containing some Republican votes a total of six times. Consequently, all but two of the voters in that precinct were disenfranchised."

The grand jurors said that in many Chicago precincts in 1982 faked punch-card votes were cast in the names of transients, the ill, the incapacitated, and people who had moved away, had died, or had not voted. Runners worked the boarding houses and hotels to find out who was not coming to the polls. "The ballots either were punched on the voting machines by people posing as the voter, or were punched with ball-point pens or other similar objects in a private place outside the polling area," according to the grand jury's report. In one named precinct in the Thirty-ninth Ward, the captain gave lists of non-voters to one of the election judges, and she slipped them into her shoe. During the day, she would draw out a list when no one was looking and forge names from it on blank ballot applications. "The precinct captain and others apparently retreated to the privacy of the men's washroom to punch some of the ballots," the grand jurors said.

THE legal conflict that perhaps best embodies the doubts about computerized democracy, and demonstrates-whether the plaintiffs or the defendants were right in this particular case-many of the difficulties of proving charges of stealing elections by computer, started in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1980 and ended, for all practical purposes except for the plaintiffs' liabilities, in a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, in 1986. In 1971, Jack Gerbel, of C.E.S., and an area C.E.S. representative had presented the Votomatic for approval in West Virginia, but the state's two examiners rejected it. They cited its permitting of overvoting, and they stated, "The computer program ... can possibly be modified by an experienced data-processing person, causing the computer to miscount votes cast for a particular race." However, the West Virginia secretary of state, Jay Rockefeller (who is now United States senator from West Virginia), seeing, as he wrote at the time, that the report of the examiners was negative, designated two new examiners, and they approved the system.

At about 7 P.M. on November 4, 1980, as Ronald Reagan was being elected President, Walter J. Price III, a plump-cheeked, energetic young man in a blue blazer and khakis and his "Election Day" tie-blue with diagonal gold and red stripes-drove down to the voter registrar's office in Charleston. A freshman Republican legislator in a county that Daniel Boone had once represented in the Virginia Assembly, Price was going downtown to see himself reelected, as he thought, and to watch the operation of the new system the county had bought the year before from C.E.S. He was not worried about vote fraud, he told me later, because the first clerk of Kanawha County the Republicans had had since 1932, Margaret (Peggy) Miller, would be running the count.

Over the vehement objections of the voter registrar, Carolyn Critchfield, Price threaded his way among desks and people toward what the election workers called the computer cage. This was a small room with windows on all sides that began about four and a half feet above the floor and a Dutch door that had a window in its top half. The two vote-counting computers of the BT-76 (Ballot Tab) system in Charleston, one of them designated the "master" and one the "slave," had been set up on the floor inside, with punchcard readers on top of them and printers beside them. On the computers, down near the floor, were sets of toggle switches. Price has testified under oath, and repeated in greater detail during lengthy interviews with me, that, as he walked around the outside of this room looking in during the next hour and a half, he saw four kinds of actions, which, four and a half years later, dominated the only known court trial so far of charges that an election was stolen by computer. The people who Price said took these actions have all vigorously denied doing so, also under oath.

Traditionally on Election Night in Kanawha County, the vote totals were announced and posted in the precincts. This year, none were. Instead, the uncounted voted punch cards were all carried from the precincts to the registrar's office and run through one central system, which Walter Price was looking at. Only these cumulative centralized counts, which included no record of precinct-by-precinct totals, were coming out of the whining, clacking printers; then they were ripped loose and fed to the local reporters and to the citizens who had gathered on the other side of the chest-high reception counter.

Price said that at least four times while he was looking into the computer room that night he saw Peggy Miller, the county clerk, drop down into what he called a coal miner's squat-"not on her knees but bent down with her knees coming up toward her chest"-in front of the sixteen toggle switches on the master computer, consult notes she had on a pad or clipboard, put the notes down, turn a key, flip some of the switches, and turn the key again. Such an action was not called for in the counting of the votes. After Peggy Miller finished flipping the switches, Price said, she reclaimed her notes and stood up. On more than one of these occasions, she walked over to the nearby "dasher," a slow printer, "and she would type some things and then the printer would run," he said.

The incumbent congressman for that district, running again, was a Democrat, John Hutchinson. He had been elected the mayor of Charleston three times in the seventies, and in 1976, during his service at City Hall, he had run for governor, but had lost. Although he and Jay Rockefeller, who in 1980 was the Democratic governor, were not friendly, Hutchinson was regarded by Walter Price as one of the five most influential Democrats in the state. Mick Staten, Hutchinson's Republican opponent, was a close friend of Peggy Miller's husband, Steven, a lawyer, who was the general counsel for the Republican executive committee of that congressional district, and Staton's largest campaign contributor. Hutchinson had trounced Staton in a special election the preceding June, and two polls conducted by the Charleston Gazette had predicted that Hutchinson would win again, in the counting that Price was watching, by a spread of between fourteen and sixteen percentage points; that is, by around twenty-five thousand of the votes that were being counted. Hutchinson's wife, Berry, said that a poll by the Democratic National Committee, too, had shown that her husband would win by a wide margin. Staton himself, however, had predicted that he would win, by five points.

Price said that during the counting his fellow-Republican Steve Miller entered the computer cage, drew out of the inside pocket of his suit coat a pack of cards between a quarter of an inch and an inch thick and the same size as the ballot and control punch cards, patted the cards to even them up, and handed them to his wife. According to Price, they were talking, but, being behind the glass, he could not hear what they said. Price testified that Peggy Miller ran the cards through the card reader, retrieved them, and gave them back to her husband, and that he returned them to his breast pocket and left the room.

Seated at a table lodged between elements of the C.E.S. system was a man Price had never seen before. Clearly, the person he was referring to was Carl Clough, the Northeast sales manager of C.E.S., who had been with the company for ten years. Price said he saw this man busily using a telephone and what seemed to be a calculator. Open in front of him on the table was a large case resembling a briefcase. Three or four times, Price said, the man grasped the phone as one might the handle of a suitcase, and, he told me, he "places it, he very carefully places it" in the case; he "pushed it down ... it was just a very deliberate pushing in" of the phone. After a time, he said, the man put both hands to the case, seemed to hold it down with one hand "like he was steadying, like there was some resistance to," the phone's "coming out," and, with the other, pulled the phone out "with some force." This resembles a description of a man using a modem, a device that permits computers separated by hundreds or thousands of miles to communicate with each other over telephone lines.

The operator of the master computer that night was Darlene Dotson; the secondary, slave computer was the responsibility of Vicky Lynn Young, just two years out of high school. Vicky Young needed to keep her job, because she was taking care of some of her close relatives. Nevertheless, later, on the witness stand, she swore that on one occasion during the counting in the cage Clough "told me to go over and stand beside Darlene and help her with her computer so that nobody could see."

Had this happened? Clough was asked during the trial. "Absolutely not," he replied. Furthermore, he said, he had had a briefcase in the computer cage, but there had been neither a modem nor any other electronic equipment in it. He thought that he had used a phone in the cage, but that it could have been moored in an adjacent room. Young testified that Clough had tools but had not used a modem; he denied that he had any tools. Dotson averred twice before the trial that there had been a phone in the room and that Clough had used it "more than once;" at the trial she said there had been a phone jack in the room, but no phone.

Peggy Miller said on the stand that she had not gone into the computer cage at all on Election Night, thereby denying Price's testimony. (Mrs. Miller, who has resumed her former career as a schoolteacher, and is a candidate for the state legislature on November 8th, later said to me of Price, "He lied in court," and she also said, "He'll testify against his mother if it'll get him something.") Steve Miller, asked by the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, John Mitchell, "Did you enter the computer room and take several computer-sized cards out of your pocket and lay them down?" answered, "Absolutely, positively no." Clough said the Millers had not been in there while he was, although he had "stepped out a few times." A county commissioner said that he had seen Peggy Miller in the room. Dotson said that the Millers were not there and that Peggy Miller "may have come in, but not all the time." Young "didn't remember" Peggy Miller there, and said that she did not see Steve Miller come in "that I remember."

In a document having to do with an appeal, the defendants described Price's testimony as uncorroborated and "soundly contradicted by every other witness called by plaintiffs who was in a position to observe the occurrences in the computer room." They characterized Young's testimony as a denial that Peggy Miller had manipulated the toggle switches; they stressed that Price had not known the identity of the man he had seen with the briefcase.

On the night in question, Price, following the returns, perceived that he was losing his position in the House of Delegates, and after saying so to a friend of his he exclaimed loudly, pointing to the computer cage, "The only election I lost was in that room!" Hutchinson, too, lost that night, and by nearly ten thousand votes-the five percentage points by which his opponent, Mick Staton, earlier that fall had predicted his own victory.

Leonard Underwood, a Baptist minister, who had been defeated for the legislature by seven votes, challenged the Charleston results in a lawsuit, but Peggy Miller said that sixty-two days after the election-just two beyond the earliest legal moment in the absence of a contested election-she had had the punch-card ballots destroyed, not realizing that Underwood's challenge was still pending. "Anytime an election is completed ... those materials are cleaned out," she said. "Otherwise we would have a continuous buildup of materials."

T. David Higgins, a Union Carbide computer specialist who was also the chairman of the Kanawha County Republican Party, testified during the trial that in Charleston in the summer of 1981, at a political affair for Representative Staton, he had spoken at length with Steve Miller:

(In a recent interview, Steve Miller denied that he had said "You underrated us" to Higgins at the Staton affair. "He told me about reports he had heard from Democrats that `you guys had stolen the election,' and that he had told them we weren't smart enough to do that," Miller said. "And he's right, I grinned like a shark. In fact, I laughed out loud. I told him, `Thank God, neither are you, David,' and turned on my heel and walked off." Miller went on to describe Higgins as "a conceited, arrogant fop" and "a shallow idiot." On the subject of Walter Price's testimony, Miller said, "He's a liar. I've never been in that computer room in my life." As for Price himself, he said, "If I had a choice between sitting down with him and a polecat, I'd pick the polecat.")

C.E.S. officials in Berkeley, upon learning of the rising public alarm in Charleston, sent out one of their programming consultants, C. Stephen Carr, who had probably written or revised as many of the codes for votecounting machines as anyone else in America. Testifying at hearings on electronic voting that had been called by the West Virginia secretary of state, in Charleston, Carr declared, "While any computer system can be penetrated, the time and effort to penetrate this one is so extreme as to render it effectively impenetrable."

Representative Staton was defeated for reelection in 1982. The West Virginia legislature passed a law that year requiring that after each election "at least five per cent of the precincts shall be chosen at random and the ballot cards cast therein counted manually." A special grand jury that was convened to investigate the November, 1980, election indicted Peggy Miller on six felony and nine misdemeanor charges of election-law violations, none of them directly related to the computers, and she was tried and acquitted on all counts.

THREE of the Democrats who had lost in 1980-Hutchinson, Underwood, and Bill Reese, a candidate for county commissioner-continued to be troubled by the outcome even after Miller's acquittal. Underwood wanted the three of them to sue for damages.

Dozens of times, driving past the Hutchinsons' home, which is near his own in Charleston, Walter Price recalled, he thought that he should go in and tell Hutchinson what he had seen in the computer cage. "It occurred to me that that poor man ought to know what really screwed him out of Congress," Price said to me. "Why I didn't do it I don't know."

In mid-1982, though, he said, he happened to take a seat in front of the Hutchinsons at a public meeting in the state capitol, and Berry Hutchinson, a shrewd and ebullient woman, who is a member of an old-money Charleston family, leaned forward and asked him, "Were you by any chance present when the ballots were being processed in 1980?"

"Well, yes, I was," he replied.

She told him she and her husband would buy him lunch in the basement cafeteria if he would tell them what he had seen.

"For about thirty-five seconds," Price told me, he flinched mentally at "having truck with Democrats" and at having everybody see him walk through the capitol with John Hutchinson, but then-"It was a flash of lightning"-this response was erased by the thought Well, hell, you've got to do what's right. Price thereupon said he would go. Over lunch, he said, he described to the Hutchinsons what he had seen, and during a visit to the computer cage after lunch he showed Berry Hutchinson the toggle switches on the front panel. Outside the registrar's office, she said later, she asked him whether he would testify if they filed a lawsuit, and he said yes.

Early the next year, John Hutchinson, Underwood, and Reese, their evidence dramatically fortified by Walter Price, sued the Millers, the registrar of voters, the county commissioners, C.E.S. and four of its employees, and others for about nine million dollars in damages, alleging (in their third amended complaint) that various of the defendants had "tampered, directly and/or indirectly, with the computer programming of the election computer" and "rigged the counting computers by the manipulation of control toggle switches and the use of predetermined material or both in such a way that the computer did not reflect an actual count of ballots cast." The plaintiffs contended that by these and other means they had been deprived of "their constitutional right to vote or receive votes [and] their right to hold public office," and of income, reputation, time, and money.

Needing a computer expert, the plaintiffs turned to Wayne G. Nunn, a slender, soft-spoken man of thirty-six who was a project scientist for Union Carbide, one of the major chemical companies in West Virginia's Chemical Valley. Nunn had supervised the design and installation of computer networks, some costing several million dollars, for the firm's laboratories and pilot plants. He had shared an office there for three years with David Higgins, who was the chief of Union Carbide's computerized technology-intelligence-information network. Nunn also ran a small custom-software venture that wrote programs, did consulting, and sold operating systems.