Bev Harris says that in August, a former employee at Diebold handed her a trove of documents from the company, representing years of discussions on an internal company Web site. In the memos, Diebold programmers seem to acknowledge security holes in their system, and they appear to discuss methods of evading testing authorities. In one e-mail, Ken Clark, a programmer at the company, acknowledges that vote data can be viewed with Microsoft Access, but he says that fixing the problem will be difficult, and it would be easier to feel out the testing labs and "find out what it is going to take to make them happy." In another e-mail, Clark recommends to his co-workers that if the state of Maryland -- which has also purchased the company's touch-screen machines -- decides to require a paper trail in its voting systems, the company should exact a high price for the required upgrades. Diebold should charge Maryland "out the yin," Clark wrote. In yet another e-mail, Clark does an impression of how voters in Georgia might react to touch-screen machines: "Yer votin thingamajig sure looks purdy," he writes. (Calls to Clark were routed to Diebold's P.R. office. While the company concedes that the memos are authentic, it disputes Harris' claim that the files came from a Diebold employee. Instead, says Mark Radke, Diebold's computers were hacked. The firm initially threatened to sue people who posted the files on the Web, but it has backed off that threat.)
In the spring of 2003, Harris received an e-mail that read, "I think I may be the Rob in rob-georgia." The message was from Rob Behler, a laid-off telecom worker who found a contract job at Diebold's Atlanta warehouse in the summer before the midterm election. Behler, a friendly fellow in his 30s who speaks with a disarming Southern drawl, paints a disastrously unflattering picture of the company that provided his state with its voting equipment. He told Harris that his time at Diebold was marked by confusion and chaos, a month of 16-hour days in which he did nothing but fix broken machines, broken management techniques, and deal with incompetent people.
On his first day on the job, Behler, who had never worked on election systems before, was promoted to a manager's position and put in charge of the team assembling, testing and deploying all of the voting machines in the state. He says that when he checked the machines that employees had been assembling for months, he discovered that large numbers of them were defective.
During the few weeks that followed, Behler spent his time fixing the machines. He says that each time he discovered a new problem with the systems, he would call up the tech experts at Diebold, and they would determine a way to fix it. The programmers would put a file on the company server -- a file like rob-georgia.zip -- and Behler would download it to his laptop, store it on a memory card, then install the memory card on the touch-screen machines. The process steered clear of any certification authorities; no independent body was checking to see what was being installed on the system.
Indeed, Behler remembers a conference call with Diebold executives in which they specifically discussed what to tell Georgia authorities if Diebold engineers were caught installing software on the machines. "Can't we just tell them we're updating?" Behler wondered in the meeting. "They're like, 'No, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. It has to be certified.' And I say, 'Oh? So we don't want them to know that we're fixing a problem?' So I was like, 'OK -- we can tell them that we're doing a quality check and that we're making sure that they're all the same.' And that's exactly what we did."
Mark Radke of Diebold says, "All I can tell you about these situations is that before the units are deployed they are fully tested, and that final testing was proof-positive about how those units were going to function."
The Georgia secretary of state's office dismisses most of Behler's claims. Chris Riggall, press secretary to Cathy Cox, the secretary of state, says that at some point before the 2002 election, Diebold did discover that Windows CE, the version of the Microsoft Windows operating system that runs on the touch-screen machines, needed to be upgraded. But this was a one-time fix that Cox was fully aware of, he said. This fix was not formally certified by state and federal testing authorities, as Georgia law requires. But Riggall says that the state's testing experts determined that because the upgrade was only to the Windows operating system and not to the other software in the touch-screen machine, it did not need to be certified. The election was fast approaching, Riggall said, and there simply was no time for certification. Doing it this way was "not our preferred best option," he wrote in an e-mail, "but nevertheless justifiable under the circumstances." As for Behler's claim that the software was downloaded from Diebold's publicly accessible server, Riggall says that's not true. "No, we never used that site during any aspect of the 2002 elections."
Behler, who has seven children, is an arch-conservative. One night this fall, standing outside his five-bedroom house in one of Atlanta's affluent northern suburbs, he described his politics in detail -- why he favored the ban on late-term abortions, why he considers the minimum wage a foolish idea, why he prefers George W. Bush to Bill Clinton, and why, despite what he knows of working at Diebold, he does not believe that the 2002 election in his state was rigged. For one thing, he doesn't consider the GOP's wins very surprising; to him, the Republicans running that year were fine candidates. But he does believe the Diebold flaws are an open invitation to election mischief.
Next page: So what really happened in Georgia?