When Susan Bernecker ran for Jefferson Parish Council in 1995, she received 33 percent of the vote, however, three days later, she discovered when she looked at the parish’s new voting machines that no matter how many times she selected her name on the machine, it didn’t always select her name.
Bernecker visited the Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment voting machines, which were, at the time, state-of-the-art, with a cameraman in tow to test out the machines. When she would select her name, her opponent’s name would appear on the screen. After repeating the process several times the flaw was discovered.
Bernecker sought help from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, but because there were no federal candidates on the ballot, they couldn’t help. She then sought the help of local computer experts, but they couldn’t help either.
She filed a lawsuit and held a press conference asking voters for help, but the judge rejected her claims. An employee from Sequoia told her she’d “rolled her finger” but video evidence showed that she hadn’t, and several who saw the video backed up her protests that she did not roll her finger.
While experts say it’s nearly impossible to tamper with computerized voting machines, Eva Waskell, a Virginia woman who studied election issues, said that the problem was that while they’re hard to tamper with, once you do, it’s nearly impossible to discover the tampering.
Doug Kellner, the then-commissioner for the New York City board of elections, said that risks were too great and outweighed the benefits of computerized voting machines.
“It’s extraordinarily difficult to commit fraud with electronic voting machines,” he said in a 1995 news article. “But once you succeed, it’s completely undetectable.”
Bernecker later participated in a test by Harri Hursti known as the Hursti Hack which showed how it was possible to alter votes recorded on Diebold optical scan voting machines.
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