There is no political event more dangerous than a general election. Even in what are called the ‘mature democracies’, elections bring out hidden weaknesses in a nation’s structure that can be stretched to breaking point, and if wise counsels do not prevail, no-one can predict what might happen.
The best example of this sort of situation is the US presidential election of November 2000. The result was extremely close -- George W Bush, the Republican candidate, beat his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, by only 0.5 percent of the votes -- 48.4 against 47.9 percent!
Such a close vote always brings allegations of hanky-panky. Speculations become rife over what might have been, had it not been for… What follows the “for” is anybody’s game.
In the US election under question, there were reports about votes disallowed because of “hanging chads” and “pregnant chads” caused by faulty voting machines.
There were also allegations of fraudulent counting, and many others. So emotionally charged became the atmosphere that even when the matter reached the US Supreme Court, not everyone was prepared to accept the Court’s judgement -- given in favour of George W Bush -- as a genuine judgment based on legal argument, rather than a partisan judgement rendered by the Court in line with the political
leaning of its members.
(The US is one of the few democracies in which judges are openly branded as “conservative” or “liberal”, and almost invariably satisfy the cynics by voting in precisely the way it has been predicted they will vote!
Fortunately for the US (and this is why it is called a “mature democracy”) at the point where the very existence of the Supreme Court became threatened because of the tension created by what many considered to be the usurpation of the American people’s democratically-delivered verdict by the Court -- or more exactly, the conservative members of the Court who voted in favour of a Bush victory -- the person who stood most to gain from an opposite decision by the Court, Al Gore, called off further challenges of the verdict.
What could have happened “if” Gore had gone on with more legal and political challenges? One possibility is that the US armed forces and the US security services could have split along political lines to reflect the division of the country at large, with the result that a civil war might have ensued, Can you imagine a civil war inside the only super-power left on earth?
In an “immature democracy”, Kenya, on the other hand, a ‘minor’ civil war did occur, when, in December 2007, election results were declared in a manner that the populace saw as manipulated to favour the tribe of the incumbent President, who was seeking re-election. Several thousand people were killed in inter-ethnic fighting that arose out of the dissatisfaction with the elections results as declared.
Thousands more were chased put of their homes, and for a while, it looked as if Kenya would be divided along ethnic lines. Certain areas became de facto “no-go” areas to certain ethnic groups.
The Kenya situation was repeated in Zimbabwe in March and June 2008, and nearly re-played in Ghana in December 2008. What saved Ghana, after an extremely close runoff between our two candidates, Prof John Evans Mills and Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo (neither of whom had been able to win over 50% of the vote in the first round) was that the outgoing President, John Kufuor, had the prescience to conclude from the situation on the ground that any prolongation of the tension created by the electoral result pull-and-stretch might toss the nation out with the presidential seat altogether.
What would the anxious crowds all over the country who were cursing the Electoral Commission for delaying the results have done if it had known then, what has been just revealed in a report published in the Johannesburg Sunday Times of 24th October 2010?
The report tells the world for the first time that the much-hailed general election in South Africa in May 1994, in which the African majority took part in such an event for the very first time ever, was nearly ruined when a computer hacker was able to change the results of three of the minority parties that contested the election against the African National Congress (ANC)!
Aptly entitled ‘Plot to steal freedom’, the Sunday Times account says: “In this edited extract from his ground-breaking book Birth: The Conspiracy to Stop the '94 Election, Peter Harris recalls the tension that followed the discovery of … an elaborate attempt to inflate the votes of the National Party, the Freedom Front and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), [in order] to steal the country's first democratic elections through computer hacking.”
Computer hacking? In South Africa, the most technologically-advanced nation on the African continent? If election results could be hacked in a South Africa on which the eyes of the entire world were riveted at that particular time, then what chance does the rest of Africa have, with its cheap “systems” (sometimes donated by foreign governments and therefore primitive)?
Peter Harris writes: “The hacker went in between 05:56 and 06:41 on the morning of 3 May [1994] and made changes to the vote count of three parties…I meet with Michael Yard of the forensic investigation team in my office at eight o'clock on Wednesday morning, 4 May 1994. He is exhausted, his eyes bloodshot and outlined by thick black lines of fatigue. He hands me a two-page report.
"Is that it?" I ask.
"That's all you need," he replies, an unhealthy rasp in his voice. "I'll talk you through it."
"The hacker went in between 05:56 and 06:41 on the morning of 3 May and made changes to the vote count of three parties,” he says. “Neil Cawse picked up early that morning that there was a significant increase in the number of total votes counted nationwide (in the order of one to four million)."
"Surely this couldn't have been easy to do. I mean, the administration division told us that this was an incredibly sophisticated system, foolproof, the Fort Knox of systems, completely impregnable. You can't just get into a highly protected IT network and change national election results."
But Harris is further told: "The total votes for all parties at each counting station was also changed, but doesn't match the sum of the vote totals for individual parties after the changes to these figures were made. The new total for all parties per counting station is in between the original correct figure and the sum of the votes per party for the counting station after the changes. So the program was doctored to increase the votes of the three parties by about point thirty-three percent."
It turns out that the changes upward are between two point five percent and four percent for the Freedom Front, approximately three percent for the National Party and between four and five percent for the Inkatha Freedom Party.
Harris writes: “There it is. Silence. I break it. "You and the team are sure of the extent of these changes?" "Oh, absolutely. These were consistent across our data sample and there are always increases to the vote count." It is worse than I thought.”
Harris is only reassured when another officer comes in and tells him: “This is history, it is already past, she says. "We are fixing this. We have no choice but to go on and make it happen. We will get to an honest result."
They do give the nation an honest election result. But they need to find out who the hacker was: “I turn to Michael Yard. "Can you find out who did this?" He points me to the report.
"The NT file server on the network is capable of generating a log of who logged onto or out from the network, and the time that this happened. We checked this log and found that this information is only recorded from 18:10 on 3 May. From this we conclude that this logging process was either cleaned out as of this time, or was only turned on at that time."
"Nice ... very nice," I say, bitterly. "So we can't trace who did this. It is a successful 'hit and run',” Harris adds.
Meanwhile, the South African “Rainbow Nation” about to be born is on tenterhooks. Rumours are rife that the racist right wing groups, with the support of the military, had staged a coup and would soon make an announcement.
Where have we heard that before? It is up to our Electoral Commission to get in touch with its South African counterpart and attack staff to the improved system in South Africa, so that we can be certain that in our next election, everything will go well.
Elections are too important to be left to chance.
The best example of this sort of situation is the US presidential election of November 2000. The result was extremely close -- George W Bush, the Republican candidate, beat his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, by only 0.5 percent of the votes -- 48.4 against 47.9 percent!
Such a close vote always brings allegations of hanky-panky. Speculations become rife over what might have been, had it not been for… What follows the “for” is anybody’s game.
In the US election under question, there were reports about votes disallowed because of “hanging chads” and “pregnant chads” caused by faulty voting machines.
There were also allegations of fraudulent counting, and many others. So emotionally charged became the atmosphere that even when the matter reached the US Supreme Court, not everyone was prepared to accept the Court’s judgement -- given in favour of George W Bush -- as a genuine judgment based on legal argument, rather than a partisan judgement rendered by the Court in line with the political
leaning of its members.
(The US is one of the few democracies in which judges are openly branded as “conservative” or “liberal”, and almost invariably satisfy the cynics by voting in precisely the way it has been predicted they will vote!
Fortunately for the US (and this is why it is called a “mature democracy”) at the point where the very existence of the Supreme Court became threatened because of the tension created by what many considered to be the usurpation of the American people’s democratically-delivered verdict by the Court -- or more exactly, the conservative members of the Court who voted in favour of a Bush victory -- the person who stood most to gain from an opposite decision by the Court, Al Gore, called off further challenges of the verdict.
What could have happened “if” Gore had gone on with more legal and political challenges? One possibility is that the US armed forces and the US security services could have split along political lines to reflect the division of the country at large, with the result that a civil war might have ensued, Can you imagine a civil war inside the only super-power left on earth?
In an “immature democracy”, Kenya, on the other hand, a ‘minor’ civil war did occur, when, in December 2007, election results were declared in a manner that the populace saw as manipulated to favour the tribe of the incumbent President, who was seeking re-election. Several thousand people were killed in inter-ethnic fighting that arose out of the dissatisfaction with the elections results as declared.
Thousands more were chased put of their homes, and for a while, it looked as if Kenya would be divided along ethnic lines. Certain areas became de facto “no-go” areas to certain ethnic groups.
The Kenya situation was repeated in Zimbabwe in March and June 2008, and nearly re-played in Ghana in December 2008. What saved Ghana, after an extremely close runoff between our two candidates, Prof John Evans Mills and Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo (neither of whom had been able to win over 50% of the vote in the first round) was that the outgoing President, John Kufuor, had the prescience to conclude from the situation on the ground that any prolongation of the tension created by the electoral result pull-and-stretch might toss the nation out with the presidential seat altogether.
What would the anxious crowds all over the country who were cursing the Electoral Commission for delaying the results have done if it had known then, what has been just revealed in a report published in the Johannesburg Sunday Times of 24th October 2010?
The report tells the world for the first time that the much-hailed general election in South Africa in May 1994, in which the African majority took part in such an event for the very first time ever, was nearly ruined when a computer hacker was able to change the results of three of the minority parties that contested the election against the African National Congress (ANC)!
Aptly entitled ‘Plot to steal freedom’, the Sunday Times account says: “In this edited extract from his ground-breaking book Birth: The Conspiracy to Stop the '94 Election, Peter Harris recalls the tension that followed the discovery of … an elaborate attempt to inflate the votes of the National Party, the Freedom Front and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), [in order] to steal the country's first democratic elections through computer hacking.”
Computer hacking? In South Africa, the most technologically-advanced nation on the African continent? If election results could be hacked in a South Africa on which the eyes of the entire world were riveted at that particular time, then what chance does the rest of Africa have, with its cheap “systems” (sometimes donated by foreign governments and therefore primitive)?
Peter Harris writes: “The hacker went in between 05:56 and 06:41 on the morning of 3 May [1994] and made changes to the vote count of three parties…I meet with Michael Yard of the forensic investigation team in my office at eight o'clock on Wednesday morning, 4 May 1994. He is exhausted, his eyes bloodshot and outlined by thick black lines of fatigue. He hands me a two-page report.
"Is that it?" I ask.
"That's all you need," he replies, an unhealthy rasp in his voice. "I'll talk you through it."
"The hacker went in between 05:56 and 06:41 on the morning of 3 May and made changes to the vote count of three parties,” he says. “Neil Cawse picked up early that morning that there was a significant increase in the number of total votes counted nationwide (in the order of one to four million)."
"Surely this couldn't have been easy to do. I mean, the administration division told us that this was an incredibly sophisticated system, foolproof, the Fort Knox of systems, completely impregnable. You can't just get into a highly protected IT network and change national election results."
But Harris is further told: "The total votes for all parties at each counting station was also changed, but doesn't match the sum of the vote totals for individual parties after the changes to these figures were made. The new total for all parties per counting station is in between the original correct figure and the sum of the votes per party for the counting station after the changes. So the program was doctored to increase the votes of the three parties by about point thirty-three percent."
It turns out that the changes upward are between two point five percent and four percent for the Freedom Front, approximately three percent for the National Party and between four and five percent for the Inkatha Freedom Party.
Harris writes: “There it is. Silence. I break it. "You and the team are sure of the extent of these changes?" "Oh, absolutely. These were consistent across our data sample and there are always increases to the vote count." It is worse than I thought.”
Harris is only reassured when another officer comes in and tells him: “This is history, it is already past, she says. "We are fixing this. We have no choice but to go on and make it happen. We will get to an honest result."
They do give the nation an honest election result. But they need to find out who the hacker was: “I turn to Michael Yard. "Can you find out who did this?" He points me to the report.
"The NT file server on the network is capable of generating a log of who logged onto or out from the network, and the time that this happened. We checked this log and found that this information is only recorded from 18:10 on 3 May. From this we conclude that this logging process was either cleaned out as of this time, or was only turned on at that time."
"Nice ... very nice," I say, bitterly. "So we can't trace who did this. It is a successful 'hit and run',” Harris adds.
Meanwhile, the South African “Rainbow Nation” about to be born is on tenterhooks. Rumours are rife that the racist right wing groups, with the support of the military, had staged a coup and would soon make an announcement.
Where have we heard that before? It is up to our Electoral Commission to get in touch with its South African counterpart and attack staff to the improved system in South Africa, so that we can be certain that in our next election, everything will go well.
Elections are too important to be left to chance.
