Ready or Not (and Maybe Not), Electronic Voting Goes National

Just over six weeks before the nation holds the first general election in which touch-screen voting will play a major role, specialists agree that whatever the remaining questions about the technology's readiness, it is now too late to make any significant changes.

Whether or not the machines are ready for the election - or the electorate ready for the machines - there is no turning back. In what may turn out to be one of the most scrutinized general elections in the country's history, nearly one-third of the more than 150 million registered voters in the United States will be asked to cast their ballots on machines whose accuracy and security against fraud have yet to be tested on such a grand scale.

Because of the uncertainties, experts say there is potential for post-election challenges in any precincts where the machines may malfunction, or where the margin of victory is thin. Sorting out such disputes could prove difficult.

"The possibility for erroneous votes or malicious programming is not as great as critics would have you believe," said Doug Chapin, the director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan group tracking election reform. "But it's more than defenders of the technology want to admit. The truth lies somewhere in between."

Since the 2000 presidential election and its contentious aftermath, voting systems that record votes directly on a computer - as opposed to those that use mechanical levers or optically scanned paper ballots - have quickly moved to the center of a rancorous debate. The disagreement pits those who see them as unacceptably vulnerable to vote manipulation and fraud against those who see them as an antidote to the wretched hanging chad.

Even in the final run-up to November's elections, the issue remains in flux. In California, the machines have been certified, decertified and recertified again. In Ohio, a closely contested state, an electronic upgrade to the state's predominantly punch-card system was halted in July by the secretary of state there, who cited unresolved security concerns.

All the while, a vocal mixture of computer scientists, local voting-rights groups and freelance civic gadflies have relentlessly cited security flaws in many of the machines, with some going so far as to say that the flaws could be intentional and accusing the major companies of having ties to conservative political causes.

The companies and election officials have fought back bitterly, accusing the activists of being wild-eyed fearmongers. A study released by Electionline.org last month would seem to suggest that partisan politics plays less of a role than critics have claimed.

That report found "no industrywide partisan trend to political contributions among the largest election system companies." The leader in the electronic voting machine market, Diebold, and its executives have given more than $400,000 to Republican interests since 2001, the study found. But other large companies, including Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems, "gave a slight edge to Democratic candidates and party organizations."

Concerns over the security and accuracy of the machines have proved harder to dispel, though, and they have not always come from the fringe.

At the end of June, two prestigious groups - the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights - issued a set of recommendations for technical upgrades and procedures that they said could help shore up high-tech voting systems in time for the November elections.

Nancy Zirkin, the deputy director of the Leadership Conference, said she thought that the report had been taken seriously, but conceded that the group did not know how many states or precincts had actually adopted the recommendations.

Other critics say that too little has been done in response to numerous problems - and that it is now too late to do much more before the election, because software and technology have to be tested and "frozen" well ahead of voting to avoid malfunctions and electoral chaos.

"Switching now, approximately 40 days before the election, would probably introduce more security problems than it would avoid," said Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who brought many of the vulnerabilities in voting systems to light.

Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, is among those who wonder whether the technology is ready for prime time. As she tried out one of Maryland's new machines at a folk festival last weekend, an apparent slip of her hand generated a "no" vote when she intended to vote "yes," before the error was caught and corrected.

By last Monday, Ms. Mikulski had signed on to Senate legislation that would require all electronic voting terminals around the nation to generate a paper record for each vote. But there are no such capabilities in the AccuVote TS touch-screen systems that will be used throughout Maryland and in many other states that have adopted touch screens or other electronic voting devices. And it is too late to add them.

The Maryland system is far from foolproof, in the view of Michael Wertheimer, a computer security consultant with RABA Technologies, who was hired by the state of Maryland last year to conduct a mock hacking attack against the Diebold machines. A number of security holes were found, including one in the Microsoft operating system that runs the election software, which did not have up-to-date security patches. The flaws, Mr. Wertheimer said, could allow tampering and skewed election results.

He also noted that in the presidential primary election last March, Maryland used software on its machines that had not been certified by independent testing authorities, and thus violated state law.

But Linda Lamone, the administrator of the state's election laws, has repeatedly stated that her office has taken the necessary steps to improve the Diebold machines. She says that issues of uncertified software have been corrected and that Maryland's election system is secure.

The Maryland Court of Appeals appears to agree. On Tuesday, the court rejected a suit brought by a Maryland voter group, TrueVoteMD, which sought to force the state to further improve security on its machines and offer voters a paper-ballot alternative.

Nevada, another state that will make near-universal use of touch-screen voting in November, purchased machines manufactured by Sequoia that produce a paper record - a move that received high marks earlier this month from the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative group in Washington. "Without an actual paper ballot, we are then left with only the computer's word for the election results," the group said in a news release accompanying its informal "Election Preparedness Scorecard" three weeks ago.

The group gave grades of F to several states - including Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Tennessee - based on their degree of reliance on paperless electronic voting. Florida, whose results will almost certainly receive intense scrutiny, received an F-plus, while Georgia was given an F-minus. New Mexico, a swing state that will rely heavily on touch-screen voting on Nov. 2, received a D-minus.

Harris N. Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group that represents many of the voting machine makers, concedes that the industry has probably not been sensitive enough to the political nuances surrounding voting technology - particularly in the aftermath of the 2000 election. But he argued that the fears expressed by many of those opposed to electronic voting are driven as much by ignorance as by passion.

"What we're replacing is a system that was broken - so broken that Congress passed a special law," he said, referring to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which was designed to help overhaul the nation's election system in the aftermath of the 2000 debacle. "It was so broken that Congress appropriated over a billion dollars to fix it," he said.

The law, which established the Election Assistance Commission, generally encourages the movement away from punch cards and the exploration of other voting technologies. The law also calls for the federal standards agency, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, to develop universal standards for voting systems. But the agency says the $500,000 Congress appropriated last year for such efforts has been exhausted, and Congress did not provide additional funds for the effort in 2004.

As for security concerns, Mr. Miller said that vendors submit their source code - the underlying instructions for the machines' software - for independent inspection, to uncover any hidden programming and to ensure that the machines calculate properly.

Critics, however, point out that the labs inspecting the software are typically paid by the vendors themselves, and that they somehow failed to uncover the flaws discovered by Mr. Wertheimer, Professor Rubin, and election officials in Ohio, Maryland and elsewhere.

While it is too late in the game to make it possible to produce a paper record for each vote on every machine already deployed, Mr. Miller said that vendors would be willing to include that feature in the future if the market demanded it. Most of the major vendors have models that can supply a printed record, but in most cases, Mr. Miller said, election officials have not required it.

Paper receipts are not automatically required because no such universal guideline has ever existed. Mechanical lever machines, for instance, which have been in widespread use since the 1930's - and will still be used by millions of voters this year - have never produced a paper record of each vote. And states have traditionally established their own definitions of what constitutes a ballot.

Still, the scrutiny and criticism that have dogged electronic voting machines over the last year all but guarantee that a pall of suspicion and distrust will hang over a technology that awaits approximately 45 million registered voters if they go to the polls. Whether the concerns are justified or overblown, experts say, in the wake of the 2000 election controversy, the mere hint of unreliability this time could turn the electronic vote, should the margin of victory be narrow, into one more tinderbox.

"The woods aren't any drier than they were in 2000," Mr. Chapin of Electionline.org is fond of saying, "but there are a lot more people with matches."

That is a point that Edward S. Morillo, a representative of the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters in California, would probably concede. Mr. Morillo travels the county acquainting voters with the Sequoia AVC Edge, the voting machine that will be used there on Nov. 2.

As patients and employees took turns poking at the screen, an occasional "What is it?" or "Oops!" seemed to foretell what ballot workers might expect on Election Day.

Mr. Morillo said that reactions to the touch screens have generally been mixed, and that Santa Clara County - like every California county where similar electronic voting is in place - would offer a paper ballot alternative for those who, for whatever reason, are not comfortable with the machines.

"The thing about the touch screen,'' he said, "is that you either love it or hate it."

Sherry Tesler for The New York Times
Voters in Santa Clara, Calif., will use the Sequoia AVC Edge on Nov. 2.

The Hand-Marked Ballot Wins for Accuracy

Missing Voting Machines Snarl Election

Simple solution. Electronic voting machines that will let you vote, then, when you are done voting, the machine will re-cap everything you did, everyone you voted for, so you can make sure you did it correctly. Then, it prints a punchcard and puts it in the bucket, and the punch cards are still actually what are counted.

These machines are a law suit waiting to happen.

Now the loser can claim that the machines didn't work right and the count was off.

We may see another election that takes three, or more, months to resolve.

The excuse machine in churning already. The butterfly ballots were too confusing in 2000, despite having that method for years. Funny how the old battleaxes in Palm Beach can track 10 bingo cards at once and not understand a simple punch ballot. They'll say they're confused by the technology, now, even though they're emailing digital pictures of the grandkids to everyone in cyberspace.

We have the new systems here in MD and they were a little problematic during the Dem primary. Our half-pint Senator Babs Mikulski just recently did a demo for the new machines and had her vote come out wrong! Last week, a judge in MD refused to allow paper ballots as a backup and would not allow the removal of a questionable elections board president, since the election was no near. This is a very liberal state, despite having just elected the first Republican govenor since Agnew. If Bush carries this state, even by a slight margin, expect the electronic ballots to be challanged nationwide. Should be interesting.

IMHO, this election will make the 2000 imbroglio look like child's play.

It may be months before this is decided. And there will be very, very bitter people on both sides.

Unless, of course, President Bush wins by an unassailable margin. Let us hope!

If the idiots in Floriduh couldn't figure out something as simple as punchcard ballots - they'll never get the hang of this.

They'll keep wondering where to put in their ATM card, remove the $20s, or where their Socialist Security check is supposed to pop out.

Or they'll scratch and scratch, hoping to win the lottery.

Fiasco a' comin', folks.

My belief (and it is somewhat informed) is that possibilities for erroneous votes, malicious programming, and vote fraud are at least as great as the critics say.

Look at the Venezula referendum on Chavez, where it is the vote recorded did not match in any way the clear sentiment of the voters. This vote was done on touch-screen machines from a Florida company who had zero experience in the area, and "aided" by Chavez's folks.

As rampant as vote fraud has been in the U.S. for many, many years, touch-screen voting with no paper trail is far worse. I personally like paper ballots; the optical scan systems seem to me to be the best compromise between those who want results immediately (I am glad to wait a day or two for results) and those of us who want to be able to recount effectively.

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