High-Tech Voting Raises Questions
Anyone who ever has used a computer has had this sinking feeling: Will that frozen screen reboot? Can those pages made indecipherable by the word processor be recovered? Can those mangled documents be pulled out of the printer? Everyone understands one simple truism: Computer programs do not always operate the way they should.
But what if the computer in question is the one that a citizen just entrusted with his precious vote? Will that vote be counted, or will it disappear into cyberspace? After the fiasco of the butterfly ballots in Florida in 2000, many jurisdictions rushed to install computer-based voting systems. Brian Hancock, an election-research specialist for the Federal Election Commission (FEC) tells Insight that 12.2 percent of registered voters in the United States in 2000 used touch-screen-type terminals, which store each voter's choices in a memory cartridge, diskette or smart card, then tally those choices with those of all voters in the jurisdiction. This so-called "direct-recording-electronic"(DRE) device, like a mechanical lever system, uses no paper ballot and virtually has no hard-copy audit trail.
So what if the machine fails? What if the code is faulty? What if someone with access to the machine tampers with the code? What if the code displays one action on the screen but tallies something else? What if a politician whose name appears on the ballot screen owns the company that writes the code? These are real questions that already have arisen, and they may become more important as the nation moves quickly to universal use of computer-based systems.
Hancock says that in the 2002 midterm elections the state of Georgia went entirely to a DRE system, and Maryland used DRE technology for elections in its largest counties. There will be more. On Oct. 29, President George W. Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act, which provides funds to help state governments upgrade older voting machines. Rebecca Mercuri, an assistant professor of computer science at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, tells Insight that during the next decade U.S. and Canadian officials will spend $2 billion to $4 billion to upgrade electronic voting systems. But she is convinced these officials are spending those billions of taxpayer dollars on new technology that very few of them fully understand.
What those officials do understand, she says, is that they are buying something that is audited internally and not open to public scrutiny -- because the jurisdictions are required to sign trade-secret agreements that preclude the equipment from being opened and the programming codes from being inspected without a court order. "We know that [some of] these machines have lost votes and have come up with zeroes at the end of the day," she tells Insight, noting hundreds of postelection reports of voting computers "locking up, jamming and having to be rebooted. What is going on with these machines we have no way of knowing."
Shortly after the 2000 elections, Mercuri testified before the House Science subcommittee on the Environment, Technology and Standards, telling the congressmen, "Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else and prints out yet another result."
Computer algorithms make the DRE systems work, explained Dennis Vadura of the California technology firm AccuPoll Holding Corp. The software code implements the election rules and regulations of the jurisdiction where the voting machines will be used. "That is what makes the machine present the correct information to the voter," he says. The code programs such things as candidates' names, referendum choices or the time when polls are to be open or closed. It is those instructions that are being submitted for review.
Vadura supports keeping the codes proprietary. From a business standpoint, he explains, typically the goal of the software company is to keep the code it developed a trade secret. "I don't want my competitor to see it because I might have certain abilities or techniques that we implemented in our code that give us a competitive advantage." But he adds, "You have to balance that [business need] with [the question], 'How can people trust it?'"
Vadura says he understands calls for making the software freely available to the public. But even a publicly owned firm such as AccuPoll would be reluctant openly to relinquish its code, because of profit responsibilities to its stockholders.
Vadura indicated paper-verified ballots are more auditable but still would not eliminate software glitches or the potential for unverified code. "But the approach we took is our tallies are effectively out in the open," he says. "The two numbers have to match, paper versus electronic. If they do, there is no nefarious intent -- by definition." The voter-verifiable paper ballot is a check and balance on the reality that hundreds of lines of computer code for each individual voting machine cannot otherwise be verified without spending an awful lot of money, Vadura says.
Trusting the local election officials may be hard enough for some voters after recent fiascos. "There is no such thing as a perfect election. You've just got too many variables," says R. Doug Lewis, director of the Election Center, a service association for election officials. "There are 6,800 election jurisdictions and roughly 18,000 election officials, 1.4 million poll workers, 200,000 polling places. You are going to end up with some mistakes." But he adds that, because of the 2000 election, all elections are under a microscope, noting that "those in Florida are under an electron microscope."
Lewis appears to confirm Mercuri's allegations. Many jurisdictions program their election software themselves, he says, and even then the accuracy of the code is only as good "as the attention span of the person on the day that they [typed it in]."
According to Lewis, FEC standards are used as the national qualification to ensure that voting systems count and record votes accurately by examining software code and how the code is developed. But, he adds, "We don't get into much evaluating of whether the code is well-written as much as [seeing that] it does what the vendor says it does and does so accurately." Fewer than 20 companies that design election systems can survive the testing and certification process, he says.
Not all critics of paperless voting systems are computer experts. Lewis suggests the main roadblock that keeps technology from spreading more quickly in the election process is elected officials, not election officials. "Elected officials, legislatures, county commissioners hate that sort of thing. They don't necessarily like to change the way they got elected," he says.
Secondly, he says, the general public only now is beginning to wean themselves from a physical piece of paper for a ballot, because there has been a desire to have a hard-copy ballot to go back to in a recount during a close election.
Most election errors are equipment errors, with occasional programming errors due to a programmer setting up a ballot incorrectly or accidentally skipping a candidate, Lewis acknowledges. But errors usually are discovered very quickly, he says, and usually are limited to only one or two precincts instead of being county- or statewide.
The reason for the programming errors, he explains, is that ballot styles within a state can differ with each jurisdiction's grouping of candidates. It depends on how many races actually are listed on a state's ballot. For example, some states have more appointed officers, such as judges, so they won't have as many election contests to list. "Other states have judges, dogcatchers, precinct committeemen, and the ballot gets really long," Lewis says. "You don't just program one ballot into the computer. You program every different ballot style that is necessary for you to have in an election."
Avante International Technology Inc. of Princeton, N.J., has been developing smart-card technology since 1995. It now has a patent pending for its Vote-Trakker system, which the company says is a voter-verifiable election system with real-time paper audit trails. Vote-Trakker was the first DRE touch-screen voting machine used in the state of California that incorporated a real-time, voter-verifiable printed ballot image. It made its debut in Sacramento County for the 2002 midterm election.
But Avante researcher James Minadeo agrees with Mercuri that illicit code and hacking are a threat to computerized voting. "Any system in the world can be hacked at some point," he admits.
In addition to using touch-screen voting, Vote-Trakker prints a record of recorded votes on a paper ballot that is shown under a protective cover so that it cannot be removed from the polling station. One problem with paper ballots is vote selling. Paper verification of the vote of a person allowed to leave the polling place could be manipulated to allow the unscrupulous to exchange contrived paper "proof" for cash.
With Vote-Trakker, the printer retracts the paper ballot after the voter has reviewed it and stores it as a paper backup to the electronic tabulation. Further, each ballot is encoded with a verification number to secure its authenticity, but it is encrypted to ensure voter privacy. The technology also records when a voter intentionally chooses not to vote in a specific political race, Minadeo says.
Despite critics' charges that the certification process is lax, Minadeo says that independent testing authorities (ITAs), which perform line-by-line code reviews, do on occasion turn up unacceptable coding in submitted software. He acknowledges that ITAs don't let everyone look at the codes they inspect, although the source codes are escrowed: "So if there is a suspicion of fraud you can open that source code, and then everyone can examine it under a court order," he says.
However, the courts may require stronger evidence beyond accusations that the machines inaccurately have recorded votes. One complication is that, without the paper backup, proving accusations of irregularities could be difficult.
Voting-system designers have their own security concerns, says Minadeo, including election officials who are very close to the inspection process and suddenly get hired by the other companies. He recounted one recent incident in California, where the official who directed the certifying of voting-system technical packages now is working for the competition. "He has all of your manuals and knows everything about your system because he actually inspected it and tested it and [now] he is working for [our competitors], Minadeo fumes. The former California official now is being investigated by the state, Minadeo says, because other voting-system companies also have complained.
Finally, what happens when a politician on the ballot owns the computer-software system displaying his name? Election Systems & Software (ES&S), according to its Website, is the world's largest and most experienced provider of total election-management systems and "has handled more than 40,000 of the world's most important events -- elections." The company's products were used in the 2000 general election to count more than 100 million ballots. ES&S is a subsidiary of the McCarthy group, a private Omaha merchant banking organization founded in 1986. U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) has come under scrutiny because of his associations with ES&S and McCarthy, in which he still owns shares.
Hagel has been forthcoming and public about his business-interest ties with the election-product manufacturer. According to a fact sheet provided by Hagel's staff, prior to his November 1996 election to the U.S. Senate, he served as president of McCarthy and Co., a private investment-banking firm, and as an interim chairman of American Information Systems Inc. (AIS), an election-software company in which McCarthy and Co. owns an interest. AIS since has been renamed ES&S. Moreover, McCarthy and Co. Chief Executive Officer Michael McCarthy was the treasurer of Hagel's re-election campaign. Hagel is on record as having disclosed that he still holds $1 million to $5 million in McCarthy stock. Despite his full disclosure the connection continues to make the senator a target for dyspeptic critics who claim to see an unethical conflict between being a vote seeker and being part owner of the vote-counting machinery.
The company fact sheet points out that Hagel resigned his brief chairmanship of AIS two weeks before announcing his candidacy for the Senate at the end of March 1995. The following January, he resigned from his position as president of McCarthy and Co. Furthermore, the fact sheet notes that his hometown newspaper also is a substantial investor in ES&S. "Neither Sen. Hagel, McCarthy and Co., nor the Omaha World-Herald has failed to disclose its relationship with AIS or ES&S," it states. "The information is both documented and public."
AccuPoll's vote-verifiable technology is similar to Vote-Trakker, and AccuPoll's final certification is expected within weeks, according to Vadura. But AccuPoll Holding Corp. is one of the few publicly owned companies in the election-systems industry, and therefore is subject to full disclosure, say critics.
Bonnie Cuellar, a proposal manager for ES&S, says electronic-voting systems such as the paperless one sold by ES&S are subjected to examination by ITAs. Once approved they are certified by the National Association of Secretaries of State or the National Association of State Election Directors. ITA testing complies with the FEC's purchasing standards, and ES&S products go through both ITA and state-level testing, Cuellar says.
But even Cuellar admitted that the ITAs cannot test every voting machine and software cartridge. Voting-system manufacturers are only required to bring in a sample of the specific model that will be certified for use in that state, both hardware and software, Cuellar explains. "Obviously, you can't bring in the actual machines because you may have a jurisdiction that purchases, let's say, 1,000 of these," she says. "So you are going to bring in one that is the same as the one you actually would be using."
Nevertheless Mercuri is not impressed with the real-time performance of the Omaha-based firm. "When you look at ES&S in the latest November election, you see disaster all over the country!" she charges.
Another issue is that election personnel are low on the learning curve when it comes to basic security standards and procedures, warns Eva Waskell of the computer-industry association Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Election officials frequently turn to the vendors of voting systems for advice about security or for help in running elections because the states have no in-house technical expertise available. "Furthermore, the election community is not in regular contact with the computer-science community and so is unable to tap into a vast amount of knowledge and skills that could otherwise be used to assist in running elections efficiently," she warned in a briefing paper almost 10 years ago.
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