Some Texas counties are clinging to the chad

Old vote machines still in use as kinks are worked out of the new

08:48 PM CST on Monday, March 8, 2004

By PETE SLOVER / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – The chad is dead. Long live the chad.

For two more years, anyway.

For all the talk of wiping out the much-maligned punch-card ballots, voters in nine Texas counties will use them when they vote today. Three counties will use the even more ancient lever machine.

Meanwhile, critics are worrying about the accuracy and security of the state-of-the-art technology being developed to replace older systems.
Elections '04

After the Florida recount in 2000 shook the nation's confidence, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. The measure allocated about $4 billion for states to get rid of punch cards and lever voting machines by November 2006.

Replacing punch cards violates a West Texas maxim: If it's not broken, don't fix it, said Sharon Wilson, elections administrator in Ector County, which will use punch cards today.

Replacing the punch cards in the 32 precincts around Odessa will cost the county about $500,000 not in the current budget. "But they've outlawed them, so we'll get rid of them," she said.

The technology that dominates Texas elections – used by 148 counties – is the optical scan ballot, the fill-in-the-dot, machine-read paper ballots.

Coming in second are the cumbersome but dependable hand-counted paper ballots, used by 88 counties.

So far, 13 counties, including Dallas, Collin and Tarrant, have begun employing the latest voting technology, the direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machine that uses touch screens or other input methods to tally votes at the machine. Unlike older technology, it does not use paper ballots, thus does not allow manual recounts.

Dallas and Tarrant counties used electronic machines for early voting but will use only optically scanned paper ballots today.

In Collin County, electronic voting machines debuted last August and will be used today. The 700 touch-screen ballots from Diebold Election Systems of McKinney have received rave reviews from voters and poll workers.

Better, but not perfect

"Every time we have a new machine come in, every time we have moved forward in technology, we've seen more accurate results, faster results that we're better able to audit," said Texas Secretary of State Geoffrey Connor. "That's not to say any voting system is perfect."

But the new devices aren't being praised in all quarters. Many voters and experts have concerns about the potential for tampering.

"Who wants to mess with the results of an election? Could be the voter, a poll worker, trying to mess with machines before the election starts. The bad guy could be the vendor themselves," said Dr. Dan Wallach, a Rice University engineering professor.

"You can't see bits. You can't see the little ones and zeros that are inside the machine. And you can't test for whether those bits worked, either," he said at a recent public forum on election technology.

But election officials said at the same meeting that Texas rules go further than federal law to require results that can be audited.

"Many times, when a computer scientist reviews a piece of equipment, they're not viewing it in the light of the overall environment in which it is expected to operate," said Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir, who oversees elections in Austin.

She said local officials can use locks and cameras for voting security. She also does background checks on poll workers and requires them to work in pairs.

The new machines' design is better, said Bill Stotesbery, a spokesman for Hart InterCivic, which makes the eSlate voting machine used in Brazos, Harris, Tarrant and Travis counties.

"While it may have issues that still have to be resolved and while there are security challenges that we're always going to face, [electronic voting] is no less – certainly, we feel more – secure than older systems," he said.

Machine review board

The new machines have brought attention to a function of Mr. Connor's office: a certification program under which a six-member board reviews new machines to advise the secretary of state whether to approve them.

The group meets three times a year behind closed doors, a policy Mr. Connor said is legal because the panel is strictly advisory. He said that policy assures voting machine vendors that their trade secrets won't be spilled and preserves sensitive security data.

Interest groups and scientists such as Dr. Wallach have pushed for the meetings to be opened, pointing to other states, such as California, that hold public hearings. The "source code" – the guts of the voting machine software – should be subject to scrutiny, to flush out weaknesses and reassure the public, Dr. Wallach said.

Mr. Connor has formed an advisory panel to study electronic voting and recommend changes to the Legislature next year.

Dr. Wallach and other engineers say the simplest way to reassure voters and prevent tampering is to provide a paper printout from which the voter can confirm his vote, and which can be kept to perform a hand recount if needed.

"A bunch of computer nerds are telling you that paper's a good thing," he said. "The purpose of an election is not to name the winner, it's to convince the loser they lost. ... With paper, a recount means something."

Staff writers Frank Trejo and Jeff Mosier contributed to this report.