Remember chads? They've hung around
By Jim Drinkard, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The wrenching experience of the 2000 presidential vote recount in Florida set in motion an urgent makeover of the nation's voting systems, designed to get rid of problematic equipment and procedures. But as Election Day 2004 approaches, that job remains far from complete, and the potential for problems is as great as ever.

Three-quarters of American voters will cast ballots Nov. 2 using the same equipment they voted on four years ago. One in eight will be using the same type of punch-card voting machines blamed for many of Florida's problems. Electronic voting, initially seen as the best way to modernize balloting, is now the subject of questions about its security and reliability. Many localities have delayed plans to switch equipment. (Related graphic: Voting methods across USA)

Forty-one states are seeking waivers from a requirement to create statewide voter-registration databases to minimize Election Day confusion; they say they can't do it until at least 2006. And 140,000 U.S. troops risking their lives in Iraq face potential difficulty voting for their commander in chief because of an unreliable mail system.

Against the back of those problems, the Election Assistance Commission, which was created by law in 2002 to help cure the nation's voting ills, will hold its first public meeting today in its new offices. On the agenda: issuing a set of guidelines for local election officials designed to head off trouble on Election Day.

Many other problems persist:

• Money is flowing to states to buy new voting machines, but federal standards for reliability — a stamp of approval that local officials could use to make buying decisions — won't be finished for months. "It's a flaw in the process," concedes DeForest "Buster" Soaries, chairman of the Election Assistance Commission. The only consolation: "States aren't rushing to spend the money," he says, because of doubts about what to buy.

• There are only three laboratories in the country set up to test voting equipment, creating potential bottlenecks. "We have a crisis in testing facilities," commission member Paul DeGregorio says.

• The corps of 1.4 million temporary workers who staff the nation's nearly 200,000 polling places is aging, and training varies widely. The average age of a poll worker is 72. "In many of our jurisdictions, especially in urban settings, if they are breathing, they serve," says Doug Lewis, director of the Election Center, which trains and gives advice to local election officials. The commission is working on a campaign to get corporations and college students involved in providing poll workers.

"The likelihood that we will have some kind of controversy this year has gone up," says Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a Web site that tracks changes in voting systems.

Legions of lawyers

That's largely because more attention than ever will be focused on voting processes this fall. The campaigns of President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry already have enlisted legions of lawyers in the most contested states to scrutinize the voting. "The least likely outcome is that everything goes smoothly on Election Day," Chapin says.

The 2000 recount forced the nation to examine how it votes, a topic that for generations had been ignored by just about everyone except the country's 20,000 state and local election officials. Congress held hearings, and the result was the Help America Vote Act, signed into law by Bush in 2002.

The law created the commission and set aside $3.8 billion to help states and localities upgrade their voting systems by replacing old equipment, creating new computerized lists of registered voters and educating poll workers.

But the effort got off to a rocky start. Commission members were not appointed until last December, nearly 10 months late. Congress neglected to provide the commission with a budget for its own operations. A technical advisory panel to guide standards for new voting equipment met for the first time June 28.

Many were quick to blame Florida's punch-card voting machines for the problems in 2000. They were just as quick to settle on a solution: converting as many jurisdictions as possible to computerized voting equipment, many with touch screens. Officials reasoned that if computers are reliable enough to handle financial transactions in an ATM machine, they should be good for voting as well.

 But closer study revealed a list of potential problems, many of which remain unresolved. Chief among them: the lack of a paper trail that could be recounted in the event of another close election, and the insistence by manufacturers on secrecy about the software that runs the voting machines. While computer experts debated what to do, many localities put their plans to switch equipment on hold.

• California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley barred localities from using electronic voting machines unless they met a list of security requirements or were equipped with printers that would create a paper record of each vote. A federal court last week upheld the requirement; 14 counties, with 43% of the state's voters, are retooling or shelving their electronic voting systems. The state specifically banned the use of a Diebold electronic voting machine in four California counties after problems were experienced in the March 2 primary. Critics of electronic voting are suing Diebold under a whistleblower law, alleging that the company's equipment exposed California elections to hackers and software bugs. Diebold also supplies machines to counties in Georgia and Maryland.

• Florida, which abandoned its punch-card machines in favor of high-tech voting, has found that technology isn't a panacea. The state saw a spate of problems with electronic voting machines in 2002. This year, in a special election held solely for a state House seat in Broward County, there were 134 blank ballots in a race decided by 12 votes. Voting rights groups have sued the state over procedures for recounting votes cast on touch-screen machines.

• Of 31 Ohio counties due to switch from punch cards to computers in November, only four are following through with the change because of the uncertainties. One, Tuscarawas County, was prepared to abandon its Votomatic punch cards and switch to a new computerized system made by Diebold. But after the state mandated that counties add an internal printer to generate a paper copy of each ballot, questions began to come up. For example, could poll workers open the machine to replace a roll of paper without violating a voter's right to a secret ballot?

"It's hard to come up with standards for a paper trail when the federal and state governments have no standards," says the county's election director, Charles Miller. "So we're sticking with punch cards for now."

The Election Assistance Commission considered recommending that all electronic voting machines be equipped with printers. But it rejected the idea when it became clear that there wasn't time to solve all the problems for this year's voting.

Today, skeptics of electronic voting are scheduled to hold "the computer ate my vote" rallies in 24 cities and plan to petition state officials to require paper backups for electronic voting.

'We don't know yet'

One potential solution is a machine that uses a touch screen for voting, then prints out a paper ballot that can be counted on an optical scanner, like those used to score college SAT tests.

"The technology for paper verification is untested, and therefore to put all our eggs in that basket for this November sets us up for a greater unknown than we can tolerate," Soaries says. How can computer voting be made secure? "We don't know yet," he says.

Many complaints from voters who claimed they were deprived of their voting rights in 2000 arose because of confusion about where they were supposed to vote. To alleviate the problem, the 2002 law called for creation of statewide computerized lists of all eligible voters. The lists would help keep up with address changes and would be accessible to officials at each polling place on a computer. If a voter showed up at the wrong polling place, the person could be steered to the proper precinct or given a provisional ballot that would be counted if voting eligibility could later be verified.

But the task proved tougher than states anticipated. Money to help build the databases was slow in coming, and some states experienced problems coordinating the various agencies that help maintain voter lists, including driver's license bureaus. So far, 41 states have told the federal government their databases won't be ready until 2006.

While Congress approved money to help states address their problems, it neglected to fund the commission itself, which doles out the money. The four commissioners and their seven-member staff were forced to work out of borrowed space until April; there was no furniture for their conference room until June.

The agency still lacks a budget to hire an executive director, a general counsel or an inspector general. The White House asked Congress on June 25 to shift $10 million to the commission for operating expenses and research needs, but that money won't be available until October.

"We find ourselves trying to catch up with the parade, so we can jump in front of it," Soaries says.

But there are bright spots. Because of the 2000 experience, election officials will be especially attentive and cautious in the coming months, Soaries says. And some important changes, such as making sure voters whose registration status is questioned can cast provisional ballots, will be in place this year.

"I think we can make it through November without feeling like our pants are down," Soaries says.

With so many tasks incomplete, the Election Assistance Commission today will consider issuing a set of guidelines for local election officials designed to head off election problems. The list will include such things as instructions on how to make the most of punch-card voting machines if that's all that is available.

Chapin says, "They've had a slow start, but they have done a pretty good job of making something out of nothing."