Does rush to voting by touch screens compute?
STEVE TERRELL | The New Mexican
August 22, 2004

At a speech in Santa Fe last week, populist author and radio personality Jim Hightower got a lot of laughs when he referred to new electronic touch-screen voting machines as \\\"faith-based voting.\\\"

But the truth is that many New Mexicans as well as many people across the country have little or no faith in new voting technology. Some say new machines are ripe for fraud, while others say computer errors could cast elections in doubt.

State election officials, however, say most of these fears are bunk.

With fears and confusion spawned from the nightmarish election aftermath in Florida four years ago the recounts, the butterfly ballots and hanging chads more people became aware of potential problems in voting machines.

And with polls continually showing a close contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry for president, all sides are especially sensitive to any possibility that any vote might not be counted.

While many initially hailed the advent of touch-screen voting, some computer scientists and activists say the new machines might be more problematic than the old ones.

\\\"As a computer scientist, I thought at first touch-screen machines was a great idea,\\\" Charlie Strauss, a computer scientist who works for Los Alamos National Laboratory, said last week.

But the closer he looked at it, Strauss said, he became convinced that the new technology represented a \\\"rush to market\\\" by companies to sell voting machines that comply with the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the Florida debacle.

The law requires each polling place to have at least one machine that can accommodate the visually impaired, the disabled and speakers of different languages.

This means New Mexico must buy about 1,400 new machines by 2006. Federal money granted to the state will be used to pay for these.

But many of the new machines certified by the state contain \\\"basic freshman programming errors\\\" that could lead to lost ballots, inaccurate votes and no way to recount, Strauss said.

Strauss is a cofounder of Verified Voting New Mexico, a Santa Fe-based group advocating the use of voting machines with a backup \\\"paper-trail\\\" system.

However, state election director Denise Lamb in a recent interview dismissed some scenarios of machine failures or manipulation as \\\"pie-in-the-sky paranoia.\\\"

Whoever is right, most New Mexicans will not be using the new touch-screen machines in November. A few counties have purchased some new machines. Santa Fe County isn\\\'t one of them. Last month, outgoing County Clerk Becky Bustamante decided to hold off on buying 56 new machines. Her decision was driven by the controversy, she said.

Strauss said he\\\'d rather see New Mexico use the old voting machines in most counties.

\\\"New Mexico, for all the weird things that go on, actually has one of the best voting systems in the country,\\\" Strauss said.

\\\"My concern is not for this election,\\\" he said. \\\"I\\\'m looking at the future.\\\" He said he doesn\\\'t want the state to rush to buy expensive voting machines with known problems. \\\"Let\\\'s wait for good machines,\\\" he said.

Strauss said he\\\'s not as worried about voting fraud as much as he is human error.

Verified Voting New Mexico and similar groups around the country have called for paper-trail machines, which print out a record when voters cast ballots on a touch screen.

With these machines, voters can examine but not touch the paper record before casting their ballot. Once the voter is finished, the machine s the paper into a secure ballot box. The paper ballots would be used in case of a recount.

But like many election officials across the country, Lamb, who also is president of the National Association of State Election Directors, is skeptical about paper-trail machines.

Having printers on voting machines would create problems of their own if the printers malfunctioned, she said. Plus, the paper records could cause long lines at the polls since voters would have to check the paper record.

Such long lines could result in some people going home instead of waiting, Lamb said. And many voters probably would not bother to check the paper ballot against the touch screen, Lamb said.

\\\"They tried this in Sacramento, and they couldn\\\'t force the voters to stay and read it,\\\" she said.

She also argued that paper printouts in such machines would be unwieldy. Strauss said there already are paper-trail machines on the market that do not have that problem.

\\\"This all started because of Florida,\\\" she said. \\\"But in Florida, the problems weren\\\'t caused by electronic machines. They were caused by systems that use paper.\\\"

The issue of touch screens versus paper trails has produced much heat in the state. Both Lamb and Strauss have accused each other of spreading falsehoods.

Strauss quoted a June 15 article from the San Jose Mercury News that documents close relations between voting-machine companies and election officials.

The story quotes New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, who is the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, saying, \\\"Personally, I\\\'ve known a lot of these people for a long time, and we\\\'ve become a family.\\\"

The story quotes a NASS spokeswoman saying fees paid by manufacturers such as Diebold, ES&S, IBM and Accenture account for more than half of the association\\\'s $420,000 budget.

Lamb said her national organization isn\\\'t funded by voting-machine companies and that her policies aren\\\'t affected by the contributions of the companies to NASS.

Lamb said vehemently there have been no examples of failures by the touch-screen voting machines.

Strauss vehemently disagreed. One example the verified-voting activists point to is the 2002 election in Bernalillo County.

In that election, a 12,000-vote discrepancy was discovered during the canvass. The \\\"missing\\\" votes were from six polling places using touch-screen machines manufactured by a company called Sequoia.

\\\"The votes were never lost,\\\" Lamb said. \\\"It had nothing to do with the machines.\\\" She said the mistake was made by \\\"software outside of the machines\\\" used to report the results.

\\\"It had nothing to do with the machines themselves, and it was caught in the audit,\\\" she said.

Strauss argued, \\\"It\\\'s all part of the same software system.\\\"

He pointed to a recent report in Wired magazine\\\'s online edition about a test of Sequoia\\\'s new paper-trail machine.

\\\"When Sequoia Voting Systems demonstrated its new paper-trail electronic voting system for state Senate staffers in California last week, the company representative got a surprise when the paper trail failed to record votes that testers cast on the machine,\\\" the Wired article says.

According to Wired, the machine worked without problems when tested with an English-language ballot. But when the testers switched to a Spanish-language ballot, the paper trail showed no votes cast for two questions on the ballot.

\\\"That was bad news for the voting company, whose paper-trail, touch-screen machine will be used for the first time next month in Nevada\\\'s state primary. The company advertises that its touch-screen machines provide \\\'nothing less than 100 percent accuracy\\\',\\\" the article said.

A Sequoia spokesman told Wired that the paper trail worked. \\\"If this happened in an election, the first voter would see it and could call a poll worker. They would take the machine out of service if they saw a problem,\\\" the spokesman said.

Strauss said the state should wait until the National Institute of Standards and Technology comes out with new standards before purchasing new voting machines.

Lamb said she doubts the new standards would call for paper-trail machines. \\\"It would surprise me if the same group that created standards for the international banking system, which is paperless, would require paper for voting machines,\\\" she said.

Currently no paper-trail machines have been certified in New Mexico. Strauss claims state elections officials have \\\"poisoned the well\\\" against manufacturers of those machines, which Lamb denies.

\\\"The secretary of state needs to undo the damage and proactively recruit manufacturers\\\" of paper-trail machines, Strauss said.