Anxiety surges around electronic voting

By Paul Nussbaum

Philadelphia Inquirer 27 September 2004

What if?

What if you voted for Bush and the voting machine counted it for Kerry? What if the machine ate your vote? What if there was a recount, but no ballots to count?

Those are the kinds of questions fueling anxiety - and lawsuits - as electronic voting machines rapidly replace older methods around the nation.

In this acrimonious election year, with memories still fresh of Florida's lost, miscounted or misvoted ballots, voter confidence in the ballot process has become a prime issue.

About 50 million voters - nearly 30 percent of registered Americans - will be asked to vote on electronic machines in November, up from 13 percent in the last presidential election.

Locally, voters in Philadelphia, Montgomery, Burlington and Gloucester Counties and all three counties in Delaware will use electronic machines this year. And the rest of the region may join them by 2006, as federal requirements push counties to get rid of lever machines or punch-card ballots.

On an electronic machine, a voter typically votes by touching a candidate's name on a ballot on an electronic screen.

Critics of the electronic machines fear they are too vulnerable to human chicanery or computer error. Increasingly, concerns have focused on the machines' lack of a "voter-verifiable paper trail," a paper record of the vote that the voter can inspect and that can be used to check that the vote was accurately registered.

Elections officials and manufacturers say the fears are misplaced; in the Philadelphia area, officials say, the relatively old electronic technology in use is more trustworthy than new-fangled machines elsewhere. And they say the possible flaws of electronic machines must be weighed against the demonstrated problems of the systems they replaced.

Reports of electronic voting mishaps have grown with the machines' prevalence. In 2003, for example, a software error caused electronic machines to record 144,000 votes in Indiana's Boone County, which has fewer than 19,000 voters. In Broward County, Fla., in January, new touch-screen machines failed to record the votes of 134 people in a legislative race, but a recount was impossible because there was nothing to recount. In a 2000 election in Middlesex County, N.J., an electronic machine was taken out of service after 65 votes had been cast. The machine had recorded no votes for the Democrat and Republican candidates for one office, even though 27 and 22 votes, respectively, were recorded for their running mates. A representative of the manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems, said no votes were lost and that voters had simply failed to cast votes for the two candidates. Without a paper trail, it was impossible to resolve the question.

In the 20 years that electronic machines have been in use, no incident of intentional tampering has been proven.

"The machines are not as secure as the vendors would have you believe, and they're not as insecure as the critics would have you believe," said Doug Chapin, director of the Election Reform Information Project (electionline.org), a nonpartisan clearinghouse for election issues. "But there's no doubt that security is important... . We now seem to have a consensus that it's a valid concern. Now what do we do about it?"

Nevada this year will be the first state to require that electronic machines produce a paper record voters can see before leaving the voting booth. The paper record, visible under a window, will then be automatically stored to be available in case of a recount.

Ohio and Washington are to have similar systems in place for 2006. California lawmakers passed a law requiring all electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper trail by 2006; it awaits Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature.

Rep. Rush Holt (D., N.J.) has sponsored a bill to mandate voter-verified paper trails. It has 150 co-sponsors, but Holt concedes it won't move this year because it lacks the support of the Republican leadership.

"I'm sure there will be some more voting irregularities this year that will provide added impetus for the legislation," he said. "The national interest in this continues to grow."

A poll last week showed 42 percent of Americans said they were concerned about potential problems with vote tampering in electronic machines; 38 percent said worried about about the machines' accuracy. The poll was conducted for FindLaw, a legal-affairs Web site.

Much of the negative attention on electronic machines has focused on those made by Diebold Inc., of North Canton, Ohio. And the debate over Diebold's technological flaws became entwined with partisan politics when Walden O'Dell, Diebold CEO and a Bush fund-raiser, wrote in a letter to donors, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President."

O'Dell has since stressed that he would never commit a "treasonous felony atrocity" such as vote tampering. But the letter was "the seminal event" in the debate over electronic machines, said Chapin of the Election Reform Information Project, uniting those worried about technological flaws with "the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people worried about elections being stolen."

Two voting-rights activists sued Diebold in California last year for allegedly lying to state regulators about the security of some of its equipment; the state attorney general this month joined the suit. Diebold said in a statement it would cooperate with the state and said charges that its machines were susceptible to tampering were false.

After the 2000 election, a panel of engineers and social scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology was assembled to study how to improve voting technology.

They found that, in elections from 1988 to 2000, manually counted paper ballots had the lowest incidence of spoiled, uncounted or unmarked, followed closely by lever machines and optically scanned ballots (which the voter marks with pencil and a machine counts). Punch-card ballots and electronic machines did significantly worse, though electronic machines' performance improved in 2000.

That study did not look at other kinds of errors, such as miscounted ballots, or the issue of voter-verifiability of ballots. The group has since strongly endorsed the concept of verifiability, said its co-chairman, R. Michael Alvarez, a political science professor at Caltech.

But verifiability needn't mean a paper trail, said Alvarez. An audio recording might work, or a write-once memory card that would serve as an official ballot.

(The scientists also said in July that 11 states, including Pennsylvania, do not report total ballots cast, "making it nearly impossible to track the performance of equipment and election procedures." They urged the federal Election Assistance Commission to require states to report total ballots cast.)

In the Philadelphia area, election officials say they are generally pleased with their electronic voting machines. None of the counties uses Diebold machines. Philadelphia and the state of Delaware use machines made by Danaher Corp. of Gurnee, Ill.; Montgomery, Burlington and Gloucester counties use machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems, of Oakland, Calif. (Bucks, Camden and Delaware Counties use lever machines, while Chester County uses punch card ballots.)

"I wouldn't go near Diebold if you gave them to me free," said Robert Lee Jr., head of voter registration for Philadelphia. "They're too new, and they break down."

Lee said the Danaher 1242 machines Philadelphia bought in 2001 are faster, more accurate and more secure than the lever machines they replaced. And he noted the lever machines didn't have a paper trail, either, so there was no way to verify an individual voter's intention.

Because the Danaher machines use 20-year-old technology, they don't have adaptable, modern software that could be easily modified by hackers, Lee said. To alter the performance of a voting machine, he said, a person would have to physically take each one apart and put in a new electronic chip.

"We don't have access to the chips, and the vendor doesn't have access to the machines," Lee said.

Lee minimized the value of a paper trail, saying it would be useless unless there was a recount, and that a hand-count of paper ballots creates errors.

In fact, after the 2000 election on the lever machines, an examination of Philadelphia ballots by The Inquirer showed that more than 3,000 votes were miscounted, because of human errors in recording or adding the machines' tabulations.

Lee said that to make sure that what a voter taps in on the front of an electronic machine comes accurately out of the back, "we test, test, test."

Burlington County's elections superintendent, Joanne Nyikita, said the county's 500 Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines, used since 1999, have had no detected discrepancies.