Plenty of risks associated with touch-screen voting

GUEST OPINION, Ed Kleinow
 Published by news-press.com on February 12, 2004
I am pleased that The News-Press has taken the position that we need to have a voter verifiable paper record of our votes in case a recount is required. However, the editorial failed to state the case strongly enough to make the readers aware of the magnitude of the risks associated with the new electronic touch-screen voting devices. I have over 20 years experience working for one of the international accounting and consulting firms, and I have audited the computer systems of Fortune 500 corporations and large financial institutions.

I can tell you that these electronic voting systems do not pass the most basic of tests that would enable an auditor to rely on them to produce accurate and complete results. Although these new systems are a great improvement in terms of ease of use and their ability to prevent over-voting and under-voting, they are subject to a variety of new security, reliability and accuracy risks.

You expect a paper receipt when you go to the grocery store. How many times have you done a basic “audit” of your grocery receipt to verify that you were not overcharged? What if Publix did not print a receipt but told you to trust them that their scanners and back office computers were always accurate? No one is suggesting that you get a receipt for your vote to take home, but the election officials need it to do a recount. There’s a lot more at stake here than being over charged for a box of Cheerios.

Defective hardware or software bugs could cause your vote not to be counted. Without a printed copy of your vote, a recount cannot be conducted to catch a voting machine error. Malicious program code (virus) could be ed into the electronic voting machines that “wakes up” on election day, after the county does its pre-election testing, changes or erases votes, and then removes itself from the system. The audit trail that is printed at the end of the day would reflect the changed votes and no recount from that point forward would detect it.

Although this seems a far-fetched scenario, consider the widely reported case of the last statewide election in Georgia in which Diebold, the vendor of its electronic voting machines, installed untested and uncertified code into every machine in that state days prior to the election. An intentional or unintentional error by a Diebold employee or a hacker could have changed the election results. During a recent review of Maryland’s new voting machines, Michael A. Wertheimer, a consultant hired by the state to conduct the review stated: “You’re more secure buying a book from Amazon.com than you are uploading your results to the Diebold server.”

And the software used to count votes is not available for public scrutiny. The vendors have fought in court to protect their code as proprietary and have so far been successful. No one can look inside the “Black Box” to see how it works.

There have been numerous cases reported across the country of electronic voting machines that did not operate properly or miscounted votes, as well as elections being called into question. Fortune magazine has named electronic voting machines the “Worst technology of 2003.”

Because of these issues, California’s Secretary of State recently decreed that its electronic voting machines would require a voter-verified paper trail.

Legislation before Congress can correct these problems. The Voter Confidence and Accessibility Act of 2003 (HR2239) would require a voter-verifiable paper record of your vote, ban the use of undisclosed software, require electronic voting systems be available for the disabled and require that surprise recounts be conducted for half of one percent of all jurisdictions. This legislation needs your support. Call or write your representatives to express your opinion on this critical issue.

By the way, let’s not overlook other big election issues such as the way Florida systematically disenfranchised thousands of individuals who were removed from the registration list because their names were similar to convicted felons. We need to make sure the entire process is secure, accurate and reliable and that everyone who is registered and wants to vote has their vote counted. With only 537 votes deciding the 2000 presidential election and the circus surrounding the recount, it is imperative that we do not have a repeat of that fiasco.