Everything's 'fine,' election officials say after machine tests

Shea Hicks, chairman of the election board, calibrates the first of 75 machines that need to be tested. Four other machines, used for absentee voting have already been tested.
Gordon County elections officials spent a full day testing the electronic touch-screen voting machines for the March 2 presidential primary and found no security concerns with the equipment.

?Everything went fine,? said Shea Hicks, chairperson of the Gordon County Board of Elections and Registration. ?We have 94 machines in Gordon County, we didn?t find anything that would give us any concern.?

The $54 million electronic voting seemed a hit with voters when it was rolled out for the state elections in 2002. Secretary of State Cathy Cox pronounced the results more accurate than ever before.

The uniform touch-screen system replaced one in which each of Georgia?s 159 counties could choose which type voting equipment to use. That resulted in a crazy quilt mix of optical scanners, punch-cards, lever-activated machines and paper ballots.

But as the state prepares to use the touch-screen voting system again for the March 2 presidential primary, new fears are being raised by some that the system isn?t as fail-safe as originally believed and could be manipulated to steal an election.

Across the country, in fact, computer scientists and political activists are spreading the word through the Internet and other means that any electronic voting system is not fraud proof.

That?s caused some alarms to go off in the state Legislature, where a bill already has been introduced requiring the machines to be modified to kick out paper records that could be scrutinized in case of a recount or close election.

Hicks said county elections personnel worked all day Monday performing logic and accuracy tests on the county?s machines and found no problems.

On March 2, voters can choose to vote in either the Democrat or Republican primary, Hicks said. The remaining Democratic hopefuls ? at this point Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.; Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.; Vermont Gov. Howard Dean; Rep. Dennis Kusinich, D-Ohio, and civil rights activist Al Sharpton ? will be on the Georgia ballot.

On the Republican side, only President George W. Bush, who has no primary opposition, is on the March 2 ballot.

Also on the ballot is a straw poll about the Georgia flag, Hicks said.

?Voters will get to choose between the 2001 flag and the 2003 flag,? she said. ?That could create some interest for the primary.

Hicks predicted a 20 percent turnout in the county.

Secretary of State Cox said she has no worries about the system?s security.

?I have been and remain completely confident in the accuracy and security of the system. It is not because I believe the machines are perfect but because of the protocol we have put into Georgia law about how these machines must be tested, and all the checks and balances we have in the system,? Cox said.

The most critical report so far about Georgia?s system came in a study last year by researchers at Johns Hopkins University who concluded the Diebold Election Systems machines used in Georgia are vulnerable to tampering by unscrupulous voters, poll workers, software developers and ?even janitors.?

Among other things, the study said the ATM-like card given to each voter to place in the touch-screen machine is vulnerable to counterfeiting and could be used to cast multiple ballots.

The lead researcher on the study, Avi Rubin, later acknowledged that he failed to disclose that he had financial ties to a Diebold competitor.

Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Cox, said redundant safeguards have been built into the system to protect against fraud and that paper audit trails, created when voters enter the precinct and sign a voter?s certificate, will reveal at a glance if an improper number of votes have been cast.

But many aren?t satisfied with that explanation, including state Sen. Tom Price, R-Roswell, who has introduced a bill requiring the state to create a paper record of each ballot cast.

?There are people ? and I?m one of them ? concerned about the ability to validate election with confidence,? he said. ?What the citizens want is to make certain elections are fair and that, if there?s a question, there?s a check and balance.?

Price said he wasn?t questioning the result of the 2002 election, which turned out extraordinarily well for Republicans. But as people become more familiar with the equipment, he said, ?the possibility for fraud increases.?

Riggall said it?s possible to convert the system to do what Price wants, but that Cox doesn?t believe the cost is worth it.

?After a century or more of using paper in Georgia for elections that have been, in some cases, fraudulent or inaccurate, we think the idea that paper is the gold standard is a false premise,? he said.