Group wants Ohio's electronic machines to give vote receipts

02/18/04
Sabrina Eaton
Plain Dealer Bureau
Washington

An activist organization headed by the founder of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Tuesday announced it would target Ohio in a $100,000 campaign to demand that the state's electronic voting machines give voters paper receipts.

Joined by the top state election officials of Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire and a computer security expert from Rice University, Ben Cohen expressed fears that hackers could tamper with results from computerized touch-screen voting systems.

Cuyahoga County agreed this week to spend $18 million to purchase such machines from Canton-based Diebold Election Systems, despite security risks found during a review commissioned by Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Elections board Chairman Tom Coyne said the county contract will require Diebold to correct any flaws before the county buys the 6,000 voting stations.

Cohen, who served reporters an ice cream called "Fudged Election Confection," said results from computerized voting machines could be altered unless there's a voter-verified paper trail for use in recounts.

He said the 400,000 members of his online grass-roots group, TrueMajority.org, will target voting officials in 10 states including Ohio with e-mail, faxes and possibly advertisements urging such a requirement.

"Paperless voting systems are far too risky, far too vulnerable," said Dan Wallach of Rice University, co-author of a report that alleged security problems with Diebold's system. The company has disputed his report's conclusions.

In Columbus Tuesday, a pair of state senators, Dayton-area Republican Jeff Jacobson and Toledo Democrat Teresa Fedor, said they would like a bipartisan panel to examine risks of using touch-screen machines and whether paper receipts should be required.

Jacobson told the Associated Press that before Ohio spends $133 million allocated to buy new election machines the federal government mandated after Florida's problems in the 2000 presidential election, the state should "ensure that every potential risk has been addressed so that Ohio voters have confidence in the way their votes are recorded and counted."

But Blackwell's office said requiring paper receipts would add an extra 25 percent to the machines' costs and might delay implementing the new systems beyond the January 2006 federal deadline because the technology is still being developed.

Blackwell said he's concerned that stalling could provoke intervention by U.S. District Court Judge David Dowd, who is presiding over a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that alleges punch-card ballots used in 69 of Ohio's 88 counties are error-prone and disenfranchise voters.

Blackwell said that even advocates of the voter verified paper trail disagree on how it should be done.

"Counties have chosen systems for themselves that don't have voter receipts," Blackwell said. "Elections officials across the state are comfortable that the internal documentation these systems provide are fine."