Crashing the Vote
OP-ED from TomPaine.com
No one wants a repeat of the Florida election fiasco in 2000.
That's why both Republicans and Democrats in Congress joined together and passed the Help America Vote Act, which requires states to upgrade their electoral systems.

That's great, but the technology many states are turning to is seriously flawed, potentially undermining the good intentions of the new law.

Computerized touch-screen voting machines are susceptible to the glitches and crashes we've all had with our own computers. Has your computer ever crashed and lost important data? Now apply that lesson to our elections.

When there are no paper ballots, software bugs or power failures can lead to lost votes. In Hinds County, Mississippi, the problems with the paperless touch screen voting machines were so severe that the November 2003 election had to be re-run on Feb. 10.

Even a single individual with access to the software running the voting machines could malicious code that would change election outcome.

If computers lose our votes, if our votes can be manipulated, American citizens will lose confidence in our electoral system and our nation will become a very different place than the one it has been for the past 228 years.

Elections are the lifeblood of democracy. If citizens don't trust that their votes are being counted fairly and accurately, voter apathy?which is already a threat to our nation?is sure to increase, and the foundation of our representative government will be weakened.

Computerized touch-screen voting machines that produce a paper ballot that records the votes a voter just cast (and that the voter can verify) are already available to states that request them. A few manufacturers are developing new products to answer the demand for secure voting machines.

The problem, however, is that most state election officials are not demanding this extra security. Instead, many of these officials believe that the machines are secure because they've been "certified" by a private independent testing authority (ITA) that keeps both the tests and the results of the tests secret from the public. While we know from problems that have shown up on certified software that ITA testing is grossly inadequate, even good testing could not guarantee that the software running paperless touch-screen voting machines is error free. If that were possible, then software vendors such as Microsoft would not have to send out frequent "bug fixes." Furthermore, a clever programmer could hide malicious code so that finding it becomes akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

If a voter checks a paper ballot to confirm that his or her vote is accurately cast, and if that paper ballot remains at the polling place, then we would have a backup audit should the voting machine fail. Also, paper ballots are needed for recounts in the event of contested elections.

It is up to our nation's election officials to step up to the plate and defend democracy. They should insist that computerized voting machines not be allowed to create another dangerous voting fiasco for our country. Already, there are some states leading the charge by requiring a voter-verified paper trail. These election officials are both Democrats and Republicans, showing this is not an issue of partisanship, but rather one of safeguarding our democracy.

Citizens should be asking their state's election officials to use their executive authority to ensure voter-verified paper ballots are produced in all elections. They should support the appropriation of federal funds to retrofit existing computerized machines that lack the ability to produce these ballots.

Bills addressing the security of computerized voting (Rep. Holt's H.R. 2239 and Sen. Graham's companion S. 1980, known as the Increased Confidence and Voter Accessibility Act) are inexplicably bottled up by Congressional leadership. Perhaps if a critical mass of states take this authority unto themselves, Congress will get the picture that Americans value the sanctity of their vote as much as they want to see American elections move into the 21st Century.