Touch Screen Voting
- The lack of a verified paper trail for recounts has critics concerned
by Tara Treasurefield in Pacific Sun

"The core of our American democracy is the right to vote. Implicit in that
right is the notion that that vote be private, that vote be secure, and
that vote be counted as it was intended when it was cast by the voter. I
think what we're encountering is a pivotal moment in our democracy where
all that is being called into question the privacy of the vote, the
security of the vote, and the accuracy of the vote. It troubles me, and it
should trouble you."

So said California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, in a surprise
appearance last December at a meeting of his Voting Systems and Procedures
Panel. A state audit of Diebold Election Systems, a leading manufacturer of
touch screen voting machines, prompted Shelley's remarks. California
election law requires vendors to notify the state before making system
changes, but the audit showed that Diebold installed uncertified software
in all 17 California counties that use its equipment. Nonetheless, the
panel granted Diebold "conditional" certification for its new touch screen
voting machine, the TSx, with the understanding that the system is
federally approved. Shortly after the meeting, it was learned that Diebold
misled the panel. The TSx does NOT have federal approval.

At the heart of concerns about Diebold and other leading touch screen
voting machine manufacturers is that their systems don't produce a voter
verified paper trail. This makes recounts in elections with questionable
results impossible. "People are understandably upset about the prospect of
'recounts' with nothing to recount other than the missed opportunities to
ensure the existence of a paper trail," says media critic Norman Solomon,
who lives in Marin County.

On January 15, the Voting Systems and Procedures Panel met again, this time
with the explicit intention of considering sanctions against Diebold. On
the way to the meeting, Greg Dinger, webmaster of verifiedvoting.org in San
Rafael, said, "This is a battleground. If we win today, we win everywhere.
The nation is watching. In any aspect of legislation, what happens in
California happens in a few years in the rest of the country."

Over 100 people from all over the state came to Sacramento that day. All
but a few were itching to banish Diebold and other paperless touch screen
voting machine manufacturers from California. But the panel promptly voted
to delay any discussion of Diebold, pending receipt of additional
documentation from the company. Neither the panel nor its staff could say
when Diebold might provide the information.

Ignoring the panel's decision to delay action, speaker after speaker
demanded the de-certification of either the TSx or of all Diebold voting
equipment in California as one man put it, because Diebold is unworthy
of California. In response, the panel alerted the audience that if they
de-certify Diebold, legally, the systems could still be used for six
months. It then issued a 30-day deadline for specific information from
Diebold. However, there was no mention of any consequences if the company
fails to meet the deadline.

Lowell Finley, Election Law attorney in Berkeley, says, "As far as I'm
concerned, [the panel has] legal authority to both withhold certification
of the Diebold TSx, based on its lack of federal certification, and to
de-certify the Diebold TS and optical scan systems based on their failure
to meet the requirements of California law. Nothing in the law authorizes
'conditional' certification. [The TSx] never qualified for certification."

The panel took another puzzling action on January 15. It denied
certification of an Avante International touch screen voting machine,
because Avante's machines produce a paper ballot. The panel explained that
California's requirements for voting systems that produce a paper trail are
still under development. John Byrnes, Avante's Director of Business
Development, says Avante has been waiting 14 months for certification by
California and that in other states, the certification process typically
takes 7 - 30 days. Avante is certified in 15 states, including Arizona,
Colorado, Idaho, Utah, New Jersey, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. In
California, an advisory board of election officials review vendor
applications for certification and make recommendations to the Voting
Systems and Procedures Panel. Byrnes testified that some members of the
advisory board are ardent opponents of a voter verified paper trail.

And that was that. Kim Alexander, founder and director of California Voter
Foundation, reports,??"For now, Diebold's voting equipment, including the
TSx, will be allowed to be used in California for the upcoming March 2,
2004 Primary election. I am deeply disappointed that California voters in
four counties will be asked to vote on equipment that is currently not
federally approved and for which there is no guarantee it will be by
March."??Over all, 12 counties representing 40 percent of California voters
will cast their ballots on paperless touch screen voting machines on March
2.

Last November, Shelley announced that by 2006, all touch screen voting
machines in California must produce a voter verified paper audit trail. "To
be told that we'll have a paper trail in 2006 is hardly reassuring about
this year," says Solomon, echoing the alarm of voters throughout the state.
To provide some reassurance, Shelley also announced in November that during
the March 2 primary, state testers will monitor the performance of touch
screen voting systems. In addition, he's requiring strengthened state
testing requirements, random audits of software, and new internal security
standards, and permitting only local elections officials, not a voting
system manufacturer or their representative, to conduct pre-election Logic
and Accuracy tests of a system.

As it happens, Marin County uses a Diebold optical scan voting system.
Though there's greater awareness of problems with touch screens, optical
scans aren't perfect either. A particularly memorable glitch occurred in
the 2000 presidential election in Volusa County, Florida, when the Diebold
optical scan system erroneously gave 4,000 votes to George W. Bush and
16,022 NEGATIVE votes to Al Gore. This sort of thing is least likely with
certified software. Yet the State of California's December audit of Diebold
showed that NO county, including Marin, was using the latest certified
version of GEMS, the central counter used with Diebold's voting systems.
Why?

??"The Secretary of State's practices change," explains Madelyn DeJusto,
assistant registrar of voters in Marin County. "I can remember sitting in a
session when they put the modified primary in after the March 2000 Primary.
We HAD to the software. There was no way any of us could have
counted the ballots without modifying the software. We sat there with our
vendors saying, 'How are we going to do it?'"

DeJusto says that its optical scan system has served Marin County well
since 1999. "I have been doing this for 30 years. We test and retest and
retest. Last November we did one recount of one jurisdiction. The State
mandates that you do a one percent recount or one precinct for every race
that's on the ballot. We do that every single time. It balances out every
time."

David Jefferson, computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab,
says, "The one percent random precinct recount provision in California law
is an excellent safeguard against many kinds of errors and large-scale vote
manipulation. However, one percent is not a sufficiently large sample to
reliably detect errors or frauds that are relatively small, but that can
nonetheless tip close elections. To detect these, a much larger sample than
one percent of the paper ballots would have to be counted."

Addressing concerns about Internet security, DeJusto says, "Our system is
free-standing. There is no outside access to it at all. It's not even
connected with our county system server. [At each precinct,] you take the
machine, you plug it into the phone, it dials GEMS, it transmits the
result. It all happens on a phone line. You see the thing ring and it's
done. The only time it's online with our system is that five seconds it's
transmitting." Marin County also prints precinct totals, posts them to the
web, and makes them available at the registrar of voters' office. "We
double check how many people voted, against how many signed the roster,
against the [precinct] figures," DeJusto says. However, election law
requires that if machines are used to tally votes at precincts, the county
must print a copy of the totals and post it "upon the outside wall of the
precinct for all to see". When reminded of this, Marin County registrar
Michael Smith said that from now on, the precinct totals will be posted on
the outside wall at precincts.

But posting precinct totals isn't a complete solution either, says Lowell
Finley. "The software in the voting terminals could be making undetectable
changes in the totals before printing them. [At least it's] a means of
isolating and detecting through comparison any fraud being perpetrated
through the central GEMS computer. [However,] this check on the system
works only if the precinct totals are being transferred physically to the
county computer on disks or smartcards. If wired or wireless modem upload
is used, [as in Marin County], it is possible for a corrupted GEMS program
to send commands back through the wired or wireless connection to the
terminals at the precincts that would alter their contents to match the
altered contents in the central computer. If this happened before the
printout from the terminals in the precincts was made, the fraudulent
results would match in both locations."

Finley says security is an issue even if precinct totals are printed before
sending the results via modem to GEMS. "Proving disparities precinct by
precinct is difficult, costly, and not grounds for challenging the
[election] result in court under current law.Also, post-printing alteration
of the data in a terminal via reverse transmission through the modem link
is still possible.Use of modems should be prohibited [until] all the
vulnerabilities in these systems are corrected assuming that is even
possible."

A report released by a team of security experts on January 29 is also
troubling. Over a week, the team succeeded time after time in hacking
Diebold voting systems in a simulated election in Maryland. A particularly
alarming entry in the report is that??"the team was able to remotely
upload, download and execute files with full system administrator
privileges. All that was required was a valid phone number for the GEMS
server." The report offers "immediate recommendations" for counties with
Diebold equipment.

All things considered, Marin County voters can have guarded confidence that
their votes will count as intended in 2004. If all else fails, they can
demand a recount of all the paper ballots. The only gotcha there is that
current law requires those who demand a recount to deposit payment in
advance for the full cost of every day of recounting. To recount the
ballots in one San Francisco supervisorial district a couple years ago
required advance deposit of thousands of dollars per day.

Voters in counties with paperless systems won't have the option of a
recount, unless Congress passes H.R. 2239 and S. 1980 into law by the end
of February. These two bills require all touch screen voting machines used
in the U.S. to produce a voter verified paper audit trail by the general
election in 2004. David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford
University and founder of verifiedvoting.org, supports these two bills.

"We need constituents to demonstrate that they have LOTS of interest in
this issue by contacting their Congressmen and Senators, especially
Republicans and members of key committees," says Dill. "You can find out
where your representatives stand by going to www.verifiedvoting.org. If you
volunteer at verifiedvoting.org, they will help coordinate contacts with
Congress."