Jeffco voting machines concern some

by Frank Catalina

When Jefferson County voters go to the polls to elect a president next November, they will be voting on state-of-the-art, touch-screen computer voting machines. Yet, some are concerned about the potential for fraud.

The iVotronic machines, which the county purchased in 2002 and used for both the primary and general elections that year, are efficient and accurate, said Susan Miller, Jeffco director of elections.

“We had a very good response from the public,” Miller said, adding that election results were tallied in half the time.

The use of computerized voting machines has become more widespread in the last three years after a tight presidential race in Florida cast doubt on the accuracy of punch cards as a voting method.

Their prevalence has also been fueled by the Help America Vote Act, passed by congress in 2002, which provided money to local governments to help them modernize their voting machines.

Not all are convinced that this trend in voting technology is good, however.

Pete Klammer, a Wheat Ridge electrical engineer, said that while the machines’ touch-screen format is more user-friendly for voters, a paper trail is necessary to ensure the vote is accurate.

Klammer belongs to a workgroup charged with creating standards for electronic voting machines. The workgroup was created by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a group that creates standards and publishes research in the field of electrical engineering.

He advocates a system where the computerized machines would print out a paper ballot that the voter must verify and place in a box. The paper ballots would then be scanned for the official count and kept as a physical record.

A bill he is backing before the state General Assembly would mandate counting of paper ballots starting in November 2006.

Without a voter-verified paper ballot, he said, the system may be open to fraud.

“The nearest evidence we have is electronic gambling machines,” he said.

Despite the heavy supervision voting machines are under, machines could be compromised during routine servicing if someone could be bribed or otherwise convinced to look the other way.

“Those are the kinds of ways that gambling machines have been compromised,” he said, noting that gambling machines are scrutinized in a manner similar to voting machines.

Miller said the machines do allow voters to verify their votes before placing them and that several tests are run to ensure the machines are accurately recording votes.

“What the machine does is force you to look at your ballot before casting it,” she said.

All the votes are stored on a personal electronic ballot, a device that looks similar to an 8-track tape, for record keeping, she said.

The machines are tested before and after each election to look for glitches, and the total number of ballots cast is matched against the number of voters who signed in to ensure the machine is not adding or losing votes, she said.

“There is no amount of testing that can prove a bug does not exist,” Klammer said.

He cited NASA’s recent problems with its Mars Rover as an example. After all the testing that went into it, the Rover had a software error when it came time to perform its duties.

“If the most expensive software in the world, as NASA’s is, can fail, why does anyone believe that voting machines can be immune?” he asked.