High-tech ballots draw skepticism

By Jack Hagel, Globe Correspondent, 2/29/2004

Faster than voters can say "Bush vs. Gore," electronic voting systems are being shuffled into polling places nationwide, replacing outdated lever machines and eliminating punchcard ballots, which many believe caused confusion in the photo-finish 2000 presidential election.

But with newfangled ballot-casting tools proliferating, voters' rights advocates and specialists on elections are trying to decide which systems are most secure, accurate, reliable, and user-friendly, and least likely to shake confidence in election results.

"The problem seems to be getting all our voters and parties to trust our electoral process at all, given the experience of the past four years," said Alex Brown, chairman of the Boston chapter of the Society on Social Implications of Technology. Brown spoke at a symposium yesterday on electronic voting at the Suffolk University Law School.

Speakers discussed voter fraud, the security of voting machines, vote auditing, and the accessibility of new technology to minority, illiterate, and disabled voters.

Massachusetts where most precincts use optical scanning machines has not approved electronic voting systems such as touch-screen machines. But about 29 percent of voters in 2004 will cast ballots on electronic voting machines, according to research by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project and Election Data Services. That was an increase from 11 percent in the 2000 elections.

"They perform better than punch cards and lever machines," said Stephen Ansolabehere, a codirector of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. "I've not seen any evidence of an actual security breach while it's operating. I don't know how strong the threat is.

"That's a central concern," he said. "The threat's important because people historically have tried to manipulate the electoral process."

But Ansolabehere said electronic systems are not yet as reliable as the optical scan machines, which read ballots marked by voters. Unlike optical scan machines, whose marked ballots serve as backups in case of scanner malfunction or close elections, electronic machines do not typically record voters' intentions on paper.

"All that it records is what the machine thinks you did and that's the auditability question: How does the machine know what you intended?" Ansolabehere said.

Legislation in many states has called for a "paper trail" that would allow for a hard copy of votes from electronic voting machines. In close elections, the hard copies would serve as final ballots. Such a system, some critics say, means that electronic voting machines aren't needed in the first place.

But Ted Selker, who works on the voter project with Ansolabehere, said paper ballots can be lost or manipulated. He and other supporters also note that electronic machines typically are easier for blind and illiterate voters to use.

Under the Help Americans Vote Act of 2002, a federal law passed in the wake of the 2000 presidential election that provided $3.9 billion to modernize voting machines, states have until 2006 to provide citizens with disabilities better access to voting. That's when electronic voting probably will make its debut in Massachusetts, according to Secretary of State William F. Galvin.

"We think we made the right decision in not pursuing electronic systems to the point where we accelerated our process," Galvin said. "We want to have accuracy."