Some mistrust screen voting
Poll shows most think it's reliable

By CARLOS CAMPOS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 02/29/04

Ben Mack will vote Tuesday on an electronic touch-screen machine, but he won't like it.
 Mack, an Atlanta advertising executive, doesn't trust the Diebold Election Systems machines used since 2002 in the state of Georgia to tally votes. Mack is worried they can be rigged electronically to produce fraudulent election results.
 
"Am I concerned that a whole block of votes is going to be altered or changed because of somebody with malicious intent?" Mack asked Friday. "Yes, I have real concerns that will happen. I think that somebody not having concern anytime we have an election is naive. It's consistently happened over the years."
 
Voters on Tuesday will vote on presidential candidates and choose between state flags on 28,000 touch-screen voting machines across Georgia. It will be the first time the machines have been deployed on a major scale since concerns about their security were raised, beginning last summer, in a series of critical reports by academics and computer technicians.
 
Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox has disputed the findings of those reports and remains confident of the machines' accuracy.
 
"Georgians can be highly confident of this voting system, not just because of our experience of the elections of 2002, but because of the more than 300 local elections which have been conducted using this equipment in the year and a half since," Cox spokesman Chris Riggall said.
 
Two polls taken by the University of Georgia have shown that the majority of Georgians think the machines are trustworthy and easy to use.
 
But some Georgians remain suspicious of the machines and are finding ways to get around them.
 
"I have been encouraging people to use early voting and absentee voting as a way to get paper documents of their votes," said Hugh Esco, a Georgia Green Party official and chairman of the Voter Choice Coalition.
 
Mack tried that route. But he found out that Fulton County uses the machines for early voting, a five-day period that ran through Friday in which voters cast their ballot on their own schedule, rather than during a 12-hour window on Tuesday.
 
Mack said he did not want to lie about his reasons for requesting an absentee ballot, so he will vote, reluctantly, on a Diebold machine.
 
Meg Smothers, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Georgia, said she considers voting with paper ballots, whether through absentee voting or early voting, "a step backwards" because of the history of election fraud using those methods.
 
"Ultimately, every time you change, there's a little bit of resistance," she said. "Overwhelmingly, the public is confident in response to this system."
 
Georgia's voting Tuesday will get a close-up look from a top federal official. Cox invited DeForest B. "Buster" Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, to observe the state's election.
 
The commission implements the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which encourages states to replace patchwork elections systems of punch card and lever machines with a uniform electronic system.
 
Georgia was the first state in the nation to use electronic voting machines statewide; Maryland has since followed. The machines are used in hundreds of other counties throughout the United States.
 
Soaries will visit the Kennesaw State University Center for Elections Systems, which provides training and technical support to the state. He also will tour several voting precincts with Cox.
 
Meanwhile, in the state Senate, a bill that would require the secretary of state to outfit the machines with a printer capable of verifying a voter's intentions on paper seemed to get a good reception during a committee meeting last week.
 
Sen. Tom Price (R-Roswell), sponsor of Senate Bill 500, said the permanent paper record would allow elections officials to hand-count ballots in the event of a tight race.
 
Cox's office is opposed to the paper printouts. Officials from her office urged senators to wait until federal elections officials create national technology standards before spending as much as $16 million on the printers.
 
The Senate State and Local Governmental Operations Committee is scheduled to meet Tuesday at 1:30 p.m.
 
Its agenda has not yet been set, but the committee might take a vote on SB 500.