E-Voting Field Test 

 By Cynthia L. Webb
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, March 4, 2004; 11:41 AM

High-tech voting machines got yet another trial run on Super Tuesday this week. The results, according to critics? There's still a lot of work to be done to make electronic voting secure and glitch-free.

The Associated Press reported that malfunctioning computers created problems for people trying to vote with e-ballots in California and several other states, "and experts predict such problems will be repeated on a national scale in November." The AP article gave a good run down of the problems encountered: "In California's San Diego County, touchscreens failed to boot properly, causing delays of up to two hours and forcing some voters to other polling places where they cast old-fashioned paper ballots. Other counties in California, Georgia and Maryland reported problems with encoders, the devices that allow touch-screen computers to display candidate and ballot measures specific to one county. Elections officials blamed improperly trained poll workers, especially in counties that recently switched from antiquated punch-card and lever systems to touch-screen terminals."

The Los Angeles Times reported that "[p]roblems with new electronic voting systems caused some Orange County residents to vote in the wrong district elections Tuesday and prevented some San Diego County voters from casting any ballot at all. The difficulties in two of Southern California's largest counties marred the state's transition from decades-old voting systems to new, computerized ones part of a costly nationwide effort to avoid the kind of punch-card ballot problems that plagued the 2000 presidential election in Florida."

Overall, election officials chalked up the problems to human error and not the technology itself, declaring the e-voting test run a success (And why wouldn't they? They have invested a lot of time and money in the machines, paid for with federal matching funds). In Georgia, the secretary of state's office received some 60 complaints about e-voting glitches, Cox News Service reported, and human error was cited as the No. 1 problem. "I'd love to sit here and go through one perfect election, but it's not going to happen," Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox said. "But everything we've been talking about is human errors. We can have the best machines on earth, but humans will always make mistakes."

Human-error was also blamed in California's San Bernardino County, where "Registrar Scott Konopasek said the computer program took much longer to load than officials had expected. After running absentee results, hours passed without any more ballots being counted. Konopasek said he started the initialization process 30 minutes after polls closed at 8 p.m. but said he should have started hours earlier. 'It's very embarrassing,' Konopasek said. 'It was a mistake on our part based on our lack of experience ... It will never happen again,'" according to The Associated Press.

"Only isolated problems were reported in the day's elections, in which delegates from nine states including New York, California, Massachusetts and Ohio were up for grabs," CNET's News.com reported. "Diebold spokesman David Bear acknowledged that the problems affected his company's new AccuVote TSx machines, but said that 'they amounted to delays in some areas. It hasn't affected people's ability to vote.' Because of low batteries, machines in San Diego and Oakland booted into a different screen that confused some precinct workers, Bear said."

A Divided Electorate?

Media outlets across the nation noted that criticism of the high-tech machines was often matched by rave reviews from voters. Here's one example: "Computer problems early Tuesday marred San Diego County's first election with electronic ballots, forcing poll workers to turn people away and leading a county supervisor to demand an immediate probe into whether some were cheated out of their right to vote," The North County Times reported. "At the same time, voters overwhelmingly told reporters and election officials that they loved the new voting machines, which allowed people to cast ballots by touching a computer screen."

"As many Marylanders cast their first votes on new touch-screen machines yesterday, the process was deemed, at the same time, a rousing success and a dismal failure. It all depends on who was doing the judging. Election directors said reluctant senior citizens embraced the machines, pointed to the thousands of precincts where the process ran smoothly and reminded voters that past elections weren't perfect either," The Baltimore Sun reported. "We had a few problems, as we would with any voting system, and that's because we have people involved," elections administrator Linda H. Lamone told the newspaper. "I don't think it's too soon to say it's working well."

"Maryland election officials praised the statewide debut of a new touch-screen voting system in yesterday's primary, despite computer glitches that crashed isolated machines and left some frustrated voters demanding the return of paper ballots. Problems with a small number of the Diebold voting machines were reported in several counties, including Charles, Montgomery and St. Mary's. But officials said the vast majority of machines worked as advertised with the help of 'a small army' of computer experts who were dispatched as troubleshooters across Maryland by state elections administrator Linda H. Lamone," The Washington Post said, noting that many "voters said they found the new machines used during the last two years in four pilot counties easier to use than the old-style paper ballots."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution explained more about the human error snafus in Georgia: "Some voters apparently filled out the wrong voter certification form and received the ballot that allowed them to vote only between two choices for the state flag and not for any presidential candidate. Others say they filled out the right form but were given the wrong ballot."

Critics Remain Unsatisfied

The human error assertion had some e-voting critics hopping mad. "Ginny Howard, a co-founder of the League Opposed to Virtual Elections, criticized Cox's office for blaming poll workers for the problems. Howard said Tuesday's confusion was made worse by complicated technology. 'What we really need is a very simple, very straightforward system that's very obvious how it works,' Howard said."

Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer science professor who has been a leading academic critic of electronic voting systems, wrote an account of his stint as a Super Tuesday poll watcher in Maryland.

Rubin excerpt: "There were ... some security issues that I found to be much worse than I expected. All of the tallies are kept on PCMCIA cards. At the end of the election, each of those cards is loaded onto one machine, designated as the zero machine. ... The zero machine is then connected to a modem, and the tallies are sent to a central place, where they are incorporated with the tallies of other precincts. In our case, the phone line was not working properly, so we went to the backup plan. The zero machine combined all the tallies from the PCMCIA cards that were loaded one at a time onto the machine. It then printed out the final tallies. One copy of that went onto the outside door of the building where there were talliers and poll watchers eagerly waiting. The other was put into a pouch with all of the PCMCIA cards, each wrapped in a printed tally of the machine to which it corresponds, and that pouch was driven by the two head judges to the board of elections office. ... The security risk I saw was that Diebold had designated which machine would be the zero machine, and at one point, all of the vote tallies were loaded onto that one machine in memory. That would be the perfect point to completely change the tallies. There is no need to attack all of the machines at a precinct if someone could tamper with the zero machine. In fact, even when the modem is used, it is only the zero machine that makes the call. In the code we examined, that phone call is not protected correctly with cryptography."

The techie site Slashdot.org linked to the Rubin review yesterday, and The Baltimore Sun ran a feature article on Rubin's election judge role.

The Paper Chase

Many detractors of e-voting technology want a paper record to spit out from the machines for proof that a vote was properly recorded. Election officials, however, have said at times that if hackers are smart enough to break into machines, they can figure out a way to tweak printed results too. The push for a paper record is not just a U.S. issue, it is happening in international circles as well, including this latest row in Ireland.

The Long Beach Press-Telegram on Tuesday editorialized in support of a paper trail for e-voting: "Though most registrars hate the idea, because it adds extra time and cost to their work, it is the public's best protection against fraud. Providing a receipt to voters, while retaining one in the official record for verification or use in cases of a recount, provides a safeguard that no computer system can offer. Electronic votes, without a paper verification, simply cannot be recounted or reliably checked for errors."

More on the paper trail concept from The New York Times: "Electronic machines are also favored by voters with certain disabilities, because audio functions and other special features allow them to vote unassisted. The problem with current all-electronic systems is that they can be compromised undetectably, and there is no reason to trust that they will correctly count votes, experts say. 'It's not a matter of finding better programming languages or writing better software,' Dr. C. Andrew Neff, a mathematician and the chief scientist of VoteHere, a company in Bellevue, Wash., said of electronic voting. 'Computer systems are inherently insecure.'" The Times continued: "Thus, the only safe way to vote electronically, computer scientists say, is to use methods that do not require trust in complex software. One such solution, soon to be mandated in several states, is a voter-verified paper trail."

But until solutions are ponied up, many critics are taking a Doomsday approach. "New Jersey Democratic Rep. Rush Holt, author of a bill to require paper records for every electronic ballot, said that although the Super Tuesday mishaps were not catastrophic, they foreshadow trouble in November," The AP reported.. "Unless Congress deals with this problem immediately by requiring voting machines to produce a paper record voters can verify we're going to have more of these occurrences each time we have an election, including this November," Holt said Tuesday. "The only question is, how long it will take before voters lose faith in a system that they thought was being fixed?"

E-Voting Supporters Weigh In

USA Today contributor Don Campbell wrote in an opinion piece: "I rarely rush to embrace new technology; I do it ively. I've fought cell phones to a standoff, but, like millions of Americans, I now regularly entrust credit-card numbers to the Internet to purchase goods and services. I never stand in grocery checkout lines if I can find a self-service scanner. Granted, a vote is more sacrosanct than a credit-card number or the right price for a pound of bananas. But much of the intelligence and national defense of our government is conducted electronically, as is much of the world's commerce. Surely, if we put men on the moon and rovers on Mars, it is ridiculous even embarrassing to suggest that we can't put voting safeguards in place." Campbell, a Georgia resident, insisted: "At some point, we need to accept the notion that democracy not only can survive, but also thrive, if we abandon paper ballots, punch cards and pregnant chads."

The Los Angeles Times article had one of the best quotes out there from an election official about the virtues of e-voting. "In Kern County, Ann Barnett, the registrar of voters and county clerk, said she had not received complaints about the new touch-screen system there. 'We've had a very good response from the voters,' Barnett said. 'It's simple. It's just like video poker.'"