Voices of Carolina: Voting machine change draws questions

Special to the Carolina Morning News

The author, Virginia Ghirardelli, is a member of the League of Women Voters of Hilton Head Island.

Here they come, ready or not. The DREs, that is. By 2006 all of the counties in South Carolina will have Direct Recording Electronic voting systems; they will all be alike, and will all be provided by one vendor.

That's the plan of the South Carolina Election Commission to implement the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002 by the U.S. Congress. The state plan is the product of the state planning task force formed after HAVA was passed. It outlines how we will improve voter registration and voting.

It's not all about voting machines, but most of the $48.5 million that South Carolina will receive over four years will be spent on new voting machines. South Carolina's matching funds will be around $2 million; an expenditure of $700,000 has been approved this year and a like amount will be needed for each of the following two years.

Touch-screen voting is the current hot topic. A lot of people, as I do, sit up straight and pay attention when the possibility of infringement of voting rights exists. Such is the case now, with newspapers, magazines and Web sites reporting serious problems with the machines. There are reports of lost votes, votes "transferred" from one candidate to another, lack of machine and software certification, and companies not revealing their source codes.

Computers certainly can be sabotaged, and this does not enhance trust in the system.

HAVA represented the first major intrusion of the federal government into what had previously been, both constitutionally and by tradition, left to the states: the operation of the electoral system itself.

Among the many people working diligently to get the legislation passed were lobbyists for the voting machine manufacturers, who recognized the business opportunity represented by a nationwide adoption of high tech approaches to the task.

South Carolina has a mixture of voting systems: punch card, optical scan, and five different forms of DRE. If we weren't promised federal money (guess where that comes from), would we be replacing all of our machines? Are they all behaving badly?

There is certainly something to be said for a uniform system, where all the machines are alike and voter and election official training is made easier. But are we replacing the optical scan machines for the newer touch-screen machines just because they're new? Has anyone suggested a uniform system using optical scan equipment, a system that allows for the retention of a paper record?

It might be too late to influence the type of voting system that the state Election Commission puts in place. But given the concerns about machines and the companies that provide them, it is important that citizens not proceed with blind faith to accept without question the reassurances issued by those in charge.

"Trust me (or us)" should raise a red flag. Let them explain to us exactly how the machine is made secure and how the software is certified. Let us look into any relationship between election officials and the people in the company from whom they buy the machines.

Above all we need to look at who's counting the votes. Election officials, accountable to the public, are responsible for the integrity of the entire voting process, from registration to voting and counting the votes. If they must rely on the technical expertise of computer programmers accountable only to their private employers, then the chain of accountability has been broken, in my judgment.

Efficiency in elections is wonderful; accuracy and integrity, and the public confidence they engender, are more important. Let the private companies count their profits, but not our votes.