Disagreement over electronic voting

 

By: BRENT FLYNN , STAFF WRITER
03/11/2004

 

County voters and elections officers say they trust the accuracy of touch screen electronic voting machines but would like to see some kind of paper trail added to assist in recounts.

Volunteer election judges and clerks at the Precinct 70 and 15 polling location at Weatherford Elementary in Plano on Tuesday said they haven't had any problems with the Diebold Accuvote TS electronic voting machine so far.

In fact, Charlie Hodges, a Republican elections judge, said the machines have made his life easier.

"I think it's a good system, and I'm glad they went to them. It's simpler for me. Instead of counting up the ballots, it's all done in the machine," he said. "It's so smart even I can do it."

The Democratic elections judge for the same precinct, while not overly concerned, said some kind of independently verifiable tally of votes was needed.

"We just need to have a paper trail," he said. "Right now we have a grand total count, but we have nothing to audit the grand total. We should have an individual tally. That way we could prove that the machine total is accurate."

Hodges agreed that in the event of a recount there could be trouble with the touch screen machines.

"I don't know about that. If I had to do a recount with punch-card votes I would just count them," he said. "I don't know what we'd do with the new machines."

Hodges said all voters sign in on a sheet, their names are recorded on a poll list and the total number of votes cast for each machine is included in a printout at the end of the day. Any discrepancies in the numbers would mean an error was made somewhere.

"If at the end of the day all three numbers don't match up, we've got a problem."

Collin County Elections Administrator Sharon Rowe said each machine records each individual ballot and could be compared to the electronic tabulation printed out on election night, after the fact.

Assistant Collin County Democratic Chairman Shawn Stevens said such a comparison would be solely of machine-generated numbers.

"You are still talking about electronic data. You're not talking about screen prints of the ballot," he said. "My understanding is essentially when they do the recount they just report back the totals. You don't have the opportunity to look at the individual ballot."

He said a voter-verifiable paper trail is mandated at the state level in California.

National controversy

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Florida, has sued Florida state election supervisors, demanding that new touch-screen voting machines be made capable of creating a paper trail for possible recounts.

In his federal lawsuit, Wexler said voters need to be assured every vote is counted.

The Florida Department of State told elections supervisors last month that manual recounts don't have to include ballots from touch-screen machines because the machines leave no question how people voted.

The computerized voting machines replaced the state's infamous punch-card ballots, which produced the dimpled and hanging chads at the heart of the 2000 presidential election controversy.

Collin County used punch-card ballots until Sept. 13 of last year when the Diebold electronic voting machines were put to use for the first time.

Wexler said the machines create new problems and violate the U.S. Constitution because they make it difficult to conduct recounts accurately.

Bill Slater, professor of computer science at Collin County Community College, pointed out some of the downfalls of pure electronic voting.

"I think anybody in the computer business would have some concerns with what will happen with those," he said. "My concerns would be how do you make sure, if there was a recount, how do you know the count is correct?

"At least with punch cards you could at least re-run them and look at the holes and see who got what vote."

Deborah Smith, county chairwoman of the Democratic Party, said the accuracy and verifiability of the results is a major concern and said Collin County Democrats were even considering filling out their own ballots, collecting them in a ballot box and counting them by hand.

"The reality is Collin County has purchased the equipment, and while I'm not pleased with that choice the equipment will have to be used for the next few years," she said. "The thing I find really scary is it's mostly our tech people that are really concerned about it."

One of those "tech people" is Stevens, a former Y2K lab coordinator for Reliant Energy in Houston.

He pointed to studies done by Rice and Johns Hopkins University and another commissioned by the state of Maryland that found security breaches that could be used by hackers to change results and defective software code that could skew election results.

"The main residual concern down here for us is we want to make sure the public has confidence in the election results," he said.

Those concerns are real. Just two years ago during the mid-term election, Dallas voters learned that some of their votes had been flipped by the electronic voting machine from the Democratic candidate to the Republican, and two of the major voting machine companies, McKinney-based Diebold Elections Systems and Election Systems and Software have strong Republican ties.

Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell is a Bush "Pioneer and Ranger" fund-raiser (one that raises $100,000) who said once in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

But Collin County election officials said the quote was taken out of context and note that they have had few problems with the new system in both the Sept. 13 constitutional election and the Nov. 4 county bond election and have given the system glowing endorsements.

County remains confident

"On a scale of one to 10, I would rank it about a nine," County Judge Ron Harris said after the Sept. 13 election.

Collin County spent $2.7 million for 700 touch-screen voting machines, manufactured by Diebold, and 300 more were added in October.

The county was one of the few in Texas that had been using paper punch-card ballots.

Such ballots required voters to sign in, pick up a ballot, it into a machine, turn pages and make a ion for each race by using a device to punch holes next to their choices. The process elicited complaints of dangling chads, miscounted votes and long waits at polls.

Officials said the new equipment allowed the county to save money on manpower, paper and time.

Rowe said her department has taken several measures to address concerns about outside tampering, or hacking, of the computer system.

"Well certainly, we've been aware of the situation going on," she said. "We are not sending reports via telephone lines (one of the security flaws pointed out in the studies)."

She said the county has instituted all of the processes required by the state to ensure the integrity of the election and have secure processes in place to code the machines on site.

Slater said the county has done a good job of addressing the threat from outside hacker attacks.

"What I've seen it is not a big concern with security," he said. "The machines are not on the Internet."

Rowe said any plans to add a paper-receipt capability to the machines would also have to ensure that voters could not use those receipts to sell their votes.

Harris said the current system is sound.

"I think it's as accurate a system as we could get without running a dual system," he said. "There is a lot of redundancy in the system. That was my biggest concern. If it was going to make a mistake in the computer, the mistake would be reflected in the paper trail."

Slater remarked, in the end, any system is prone to mistakes and open to skepticism.

"With the old voting machines where you pull the lever, how do you know your vote is being counted correctly?" he asked. "There probably always is going to be some concern there. Even paper in the box: you could lose the box. There isn't anything that's going to be foolproof.

"I'm not afraid of voting that way. I wish it were a little more secure. In reality, it's not any worse than paper ballots."

The bottom line for Stevens is that over time successive iterations of electronic voting machines will instill confidence in voters' minds but doesn't think we're there yet.

"If we don't have hacking and there are sufficient safeguards in place we'll be better off in the short-term until we get a long-term fix in place," he said. "The error rates on the punch cards were horrible. Assuming all sufficient safeguards are in place, I think we have moved the ball forward."

One of those safeguards is guaranteed by Harris himself.

"I can assure you that the president of Diebold won't have any influence on the Collin County election," he said.

Voters support system

Despite the controversy, Republican and Democratic voters on Tuesday had faith that their votes were being counted.

"I don't have any concerns. Not right now. We'll see as November approaches," said Walter Norris, a Democrat.

Carole Hysmith, who did not wish to reveal her party affiliation, said she liked the new machines.

"As long as a hacker doesn't get to it, it doesn't bother me," she said.

Republican Kamala Hanna was impressed with the machines and saw them as a sign of technological advancement.

"I like that concept a lot better than punch cards," she said. "The paper ballot was flawed. This being more advanced technology you have to think it would have higher accuracy."

She said there probably wasn't a foolproof system available but thought some type of paper receipt might be helpful.

"Working for an insurance company I'm all for checks and balances," she said. "That (paper receipt) probably would ease a lot of people's minds."

Collin County Republican Chairman Rick Neudorf said voters should have faith in the current system and its administrators.

"There's no guarantee other than to trust that the system here is managed correctly."