Without paper trail, election could be chaotic

By Dan Gillmor

Mercury News Technology Columnist

News and views, culled and edited from my online eJournal (www.dangillmor.com/blog):

COUNTING UP: If the March 2 Super Tuesday primary election was any indication of what's coming, America is in for a rough time in the November presidential election.

Glitches with electronic voting machines occurred in several states as well as in big California counties such as Alameda, Orange and San Diego. Various news reports, including coverage in the Mercury News and the Los Angeles Times, again showed a surprising level of ho-humness among voting officials and the people who sell these flawed machines.

The problems are hard to gauge precisely because the machines aren't designed with that in mind. There's no completely trustworthy verification system, so it's impossible to be sure what went wrong, where and how badly.

Voter-verifiable paper trails would alert voters if something is wrong, on the spot. Then they wouldn't have to worry after the fact whether they'd be disenfranchised.

Every time I warn about the perils of electronic voting machines, I get accused of being a Luddite. Or else people say, ``It's better than the old system.''

Well, I'm a big fan of installing modern equipment to make elections better. And if the machines work right they'll clearly be better than what we had. But these are computers, and computers are flawed devices.

Software behaves in unpredictable ways, and rogue programmers or hackers can create havoc.

Meanwhile, hardworking poll workers can make mistakes. They're human like the rest of us.

So, again: We need a backup and a verification system that combines the best of computers and people but doesn't absolutely rely on programmers and people to get everything right every time.

Such a system exists: It's called paper.

A paper printout could be used to recount ballots in close elections, instead of trusting the ``garbage in, garbage out'' system that invites us not to trust it. It could be used for random checks, as a precaution.

California is supposed to get this in two years, thanks to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, who gets what's at stake and wants to do the right thing.

State Sens. Don Perata, an Oakland Democrat, and Ross Johnson, R-Irvine, have asked Shelley to postpone the use of the new machines this year. He should give this some serious thought; we're in a potential crisis.