Election fix stymied by delays, computer doubts, confidence gap

The Associated Press

 

EDITORS NOTE - Problems with the election system in Florida left the winner of the 2000 presidential race in doubt for more than a month, and prompted widespread calls to reform the way the nation elects its leaders. Yet nearly four years since George W. Bush won in Florida by 537 votes, reform has been spotty. This story is part of the AP's ongoing coverage of electoral problems across the country.

By ROBERT TANNER

AP National Writer

The discord of Florida 2000 is hard to forget. Angry crowds yelling at local election officials, a paralysis that virtually halted other political work, accusations of a stolen presidential election that echo today.

But the many promises that followed the 36-day stalemate have not produced a nationwide solution to the glaring flaws exposed in the way we cast votes and count them - and another presidential election is just months away.

There's blame enough to go around. Pick any of the following, or all: President Bush and Congress; the voting machine industry; local election officials. (You can add computer scientists, the media, even mistake-prone voters.)

It's true some changes have been made: Roughly 50 million registered voters, or slightly more than a quarter nationwide, will be able to cast ballots on the latest touchscreen equipment this year.

But that leaves the glass half-full, at best, especially with the biggest reforms so far now coming in for criticism. In particular, those ATM-style electronic voting machines - once trumpeted as the solution to voting problems - are now under fire from some computer scientists and lawmakers. That, in turn, is slowing further reforms and weakening confidence in the system even more.

"You have resistance, sort of natural resistance, to change," said Ken Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state. Legislators in his state, worried about security, want an end to electronic machine purchases, even if punch cards remain in many counties.

In critics' eyes, the problems have been worsened by electoral officials blind to the dangers of a broken system or influenced by political aims, and caring too little about damage done to voters' trust. Others see the slow progress as healthy - that's the way democracies work, they argue, by publicly hashing out problems.

Either way, the bottom line is that another razor-thin presidential election could again leave a victor unclear, a system unable to smoothly resolve the problem, and a skeptical and angry public.

The pitfalls break down into three broad categories: cash, computers and confidence.

After the 2000 crisis, promises of electoral reform didn't translate into quick action. It took nearly two years for Congress to pass the law giving states money and direction to buy new machines, and improve voter registration and training.

The problem was that policy-makers were pulled in different directions - minority and disabled voters sought federal standards to ensure all had equal access to the polls, while state election officials argued local control would best serve widely different communities.

Experts produced nearly a dozen studies, including recommendations from a Gerald Ford-Jimmy Carter commission (some of its top ideas, like making Election Day a holiday and giving all felons the right to vote after serving their sentence, were promptly ignored).

Money for the states to implement reform took even longer: Of $3.8 billion promised, states have only received $650 million so far.

The commission that was to be created to dole out money and advice was delayed by arguments between the White House and Congress. Members weren't appointed until December, less than a year before the 2004 election.

"I put the largest blame on Congress itself," said Kim Brace, an elections expert who consults with states. "They built up a lot of hope in the rhetoric side and fell through dramatically on the action side. And certainly on the dollars."

The delays continue.

Critical technical work on voting machines, tasked to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, was suspended for two months this year because of a lack of federal money. The institute's job? Make sure standards are tough for computerized touchscreen voting machines.

And that leads to the heart of the fight: Critics, including some prominent Democrats, say the ATM-style machines are a bigger danger than punch cards, source of the infamous "hanging chad" ballots that left Florida election commissioners trying to divine voter intent from bumps on the cards.

Lately, those warnings have been heard: Besides Ohio, officials are reconsidering or delaying the switch to new machines in California, West Virginia, Utah, and more.

"Why trade one imperfect system for another imperfect system?" David Wilde, a councilman in Salt Lake County, asked when questions were raised there about switching to touchscreen machines.

Computer scientists' worries run much deeper.

The high-tech voting machines, they say, can miscount election results through a software bug or a crashing computer; what's even more troubling, they can be manipulated if someone hacks the computer's software. And the biggest problem is that, without a paper ballot, there is nothing tangible to recount.

Because the voting machine industry keeps its computer code secret, claiming competitive business concerns, no one can be truly confident that the machines are as secure as they promise, critics say.

"If something can be stolen, eventually it will be," said Barbara Simons, a retired IBM computer scientist. "Our democracy is much too valuable to trust them to this machine. ... If the election is close - or the opinion polls are close - that means people aren't going to trust the outcome. And there's no way to convince them that they are right."

The solution, in this view, are "voter verifiable paper trails" - a paper ballot that the computer prints after a vote is cast, that the voter can see to ensure their choice was accurately recorded, and that will be locked away for any recount.

A number of studies of the electronic machines have confirmed the doubts, including a harshly critical one from Johns Hopkins University. Studies in Maryland and Ohio also found flaws, but said they could be corrected.

The divide is deep, however, with exasperated election officials and executives from the voting machine industry arguing that critics are inflating small problems into systemwide dangers and frightening voters unnecessarily.

"I think touchscreen is the best voting system," said Pam Iorio, the former elections supervisor in Florida's Hillsborough County (Tampa), where touchscreens were installed. "Election officials have just not been able to get their message out."

The paper trail proposed would "do more harm than good," said Dawn Williams, who oversees elections in Marshall County, Iowa. The receipts will just confuse voters, add more equipment to break down and more burdens for poll workers.

Primary elections so far this year have produced small glitches - machines that failed to boot up in San Diego, coding problems in Georgia and Maryland - but no outright disasters. Supporters of the new technology say that proves the wisdom of their confidence; doubters say it shows nothing of the sort.

The suspicion of critics is compounded by the fact that election officials and the voting machine industry are often closely intertwined.

Washington state's secretary of state went to work in the industry; so did several election officials in California. Under scrutiny is a job change in California, when the former state official in charge of evaluating voting machines took a top job with Election Systems and Software, a large manufacturer.

Those in the relatively small world of elections say that's natural.

"I personally don't see anything wrong with it," said Ernie Hawkins, who retired last year as head of Sacramento's election division. "You know the business, you know the problem, you know where the dangers are. I'd probably be more inclined to listen to someone who was trying to sell me something if they knew what they were talking about."

And don't leave out the politics. The chief executive of Ohio-based Diebold Inc., one of the largest voting machine manufacturers and a top target of security critics, is a top fund-raiser for the Bush campaign. In an August fund-raising letter, Walden O'Dell sought $10,000 donations and declared he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

He later announced that he would "try to be more sensitive" and would lower his political profile.

While errors are inevitable in a system recording tens of millions of votes nationally, it's clear that scrutiny of the voting system will be at an all-time high this year. A greater-than-usual number of election officials have quit or taken retirement. Others are just hoping for a presidential blowout.

"Every election official's prayer is, you hear many times, they really don't care who wins," said Richard Smolka, an elections expert and retired political science professor. "They just don't want the election to be that close."