Election 2004: Touch-screen voting faces criticism

By CATHY ZOLLO, crzollo@naplesnews.com
March 22, 2004

Close to a third of voters who cast ballots in the November election will do it by touching a screen or pressing buttons that will electronically record their choices.

In Florida, more than half of the voters will cast electronic ballots this fall. But in the continuing aftermath of the last presidential election controversy, those statistics have some computer scientists and political activists worried and wanting a paper trail for every vote.

They shouldn't worry, say others, who call them Luddites for their reluctance to wade into the technology that, following the 2000 election, swept the country as part of election reform.

Of the state's 67 counties, 15 use electronic voting machines from one of two vendors. They are the largest counties and represent more than half of the state's 9.3 million registered voters, including those in Collier and Lee counties. The rest will use optical scan systems that require voters to fill out a paper ballot that is tabulated by machine.

Notable among the reluctant to go electronic just yet is Rebecca Mercuri, a leading computer security and electronic vote tabulation specialist and a research fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Mercuri, who has researched electronic voting for 14 years, said the rush to purchase and use the machines is premature and fraught with problems. Most worrisome to her is that no universal standards for the machines have been written as required under the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, that came out of the 2000 election problems.

"This cart before the horse situation is despicable. . .Standards can be inappropriately employed to favor some vendor's products over others, make competition costly and encourage mediocrity over innovation, all of which can have negative effects on security," Mercuri said at the December seminar by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Reports abound that the shift to using voting machines hasn't been smooth in many places. In California, there were problems with poorly trained poll workers, incorrectly assigned ballots and machines that didn't undergo the testing required by the federal government.

And seniors in Broward County seemed to have greater difficulty operating the machines. They had double and triple the rate of undervotes than in precincts where the average age was younger, reported the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. Democrats worry that the errors could mean 4,000 lost votes in the November election.

That's in a state where the margin for winning the presidency was less than 550 votes four years ago.

Mercuri said any programmer can write a code that displays one thing on a screen, records a different thing and prints something entirely different from both, and the machines don't provide independent audit trails in the event of the need for a recount.

"Communities that rely on promises of security and accuracy when purchasing such systems run the severe risk that they will administer an election whose results may someday be contested — but they will not be able to provide an independent audit which can ascertain the content of the true ballots cast," Mercuri said in a statement paper on the technology. "In short, Florida all over again."

Local and state elections officials say Mercuri's warnings are far more dire than the situation warrants, and a less-than-friendly issue paper from the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections denounces such concerns.

"(T)he issue of creating a paper trail for each voter is unnecessary except to eliminate the paranoia of the critics of these systems," it says.

Collier County Supervisor of Elections Jennifer Edwards isn't as abrupt, but she said the alarm raised by Mercuri and others is demoralizing to voters and could do more harm than good come election time.

"We are concerned that these people are doing a disservice to our voters," Edwards said. "We are confident in the equipment."

That confidence, Edwards said, comes from the testing that the machines undergo at the federal, state and local levels, though there are slightly different standards at each level.

In early 2002, Collier County spent roughly $4.3 million for an electronic voting machine system and two years of maintenance from Election Systems & Software, an Omaha, Neb. -based company.

State elections officials add that Florida has testing that is more rigorous than what is required by the federal government.

Though HAVA requires a uniform set of voting machines standards, those haven't been written yet. It's part of the problem, according to Mercuri, and complicating it is the fact that the federal government cut funding to the National Institute of Standards and Technology for its part in helping to formulate those standards.

In the long run, the answer for critics is having printers affixed to the machines that would spew a paper ballot that the voter could then verify and in a locked ballot box.

Two identical bills are moving through the Florida Legislature that would require such paper ballots by 2006, and similar bills are moving through the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Elections officials have said adding printing to the function of the machines would cost between $500 and $1,000 for each. Still others, including Mercuri, say the machines are already fitted with printers that deliver the day's totals, so adapting them to print a paper ballot for the voter to verify shouldn't cost quite so much.

Nicole de Lara, spokeswoman for Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, said no vendor has offered a printer-equipped machine for certification by the state, but she said at least one is working on a prototype.

Those on all sides of the debate say it's far too late to offer voters a paper ballot for the 2004 presidential election.

"The technology doesn't exist yet," de Lara said. "It hasn't been developed, and it will probably have to be reviewed by the Legislature. This is not as simple as saying let's go buy these machines and hook them up."

To elections activist and observer Liza McClenaghan, a paper ballot isn't the simple answer.

"The major thing we need is that there be international standards for the software and equipment used in the voting process and that all companies entering the election market meet those requirements," McClenaghan said. "It would improve the ability for outsiders to examine them."

Elections officials, activists and experts agree on at least this much in the debate over voting methods: any system is going to fail without the proper training for poll workers.