An America where votes disappear

04/04/04
Susan Nielsen

T he guy in charge of Oregon's elections is worried.

Not about Oregon. This state's voting system is fine, thank you. Secretary of State Bill Bradbury is troubled by the states that have installed touch-screen electronic voting machines with no paper records of votes and no way to check for mistakes.

He's got reason to worry. Using new technology is fine, but ridding elections of the checks and balances that compensate for human failure is crazy.

"It's very clear there's a growing level of concern about touch-screen voting and having no paper trail," Bradbury says. "The potential for abuse is there."

You remember how this love affair with computerized voting began: After the debacle involving Florida's ballots in the 2000 presidential election, the nation swore never again to have its elections swing on hanging paper chads. People decided if they switched to paperless voting machines, elections would be perfect and the integrity of the nation's voting systems would be saved.

Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which promised states $3.9 billion to replace their old punch-card and lever voting machines. In the rush, Congress left out two big things:

They didn't require new voting machines to keep any paper records for backup. They also didn't require private voting-machine suppliers to provide open-source software for elections officials to inspect for bugs or foul play.

In other words, if the computer screws up, there's no way to recount. And if a programmer or voting-machine company silently conspires to influence the election, well, there's no way to know.

In a presidential race, that's the equivalent of a few million hanging chads.

Today, at least 30 states use direct-recording electronic machines, or DREs. Countless touch-screen machines simply spit out a winner and leave no paper trail at all.

That'd be like Multnomah County burning all of its paper ballots on Election Night, just after the first tally.

Computer scientists from universities across the country, from Stanford to Harvard, say these paperless machines are ripe for tampering and hacking. Fortune magazine dubbed the machines the "worst technology of 2003."

Yet the outcome of our next presidential election, likely to be another close call, depends on them.

Conspiracy theorists are on fire. They note that the chief executive of Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, one of the nation's top vendors of voting machines, is a big fund-raiser for President Bush. In a widely circulated fund-raising letter last summer to Ohio Republicans, the voting company chief promised to help Ohio "deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

Critics also claim to see a suspicious trend of Republican upsets in counties using touch-screen machines.

"To have an election without any possibility of a recount to verify the results is an appalling thought," says Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. "In fact, maybe it's wired. Maybe the conspiracy people are right. I don't know."

Even without conspiracy theories, ordinary computer troubles offer plenty to worry about. Counties in California and Maryland demonstrated that in the March presidential primary.

In Maryland, precinct officials tried to send their vote totals over modems, but the server crashed.

In California's Orange County, an estimated 2,000 people voted in the wrong races when poll workers entered the wrong computer codes. In San Carlos, a voting machine inexplicably recorded 10 fewer ballots than the number of people who physically signed in to vote. In San Diego, poll workers turned voters away when the computers failed to boot up properly.

California says it will have backup paper ballots in all counties by 2006. A few other states now say they'll incorporate paper trails, too. Whatever happens, any changes will likely happen in states, not in Congress: Bills requiring paper trails have "zero" chance of passing, says DeFazio, a co-sponsor of one bill. Republican leaders oppose the change, he says.

Thankfully, Oregon won't use these touch-screen machines, except to assist people with disabilities. Oregonians vote with mail-in ballots, which are fed into reliable optical-scanning machines. Elections officials keep the paper ballots for possible recounts.

That's good for Oregon. But Bradbury, DeFazio and growing legions of leaders and voters don't want federal elections to be vulnerable to viruses, malfunctions, power failures and software bugs.

It's not because they distrust technology. It's because everything in democracy needs checks and balances. And every vote, whether for local sewer commissioner or national president, needs to be counted openly.

Not tallied and zapped.