Critics cautious of new vote machines

Ballots can't be reviewed later

BY JOHN McCARTHY
FLORIDA TODAY

In the wake of the 2000 presidential election fiasco, Florida and every other state in the country rushed to replace antiquated voting systems.

While the meaning of hanging chads isn't likely to be a focal point this November, critics say the newer voting systems have problems of their own.

The biggest problem, they say, is that the ATM-like machines that will be used by about half of Florida's voters this November don't have any paper ballots that can be reviewed after Election Day.

"The voter has no way of checking whether that machine has correctly recorded his or her votes," said David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University in California. "We are losing the ability to do meaningful recounts."

Elections officials, though, say the machines are rigorously tested before they are put into service.

"Do I think the machines are accurate?" asked Indian River County's Kay Clem, president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. "You bet I do. I'd bet my life on it."

After 2000, Florida banned the use of punch-card voting systems and required the counties that used them to switch to either optical scan machines where paper ballots are fed into a counting machine or touchscreen systems, where voters make their choices by pushing on a computer screen.

Fifteen counties opted to buy the touchscreen systems. About half of Florida's voters will use these machines in November, as will about 50 million voters nationwide. Brevard County purchased an optical scan system prior to the 2000 election.

There is little doubt that the touchscreen machines go a long way toward eliminating the biggest problem that plagued the 2000 election: determining the intent of voters who completed the ballots improperly. Was that pregnant chad the result of a voter not pushing hard enough on the stylus or of the voter starting to vote for that candidate and the changing his mind? Did this voter really mean to vote for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan or did he think he was voting for Al Gore, but was confused by the layout of the "butterfly ballot?" And what did this voter mean when he filled out the circle by one candidate's name and put an "X" through the opponent's circle?

Jack Large of Vero Beach first tested out the new machines in 2002 when Indian River held mock elections to give voters a chance to try out the new way of voting.

"I went in to change my vote for best patriotic song from 'The Star-Spangled Banner' to 'Yankee Doodle Dandy,' and it was easy to do," he said at the time.

But while the high-tech machines are easy to use, they create new problems, critics say. The biggest is that while voters see what's going on on the screen, they have no way of knowing that the machines are actually recording their votes as they cast them.

"We don't know what is going on inside the machine, and we can't know," Dill said.

There's also a security threat. A study conducted by computer scientists from Johns Hopkins and Rice universities found that touchscreen systems also known as Direct Reporting Electronic, or DREs were vulnerable to hackers. They examined machines made by Texas-based Diebold Election Systems, which the state of Maryland was in the process of purchasing. Those machines have not been certified for use in Florida. Critics of that report said the scientists didn't examine the machine in the real-world environment of a polling place with all the security that entails.

One of the report's authors, Avi Rabin from Johns Hopkins, acted as an election judge during the March 2 primary in Baltimore County, Md. What he learned and saw did ease some of his concerns, he wrote in an op-ed piece that appeared in March 27 edition of The Miami Herald. Overall, though, he wrote that he was still concerned about the machines.

"After my experience as a judge, I still believe that the Diebold machines, and ones like them from other vendors, represent a major threat to our democracy."

The biggest threat comes not from hackers Rabin, Dill and others contend, but from programmers at the companies that make the election machines. A malicious programmer, they say, could write programs that wouldn't cast votes the way they are supposed to.

"Insiders can commit computer fraud much easier than outside," Dill said.

That's just not realistic, said Paul Craft, who is in charge of certifying voting systems for the Florida Division of Elections. All the software undergoes extensive testing to make sure it does what it is supposed to do, he said. "David Dill is real good at producing the questions. The problem I have with Dr. Dill is that he doesn't give credit to the procedures and the kind of testing we do."

Florida's top election official Secretary of State Glenda Hood said the 15 counties that have DREs have held hundreds of elections since 2002 with no problems. "It seems to me those counties should continue to feel confident about using them."

Still the movement to add paper ballots as a backup to the machines is growing. California and Nevada passed laws requiring paper backups by 2006.

Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, is suing to have printers added to Florida's touchscreen machines. And Sen. Bob Graham has introduced a bill that would require the machines to have paper ballot receipts.

Hood said she didn't think it would be possible to add printers for this November's election. There are no national standards for such printers, she said.

But she expected the touchscreen systems to evolve over time, and printers could be part of that evolution.

"We need to make sure that every person believes that their vote counts and that they have access to the polls."