Elections officials say software flaw won't alter touchscreen votes

By LAURA LeBEAU, lalebeau@naplesnews.com
June 20, 2004

Despite concerns among critics with a software flaw in touchscreen voting machines, Lee and Collier county election officials are confident the system "glitch" will not alter votes cast in an election.

This involves a post-election function and in no way affects votes or the tabulation of votes, said Sharon Harrington, Lee County's supervisor of elections.

The software problem affects the iVotronic touchscreen voting machines and their ability to accurately and quickly produce an event log following an election, a standard step in preparing the machines for the next election, said Collier County's deputy supervisor of elections, Gary Beauchamp.

The event log audit shows all transaction history on the machines, such as whether a vote was cast or canceled, and that the machines were cleared and tested, but nothing printed on the event log audit shows anything about the ballots, Beauchamp said.

Harrington said workers at Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., are working to upgrade the process by which transaction history is downloaded from the voting machines. Occasionally, the serial number of the machine is ped when downloading the data to a compact flash card, but the company said by linking the voting equipment to a laptop computer and downloading through a serial port, the serial number information is correct.

Beauchamp said Collier County has used the touchscreen systems since 2002 and has had no lost or compromised votes.

In state-mandated logic and accuracy tests, voting machines are randomly ed and tested before going to the voting precincts for any election. The tests, conducted in public, have consistently produced accurate results, Beauchamp said.

Touchscreen voting produces no paper trail, and state officials say there is no need for recounts because the system was designed to prevent people from overvoting—voting more than once in the same race. A review screen allows the voter to verify his or her votes, and to make changes, whether in candidate ion or by voting a race he or she may have skipped, an undervote.

When polls close on election night, each precinct transmits vote totals via a stand-alone modem system to the elections office. Those totals are added to the absentee paper ballot totals and compiled to produce election totals. Beauchamp said as soon as the modem process starts, the data are encrypted for security purposes. When it's received at the elections office, it becomes unencrypted. The totals sent by modem from the precincts are verified against printed paper tapes produced by the machines to ensure no interruption in data.

The touchscreen voting systems have come under recent scrutiny in the wake of the software glitch. A press release dated June 8 stated Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., sent a letter to Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, voicing his concerns and requesting a special investigation as to when Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood and election officials were made aware of the software flaw and the subsequent handling of the findings.

In response, Crist indicated to Wexler that since Wexler had pending appellate state and federal cases against Hood, no investigation would be opened.

With the Aug. 31 primaries approaching and the November election less than five months away, Harrington said ES&S employees are working diligently to fix the software flaw soon.