Rare glitch fuels furor over touch screens
By BRIDGET HALL GRUMET, Times Staff Writer
Published June 25, 2004

Critics worry the flaw, which doesn't affect vote tallies, portends greater problems. It should be fixed for the primaries.

NEW PORT RICHEY - Something can always go wrong on election day. But chances are, the culprit will be man, not the machine, Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning said.

The voting data is backed up three times on Pasco County's touch screen voting machines, and hackers can't tap in because the voting booths are not plugged into the Internet.

But people can make mistakes, Browning said. Poll workers can pull up the wrong party's ballot on the machine, or they can forget to make sure a voter signs the register before casting a ballot.

"The machinery is sound. The machinery is secure. It's accurate," Browning said. "Many of the issues that are reported as equipment issues - a closer examination will show you it was poll workers or it was a procedural issue."

But the machines used in Pasco County do have a so-called "glitch" that can appear days after the election. In a handful of cases, when elections workers download the voting data from the machines in a certain way, the unit's serial number comes across garbled.

It's a minor flaw that doesn't affect vote tallies, Browning said, and officials plan to fix it before the Aug. 31 primary. The company that manufactures the iVotronic machines, Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., has designed a software patch to fix the problem.

To the longtime critics of these machines, however, the glitch underscores the larger fears about the completely computerized voting system. The system has no paper backup, aside from the post-election printouts of votes logged by the machines.

Critics wonder: If the serial number can get scrambled, what keeps the vote tallies straight?

"They say the reason we don't need a paper printout (of individual ballots) is because the computer has these event histories," said Patrick Bergy, a computer network administrator at a Tampa cardiac clinic who is vying for Browning's job this fall.

"But here we have in-your-face examples of these event logs not doing their job," Bergy said. "I don't care if it's a serial number thing. This is an example of the first of many more issues to come with event logs."

The promise of a software patch - which is being tested by the state Division of Elections and an independent group before the counties can get it - gives Bergy little comfort.

"Ask Microsoft if there's ever going to be an end to these patches, or these problems," said Bergy, likening the iVotronic glitch to the bugs that people encounter on their personal computers.

"These are computers, contrary to popular belief," he said. "They're not Cuisinarts."

Browning winces at such an analogy, however. Although the machines use computer technology, they are specially designed for the sole purpose of collecting votes. Calling them computers, Browning has said, "is misleading."

Moreover, there is no evidence suggesting vote tallies have been affected by the serial number glitch, he said.

"What they're wanting to do is to make all these threads that weave everything together and say the system is broken, and it is not," Browning said.

The glitch is not an issue on election night, when workers use infrared cartridges to pull the vote tallies from the touch screen machines.

It appears a couple of days after the election, when archival voting data is downloaded onto tiny computer disks called compact flash cards. The serial number appears garbled if the touch screen machine is running on a low battery, Browning said.

But if workers use a cable to plug the machine into a laptop computer, the data comes through perfectly, full serial number and all, Browning said. The vote tallies match the figures on the compact flash cards, he said, so that data is not being affected.

Bergy is not so sure. Without a paper copy of each vote being cast, he said, there is no foolproof way to know whether the voting machines are accurately capturing and recording each vote, he said.

He plans to ask the County Commission to launch an independent study of the iVotronics.

"If a file is corrupted," he said, "hundreds of votes could be lost, and we'll never know about it."

Not so, Browning said: Aside from passing rigorous state standards, these machines are tested before each election to make sure they are correctly processing test votes.

"Voters can continue to have assurances that their ballot will be cast properly and counted properly," Browning said.