Diebold and the dutiful

From the electioneering you've seen so far this year, you might not think anyone's testing for logic or accuracy.

But in fact four guys spent last week doing just that on about 400 of Columbus' touch-screen voting machines.

One guy worked for Columbus' elections office. The other three worked for voting-machine maker Diebold, which is pronounced "dee-bold," like in a soap opera ("Diebold and the Beautiful").

Diebold makes more than just voting machines. It started manufacturing safes in Cincinnati in 1859, and gained a following after the 1871 Chicago fire, in the wreckage of which almost 900 Diebold safes were found with their contents intact.

If you've never heard of Diebold, then maybe you never checked the brand name on your ATM. Maybe you didn't know that in 2001, Diebold got a contract with the National Archives to secure the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. Maybe you haven't heard that Diebold now supplies voting machines not only to Georgia, but to 36 other states as well as Canada and Brazil.

So it might appear that Diebold now controls access to your bank safe, your ATM, your Bill of Rights and your voting machine. Maybe Diebold's running the country.

Or maybe not, because if it were secretly running the country, then last year its Republican chief executive would not have sent out a party fund-raising letter in which he bragged of being "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." Critics said the head of a company that makes voting machines shouldn't say things like that, at least not without thinking first.

So it's important to ensure the integrity of this electronic voting system, because if people ever discovered Diebold had corrupted an election, its top executives would need safes to duck into before torch-bearing mobs reached the company's Canton, Ohio, headquarters.

How do you test a voting machine for logic and accuracy? First you remove a seal to open the case it's in. The seal's a blue plastic tab put on the case after the last election. When you finish the test, you apply a red seal to show the machine's cleared for the next election.

Then you need a key to open hardware locks on the machine itself to lift up the touch-screen and open a side control panel where you turn the machine on.

You plug in an election supervisor's computer key card and calibrate the touch-screen by tapping tiny crosses at the corners. If the screen isn't calibrated, its sensors may not match up with candidate names and boxes on the ballot. Punching the screen in one place then might register a vote somewhere else.

You make sure the machine shows the right date and time, and you character-test the printer. Then you plug in a voter-access card encoded with a ballot just like voters use on election day and you do a test vote.

The electronic ballot is on that access card; not on the machine. It won't appear on the screen without that card. Once that ballot is cast, a poll worker must encode the card with another ballot before it can be used again. That way a voter can't just re the card and vote again and again.

To test the machine, you plug that card in and vote in every race that pops up, testing the calibration along the way, then you print the result to see if it adds up. The testers cast 95 votes each time. If the printout shows more or fewer than that, then there's a problem with the machine.

Problem machines go back to Diebold for repair. Even if the problem's just a broken leg clamp on the stand, the machine is pulled from the lineup. Eighteen machines were set aside last week. Columbus owns 427 and will use 375 in the next election 10 at the elections office for absentee and advance voting; 365 at the polls on July 20.

The machines are powered through a "daisy chain" extension cord, but each has a battery backup that kicks in if there's a power outage. Those rechargeable batteries all have to be checked, too.

Once you've done a test vote, you cancel the ballot and "zero-out" the machine to ensure no votes are stored in its memory. The machines don't store ballots, but they do count votes both on cracker-thin memory cards that poll workers pull out and take back to the elections office for the election-day tally, and on a backup memory bank in the machine. So if a memory card is lost, election supervisors can go back to the machine to check the tally.

As you zero-out the memory, you print that zero result and leave that printout on the machine, then you reset it, lock it up and seal the case. On election day, poll workers are to check that printout and zero-out each machine again, and three must sign off as having witnessed this.

The primary security complaint about Diebold voting machines involves the election supervisor's card: If you can get one of those cards, and you know the access code and how to use it, you can sabotage an election you can "zero-out" a machine that has votes on it.

One advantage to electronic voting is that a machine won't let you vote twice in one race, like confused people used to do on the old optical-scan ballots. This so-called "overvote" has virtually disappeared. There's still an "undervote," votes left uncast as voters skip some or even all the races on a ballot, but you can't force people to vote not even if you're secretly running the country.