E-ballots worrisome to those who value accuracy, fairness

By Thomas Elias
July 1, 2004

No commodity in a democracy is more precious than the right to vote.

That's why many county election officials looked silly as they spent the springtime loudly protesting and then filing lawsuits over the decision of California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to ban touch-screen voting machines in four counties and impose several conditions on all other counties using them.

There's no question these machines have been a problem in some places, and might become one in others especially those manufactured by Diebold Election Systems, a Texas-based subsidiary of a large Ohio maker of security systems.

The concern starts with remarks by company chairman Walden O'Dell, a major fund-raiser for President Bush, who publicly promised last winter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

Did that mean fixing his company's machines the dominant election device in his home state? O'Dell laughed off that suggestion, but cynics continued to wonder.

Worries also center around what has happened in other places:

In Broward County, Fla., one center of that state's year 2000 voting fiasco, 134 people who used touch-screen machines in a January special election didn't have their votes recorded. The election was decided by 12 votes, and local officials said they had no way to recapture those that went uncounted.

The same kind of machines lost 436 votes in a 2002 election in North Carolina.

Computer scientists in Maryland demonstrated last winter that hackers could guess passwords for touch-screen machines and change software so that an actual vote for one candidate would be recorded as a vote for another.

In California, glitches have been at least as severe. Thousands in Alameda and San Diego counties were unable to vote when they wanted to last March because machines would not start up on schedule. In San Diego, some presidential primary election votes for Democrat John Kerry were credited to Dick Gephardt, who had ped out weeks earlier. And in other places, more thousands of voters were given electronic ballots for the wrong precincts, preventing them from casting ballots in some local races.

For anyone concerned with electoral integrity, that's a nightmare picture. Shelley's action was little more than an attempt to see that similar fiascos are not repeated. A subsequent Shelley order should ensure that touch-screen systems are properly proved and get countable paper backups before they become the exclusive voting technology anywhere in California.

That's not to say the electronic voting hasn't worked well in some places. In Riverside County, the first major jurisdiction in the state to move to touch-screens, they've done well and proved popular.

But overall, the machines have not yet proved worthy of the trust their makers ask Californians to put in them.

That's why Shelley banned them from four problem counties for this fall. It's also why he demands that where they are used, voters be offered the chance to cast paper ballots instead and why he insists they provide paper records of each vote, allowing voters to make sure their choices have been recorded and can be recounted if necessary. By contrast, where systems are purely electronic, recounts amount to no more than pushing a button or clicking a mouse and receiving the identical results one more time.

"I was proud to be the first secretary of state in the nation to call for a voter-verified paper trail ... and I am taking actions that will allow us to get there," Shelley said.

Most of the objections from local registrars center on money. Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack griped even before Shelley's order that it would cost up to $2 million just to store the paper voting evidence. Riverside Registrar Mischelle Townsend said it would cost $700,000 for her county to install voting booths for those who want paper ballots. And there were others.

All of which amounts to little compared with the value of the right to vote and the accompanying right to have those votes tallied accurately. In a state where some elections have been decided by 10 or fewer votes during the last two years, that's not a concern to be laughed off.

The concern becomes greater when Shelley reports that Diebold installed some machines that had not been certified and then lied about their status.

Shelley's actions were applauded by Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation and arguably the state's leading expert on electronic voting. "An important, historic step," she called Shelley's move. "It turns our state away from making further investments in risky e-voting equipment."

She's right, and so is Shelley. For even if paper ballots take longer to count and paper trails cost a bit more per vote, they're well worth it if they make voting more secure, thus restoring voter confidence in an electoral process that has been highly questionable for the last few years.

Thomas D. Elias, of Santa Monica, is a columnist and an author. His e-mail address is tdelias@aol.com.