Touch and Go
Is touch screen voting a democratic dream or a paperless nightmare of fraud and error?
by Tara Treasurefield

IN 2003, Karen Rose voted unassisted for the first time in her 51 years.

A licensed psychotherapist with a private practice and faculty clinical counselor at San Francisco State University, Rose is an accomplished, productive individual. But because this Berkeley resident has been blind since birth, she wasn't able to vote on her own until Alameda County invested in a touch screen voting system. Of course, Rose can't see a touch screen any more than she can see a paper ballot. But earphones attached to the system allow her to hear a recording of the choices on the ballot, and a numbered keypad allows her make ions.

"In the past, I had to pay someone to fill out the absentee ballot for me, or come with me to push the punch card," says Rose, who has served on the City of Berkeley Commission on People with Disabilities for five years. "[With the touch screen], I had the same right to vote as anyone else, without having to pay someone. No one was [casting my ballot] for me . . . I was thrilled to finally be a whole and equal citizen, with the same rights as any other citizen."

Now that she has voted without assistance, Rose isn't about to give up touch screens-and she has a lot of company.

Almost every touch screen voting machine is a Direct Recording Electronic device (DRE). As the voter enters choices directly into the machine, the system records them electronically. No matter what you call them, DREs are a democratic dream come true for many voters: they promise long-awaited accessibility for the disabled and non-native English speakers and the streamlining of complicated elections ballots. Another advantage of DREs is that they eliminate undervotes (incomplete ballots) and overvotes, ballots where the voter ed two or more candidates for the same office. But DREs are also fraught with controversy.

The central issue is that the current generation of touch screens do not produce a paper record for every electronic ballot cast. This means there is no way for voters who distrust invisible ballots to verify the accuracy of their votes, and no way to conduct a meaningful audit. Worse yet, paperless touch screens increase the possibility that malicious or erroneous code, which can change millions of votes, will go undetected. This is no small matter, as more likely than not, 50 million Americans-about 29 percent of the electorate-will use touch screen voting machines this November. A growing number of citizens across the nation believe that DREs have placed democracy squarely at risk and they're fighting to save it.

All things considered, it's not surprising that despite enthusiastic support for touch screens in some quarters, on April 30, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley imposed an outright ban on the TSx, a DRE manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems Inc. that was used by four California counties. Also on April 30, Shelley decertified the remaining DREs in ten counties, including Alameda County, and said that he would recertify them if the registrars and vendors complied with 23 security measures. In another critical decision, Shelley directed DRE counties to provide a paper ballot to any voter who wants one in the 2004 presidential election. Mark Radke, Diebold's director of marketing, promptly met Shelley's actions with optimism. "We have confidence in our technology and its benefits, and we look forward to helping administer successful elections in California and elsewhere in the country in November," he said. "We plan to continue working in California in a significant capacity in the future." But Riverside, Kern, and Plumas counties had a different response: they sued Shelley. The complaints included attempting to force counties to spend millions to replace their DREs and violating the constitutional rights of disabled voters.

IT WASN'T THE FIRST TIME Shelley set stringent requirements for DREs. Though he announced last November that California's voting systems were secure, he also ordered that by July 1, 2006, every DRE used in California elections must provide a voter-verifiable paper trail (VVPT), to "restore voter confidence."

"Voter-verifiable paper trail" and even "VVPT" may sound complicated. But the term simply means that in a democracy, voters must be able to confirm the accuracy of their votes. To that end, VVPT advocates want every vote cast on November 2, 2004 and beyond to produce a paper trail, either with printers attached to DREs, or with paper-based systems, such as optical scans.

Another advantage of VVPT is that it makes touch screen voting systems auditable. Bev Harris, publicist, investigate journalist, and author of Black Box Voting, has dubbed electronic ballots "vapor" ballots. She says, "Getting rid of paper records means getting rid of auditability-the checks and balances that help to prove that votes were counted correctly. Vote counting is just bookkeeping. You must be able to prove how you came up with your numbers, and you must use independent sources of evidence to do so."

Harris was one of the first people to warn of problems with DREs. In 2002, she self-published her shocking expose of the DRE industry, posting one or two chapters at a time to the Internet. The entire book can now be downloaded free of charge at www.blackboxvoting.org and a paperback version by Plan Nine Publishing came out this year. Initially, both Harris and Black Box Voting were met with near-universal skepticism. Now, she has achieved folk heroine status, primarily because Diebold has an uncanny talent for shooting itself in the foot.

California's October 2003 recall election alone provided ample evidence that Diebold's voting systems are scandalously inaccurate and insecure. Every DRE county has at least a minimal optical scan system, so that absentee and provisional voters can cast their ballots on paper. A machine (scanner) "reads" the marks on the paper ballots and computes the totals. Then the totals from the electronic ballots cast on the DREs and the paper ballot totals from the scanners are transmitted to the county's "host computer," where vote counting software computes the election results. The software that computes election results in Alameda County is called GEMS, a product of Diebold. In the recall election, GEMS shifted 3,000 absentee votes intended for Democrat Cruz Bustamante to a Socialist candidate from Southern California. Brad Clark, Alameda County registrar of voters, caught the error only because he knows how voters vote in his county and didn't trust the figures that GEMS came up with. Equally disturbing, an investigation by the Secretary of State's office revealed that uncertified software was running on Diebold equipment in all 17 California counties that used it.

It doesn't seem possible to do any worse, but somehow, Diebold pulled it off. In the March primary, part of Diebold's voting system, the precinct control module (PCM), failed in Alameda and San Diego counties. The PCM creates the cards that voters use to access Diebold's touch screens. At precincts where the PCM was not working there were no access cards, and an unknown number of people were unable to vote. Diebold president Bob Urosevich appeared at a public hearing of the Voting Systems and Procedures Panel in Sacramento after the March primary. Like an irresponsible teenager accustomed to charming those who would hold him accountable, he stood before the panel and forthrightly explained that a design flaw in the PCM caused the battery to drain even when the switch was OFF. Diebold equipment in Kern and Solano counties, and the Sequoia voting system in Napa County, were also problematic. In addition, in an eerie replay of the GEMS mishap in Alameda County during the recall election, Diebold's GEMS software in San Diego gave nearly 3,000 absentee votes cast for John Kerry to Dick Gephardt, who had already ped out of the race.

Also in the March primary, blind voter and computer scientist Noel Runyan, who lives of Campbell, was a casualty of Santa Clara County's Sequoia DRE system. Theoretically, when Runyan donned the earphones connected to the DRE, a recorded voice would lead him through the ballot. That didn't happen. "The speech function didn't work at all," says Runyan. "We tried it on several machines, and they didn't work either." He finally gave up and asked his wife to cast his ballot for him.

As it happens, Runyan and other visually-impaired voters had an opportunity to test Diebold, Sequoia, and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) voting systems for accessibility before the primary. He gives failing marks to all the systems. "The access interface [on all of them] was done like a junior high school science project," says Runyan. "They are so poorly designed that I worry significantly about the competence of the rest of the design of the equipment, and how that impacts security… What I most worry about is the ways in which these things can be used to illegally modify a vote afterwards."

Echoing Runyan's assessment of DREs, Yolo County registrar of voters Freddie Oakley says she distrusted them from the start. "I've been working with computers for over 30 years," says Oakley. "I looked at those things and said, 'Overpriced, underpowered, made in somebody's garage, not ready for primetime.' "

If Shelley needed more evidence than the performance of DREs in the October 2003 recall election and the March 2004 primary before he could bring himself to pull the plug on them, the results of a mock election staged by a small Maryland-based security firm called RABA Technologies provided it. After successfully hacking into the Diebold AccuVote TS (the precursor of the Tsx) time after time and with the greatest of ease, RABA reported that only a major code rewrite could eliminate the system's security risks.

Believe it or not, even more reasons to distrust Diebold exist. In Black Box Voting, Bev Harris tells the tale of Jeffrey Dean, a 23-count embezzler who specialized in computer fraud. Dean was both a director and head of research and development at Global Election Systems (GES) in 2000, which Diebold purchased in 2002. Harris reports that according to a public court document released before GES hired him, Dean served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree of sophistication and planning." Yet, Dean had access to the most sensitive components of the GES voting system. What's more, upon purchasing GES, Diebold retained Dean as a paid consultant and hired John Elder, a convicted cocaine trafficker who had also worked at GES, to manage its national printing division.

In August 2003, Diebold chief executive Walden O'Dell wrote in a fund-raising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." At that time, Diebold was trying to sell voting machines in Ohio and success was near at hand. Diebold's prospects in Ohio have dimmed significantly since then. At the beginning of May, twenty Ohio counties were interested in purchasing Diebold DREs in time for the 2004 presidential election. A month later, only four counties were still open to that possibility.

In Diebold's defense, Douglas Jones, associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa and ten-year member of the Iowa's Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems, says that some very conscientious people work for the company. But he admits that if everyone trusts the system, crooks have an easier time. "There's a comedy of errors here, as well as a continuing tradition of crooked elections. I think that incompetence is just as important as fraud in some cases."

As of June 1, the deadline for each county to notify the Secretary of State of which voting system it will use in the presidential election, there were so many unknowns that Alameda County was undecided. The AccuVote-TS lacked full federal certification, Diebold was not willing to give its source code to the Secretary of State without a nondisclosure agreement, and Shelley was not willing to recertify Diebold unless all 23 of his security measures-including possession of the source code were met. In other words, the Secretary of State and Diebold were at a stalemate. But hope springs eternal, and Diebold spokesman David Bear said, "We're hoping for final approval from the Secretary of State's office to allow us to move forward."

Brad Clark, Alameda County registrar of voters, would like to stay with Diebold for November 2004 and beyond. But if the pending issues with Diebold cannot be resolved in time to prepare for the coming election, Clark says that Alameda County will upgrade the optical scan system it now uses to process absentee ballots and use it for a county-wide all-paper election. The cost would be about $1 million for a high-speed central scanner, or $4 million for a scanner at every precinct.

In the meantime, the L.A. federal court won't consider Riverside County's case against Shelley until the end of June, which means the issue of recertification is likely to remain undecided for at least that long. Either way, come November 2, 2004, Alameda County will provide a provisional ballot to every voter that requests one.

"Too little," says Grand Lake Theater owner Allen Michaan, who wants Shelley to ban all paperless DREs from California. Alarmed by the outcome of the last presidential election, Michaan has been posting political messages on the Grand Lake's marquee every week or so since November 2000. "The fact of the matter is that most people are not going to request a paper ballot," he says. "They're going to walk in with the assumption that if [the voting machine is] here, I can use it. It must be safe."

ELAINE GINNOLD, Alameda County assistant registrar of voters, confirms Michaan's worst fears. "Our experience is that very few people request paper," she says. "In this county, most people like the touch screens and vote on them." Like Clark, Ginnold hopes to Diebold's Accuvote-TS in November. "It's accessible to people who can't see, it's accessible to the Spanish-speaking and Chinese-speaking voters, and it's very accurate," she says.

Alameda County's drive for paperless DREs began in 1997, Ginnold says, because the county's Votamatic (punch-card system) was old and "on its way out". Around that time, the Asian Law Caucus filed a complaint with the Department of Justice and "part of the settlement agreement was that if we ever got a new voting system, it must provide a ballot in Chinese," explains Ginnold. When a prototype of Diebold's new election system became available in 1999, Alameda County used it in a small election in Piedmont. "It got rave reviews," says Ginnold, and following one success after another, the county put the system in the city clerk's office in 2000 for early voting. Once again, voters liked it, and contract negotiations began. According to registrar Clark, state and federal money covered the system's $12 million cost.

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by Congress in 2002, endorsed the new technology since it meets HAVA's 2007 requirement that all voting systems be accessible to disabled and non-native English speakers. "Everyone started jumping on the bandwagon," says Ginnold. "If we had said we're going to use paper [with an optical scan system] because this [DRE] technology is not established yet, we would have been laughed out of town. Paper didn't provide what we need in this county. None of the black box people [DRE critics] were anywhere in sight at that time."

The "black box critics" may not have been visible in 2002, but they soon would be. Bev Harris was busily posting chapters of Black Box Voting to the Internet. Also at that time, Stanford University Professor David Dill was on the verge of creating verifiedvoting.org. Dill's website quickly became the premiere source of accurate and reliable information in the struggle to secure a nationwide VVPT requirement by November 2, 2004.

Steve Weir, registrar of voters for Contra Costa County understands the appeal of touch screens-given language diversity and the complications of California elections-but Contra Costa is considering a different machine altogether, one that is less of a political minefield. The county's current optical scan system is not accessible to disabled voters and will have to be replaced by 2006. Weir's solution: an accessible optical scan system that would cost $7 to $9 million. "In this climate, there is no way in heck that I am going to bring any kind of electronic voting system into this county," he says. "It's way too [politically] dangerous to be dealing with this issue."

Dangerous, problematic, or otherwise, DRE technology has an impressive array of ardent supporters. Kathay Feng, voting rights project director at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles, testified before the California Voting Systems and Procedures Panel in April, that "DREs are important to empowering the Asian Pacific American community to reach full voter turnout. They are the only equipment that give voters full bilingual access to the ballot that is both private and equal." Feng adds, "Optical scans are often so counter-intuitive that voters struggle with how to mark them."

Feng's fierce opposition to optical scan systems surprises Ginnold. "I haven't heard any complaints from the Chinese community groups about our optical scan ballot," she says. "It's just a paper ballot done in Chinese."

Ted Wang, policy director at Chinese for Affirmative Action, insists that electronic voting systems have distinct advantages. "In an electronic system, the language appears on the screen. If you make a mistake, you can go back, you don't have to destroy the ballot. Before you turn in your ballot, you get a summary [through earphones or on screen] of how you voted. All those procedures help assure someone who's new to the process that they voted properly."

Backing up the Chinese voters, last summer, the National Council of the Blind passed a resolution opposing VVPT. "We think it's a red herring," says Roger Peterson, past president of the Silicon Valley Council of the Blind. "It's not evident to us that it will make things any better. It's just a means to postponing [the use of DREs]. This idea of the paper trail being a security blanket is a sighted prejudice.

The national office of the League of Women Voters (LWVUS) also opposes VVPT, causing great rancor among its members. Responding to a 2003 New York Times article that raised questions about the security of paperless systems, LWVUS president Kay Maxwell wrote, 'The concerns raised [in the article] about electronic voting machines are worrisome because they unnecessarily scare voters and ignore the larger problem: reforming election systems." When outraged League members across the nation protested this position, the national office replied, "The LWVUS does not believe that an individual paper confirmation for each ballot is required" for recounts and voter verification, and in fact, can be counterproductive. Furthermore, LWVUS ordered league members who disagreed not to speak out in public as league members.

Maxwell's gag order sparked open rebellion, and members countered that the national office's support for paperless voting violates its tradition of basing positions on study and input from local chapters. Genevieve Katz, a member of the Alameda County chapter of the League of Women Voters, wrote an open letter to Kay Maxwell asking LWVUS to switch to a neutral position, then posted the letter to leagueissues.org, By the middle of June 2004, over 900 League members nationwide had signed Katz's letter. Then on June 14, at the League of Women Voters annual conference in D.C., a resolution directing LWVUS to take a neutral position on VVPT was passed with overwhelming support.

Michael Shamos, a well-known computer scientist and voting system examiner at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is not a fan of paper ballots. In April, Shamos wrote, "Every conceivable kind of manipulation you can imagine (and many you can't) in every state of the U.S. has been tried [with paper ballots]. Whatever fears one may have about DREs, they're far safer than any form of paper. The opponents have simply decided that computers are not safe and they will neither acknowledge nor respond to any argument to the contrary except to insult their adversary."

But David Wagner, assistant professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley, sees it differently. A specialist in computer security, Wagner says, "The testing laboratories won't tell anyone exactly what tests they are performing, but it is clear they are not doing enough. Systems with serious flaws are getting approved for public use. The certification process needs major reform."

Shamos agrees that testing "falls far short of what's needed," but he's less concerned about DREs than, say, airplanes. "Not to endorse questionable voting systems or trivialize the possibility of chicanery, but I and the republic will survive if a president is elected who was not entitled to the office," says Shamos. "But I will not survive if a software error causes my plane to go down."

Michael Shamos has every right to place a higher value on his own life than on the sanctity of the electoral process. But perhaps without intending to, he draws attention to a crucial point: America may already have a president who is not entitled to the office and democracy may not survive. In the 2000 election, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a hand recount of the ballots that scanners rejected because the machines could not discern the voter's intention. As the recount progressed, Al Gore picked up votes and was closing in on George Bush's narrow lead. Then the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the recount before it was completed and effectively handed the presidency to Bush-by one judicial vote.

Justice Scalia, in the majority, explained that counting questionable votes (due to hanging chads, dimpled chads, and inconsistent tallying procedures) threatened "irreparable harm" to George W. Bush by "casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election." In a dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens argued that the high court should have found a different solution. He said, "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner … the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." The debacle in Florida led directly to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which in turn elicited the stampede to replace paper ballots with paperless DREs. Today, alarmed citizens who feel doubly-dupedfirst by the 2000 election, and then by the false promises of HAVA and DREs-are rolling up their sleeves and using every tool at their disposal to shore up a failing democracy. And that's a very good sign, says the Iowa State Election Board's Douglas Jones. "If we can constructively mobilize the voter distrust which exists now because of the problems with voter equipment, I believe there's a real possibility that we can pull off the best and most accurate election in American history."

MAKING JONES'S POINT, citizens in a number of states are promoting legislation to require paper backups to touch screens. In addition, several pending Congressional bills and several influential politicians seek to impose a VVPT requirement on all states at once.

Another sign that DRE critics are having an impact is that voting equipment vendors are hard at work developing new systems designed to meet the requirements of virtually every voter. One is the ES&S AutoMARK (a product of two companies partnering together), the accessible optical scan system that interests Steve Weir. As with traditional optical scan systems, able-bodied voters mark their choices on a paper ballot. But the new system also accommodates blind and non-native English voters with a touch screen, earphones, and numeric keypad, and the machine marks the ballot for voters who are unable to do it themselves. Rhode Island uses a low-cost optical scan system that includes a tactile ("see" by touch) ballot that makes it accessible to blind voters. A unique advantage of tactile ballots is that they also allow blind voters to vote absentee without assistance. In addition, several DREs that produce a paper trail are already federally certified.

The San Jose Mercury News described one new untested system as the "Holy Grail," because it features public software for public elections. Created by Open Voting Consortium (OVC), a nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, the as-yet-unnamed voting system (Holy Grail sounds pretty good) is open for review by anyone who wants to examine it. OVC president Alan Dechert says, "This is the low-cost, open source alternative to the proprietary systems."

Dechert, who has a 15-year background as a software test engineer and application developer, envisions a 21st-century Manhattan Project. He wants to bring top computer scientists together to develop the ideal voting system and is looking for about $40 million in government funding to do it.

WHILE THE ISSUES may seem highly technical and to be subject to the whims of government officials, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco points to two crucial actions that every citizen can take: vote, and get out the vote. "The absolutely best way to avoid problems in the election is to make it a landside," she says, "to have very clear winners and losers."

As important as it is to vote, some citizens who are wary of touch screen technology go a step further and advocate voting absentee. Michaan, the outspoken owner of the Grand Lake Theater, placed this message on his theater marquee in February: "Touch screen voting is fraudulent. Demand absentee ballots."

That's what Carrie Olson, Berkeley resident and director of operations at Moveon.org, plans to do. But because absentee ballots are highly vulnerable to mail fraud, she'll hand-deliver hers to the county registrar. Olson knows that the secretary of state has ordered DRE counties to make provisional paper ballots available at the polls for voters who request them. But she believes that provisional ballots will bog down the systems while processing absentee ballots is an established and reliable method.

Olson has a point. In the March primary, San Diego County election officials did not provide provisional ballots, even though Kevin Shelley asked all touch screen counties to do so. When paperless systems failed, voters were out of luck, unless they went to another precinct and cast their ballots on a paperless DRE that was functional. Also in the primary, some Alameda County precincts ran out of provisional paper ballots.

Local LWV member Katz has another plan for the presidential election. She'll be one of 2000 volunteers nationwide to participate in the Clean Voting Campaign, founded by Black Box author Bev Harris. "This is sort of a secret shopper program for democracy," says Harris. "The volunteers will perform standard election-day tasks, by serving as poll workers, election judges, and poll watchers. But the volunteers also have an "undercover" assignment: to make sure that any security lapses, instances of disenfranchisement, equipment failures, and other problems receive immediate and public attention. Specifically, these guardians of democracy will alert the media of glitches as they arise, collect information for prompt legal action, and monitor election results for anything that looks suspicious.

In spite of undercover volunteer watchdogs, pending legislation, provisional paper ballots, and push for absentee ballots, most voters will go to the polls and vote as they always have, unaware that anything has changed and that the most fundamental democratic right is at a critical crossroads.

For her part, Karen Rose hopes to participate in democracy on November 2 by once again joyously casting her ballot without assistance. In so doing, she is provoking Noel Runyan to accept the fate he seems destined for-to persuade blind voters to withdraw their support from voting systems that aren't good enough for them. "We're getting rushed into a solution," he says. "I'm telling blind people, 'Yes, I know how much you want to vote independently. But we have to be patient until this gets worked out properly.'"

Runyan is also urging blind voters to dismiss false claims that VVPT will hamper their ability to vote without assistance. "I'm fully behind a paper trail," he says. "I think that's going to have to be the requirement across this country, given this technology." In concept, Runyan embraces the technology as a means to obtain accessible voting, but is concerned by accessibility and security as it now stands. But if the Sequoia DRE in Santa Clara County is recertified in time for the presidential election, Runyan will help other blind voters use it and he will use it himself. Direct experience with DREs will prepare him to present solid testimony on this issue.

Runyan's efforts to bring others around to his point of view may fail. But he has already achieved a far greater success. Gnawing concerns about touch screen voting machines have left him no choice but to step forward, speak up, and debate one of the most compelling and controversial issues in the nation's history with his fellow Americans. In other words, Noel Runyan is participating in democracy, a form of government whose very survival hinges on a vigilant, well-informed, and passionate citizenry.