Reed announces safeguards for electronic voting

By GENE JOHNSON
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

SEATTLE Secretary of State Sam Reed announced a series of measures to improve trust in electronic voting machines Wednesday, including the requirement that by 2006 each produce a paper trail that will allow voters to verify their ballots.

"The most fundamental quality to a democracy is using a voting system people can trust," Reed told a news conference. "To gain that kind of trust and confidence, people have to be able to verify their vote."

Only two of the state's 39 counties - Snohomish and Yakima - will use the machines at all of their polling places during this year's election. Another county, Skamania, usually has all of its residents vote by mail, but this year will have two machines at its county courthouse for use by disabled voters or others who want to try them out.

The machines in those counties don't immediately produce a paper trail that voters can check, but paper versions can be created later if recounts are needed. By 2006 they will have to be retrofitted - at a cost of roughly $500,000 to Snohomish and $50,000 to Yakima - to print the voter's choices immediately. Voters won't keep the receipts, only view them; they will then be deposited into a box attached to each machines.

In the meantime, Reed said, counties that use the machines will have to test them before, during and after Election Day to ensure they function properly and that no one has manipulated them. In addition, the machines must not be networked together or connected to the Internet, to prevent hackers from accessing them.

Reed gave the counties until 2006 to automatically print out a paper trail because federal testing of hardware and software required to do so won't be completed until then.

Elections officials across the country have started turning to touch-screen and other types of electronic balloting following Florida's election debacle in 2000. The federal Help America Vote Act requires that by 2006 there be at least one electronic voting machine in every polling site in the country and provides federal money to put them there.

But questions about the systems have persisted since a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers revealed security problems with versions made by Diebold Elections Systems of Ohio last year. California's secretary of state decertified a version of the Diebold machines for use there, and no Diebold systems are certified for use in Washington state.

Snohomish County, which has 1,000 machines made by Sequoia Pacific, has used touch-screen voting since 2002 without any problems, said county Auditor Bob Terwilliger. On election days, the county breaks its polling sites into routes and has specially trained troubleshooters on patrol to make sure the machines don't fail.

Yakima County will have 195 machines made by Hart Intercivic at its 67 polling sites this year. County Auditor Corky Mattingly said the machines can be used in Spanish, which will better serve the area's large Hispanic population, and that headphones attached to the machines will help illiterate and blind voters cast their ballots in secret.

Auditors at both counties said their staff had determined that using the machines is cheaper in the long run than optical-scan or punch-card balloting.

King County, the state's most populous county, uses optical-scan ballots, in which voters fill in circles next to their candidate's name.

Elaine Kraft, a spokeswoman for King County Executive Ron Sims, said the county will obtain some electronic voting machines by 2006 to help disabled people vote, but has no plans to purchase more.

"We have a system that's working now," she said.