State says e-voting machines must leave paper trail by 2006

By NEIL MODIE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Secretary of State Sam Reed announced a series of safeguards to bolster public trust in electronic voting machines yesterday, including a requirement that by 2006, each device produce a paper trail allowing voters to verify their ballots.

Snohomish and Yakima are the only two Washington counties that will use electronic machines at all their polling places this fall.

But to prepare for 2006, when all counties will be required to use at least some touch-screen voting machine, or similar technology, Reed said he has adopted a new policy requiring that electronic voting systems provide a voter-verified paper audit trail.

The policy also calls for more frequent testing of voting equipment and intensive training of poll workers.

King County election officials, however, are looking beyond machines that allow voters to make after-the-fact printouts to produce an audit trail.

Dean Logan, the county's manager of records, elections and licensing services, said he is interested in a newer device that uses an electronic touch screen to mark a voter's choices onto an optical-scan ballot.

That way, he said, a computer would have a ballot card to tabulate instead of an electronic instruction.

Other than that possibility, however, King County intends to stick with its existing optical-scan system, in which voters fill in a circle next to a candidate's name, because "we have a sizable investment in it, and it works well with the significant number of voters who vote through the mail," Logan said.

Like other local governments, however, the county by 2006 will have to comply with a requirement in a 2002 federal law that it have at least one electronic voting machine in each of the county's 546 polling places.

The law was passed in the wake of Florida's punch-card-ballot debacle in the 2000 presidential election.

The law provides federal money to cover the cost of the machines and the software.

King County expects to receive about $3.4 million. Logan said the county will use the new devices to supplement the optical-scan system because the latter, unlike electronic machines, allows multiple voters to mark ballots at the same time.

Logan said he is reluctant to switch King County to electronic machines "unless I'm convinced that the voters are going to have confidence in it. That concern is out there."

Reed, at a Seattle news conference, acknowledged how essential it is that voters be able to trust their voting system, and "to gain that kind of trust and confidence, people have to be able to verify their vote."

Johns Hopkins University researchers revealed security problems with electronic voting machines made by Diebold Elections Systems of Ohio last year. California's secretary of state decertified a version of the Diebold machines for use there. No Diebold systems are certified for use in Washington state.

State Rep. Laura Ruderman, D-Redmond, who is challenging Reed, a Republican, in the November election, charged that his proposed safeguards "only amount to a Band-Aid on the real threat" of hackers tampering with electronic voting. Ruderman said in a news release that the secretary of state's Web site May 2 "was hacked and replaced with a 'Hacked You' message. In March 2004, he (Reed) was cited for failing to comply with state information technology security requirements."

"Our voting equipment is not connected to the Internet," replied Steve Excell, Reed's chief of staff. He said the secretary of state's Web site and many other state government sites were hit for about a half-hour May 2, but voting-system security was never in jeopardy.

Excell said a new information-technology security plan submitted by the secretary of state's office was misplaced by a staffer for the state's Information Services Board, which then mistakenly cited Reed's office before the mistake was corrected. He said Ruderman, as a board member, should have known that.