Voting machine fix likely to be OK'd

New software designed to correct a problem with touch-screen voting machines will probably receive state certification by the Aug. 31 election.

BY CHARLES RABIN

A top state election official said Thursday he will likely recommend certification of software designed to correct a flaw in the audit system of electronic voting machines.

Miami-Dade, Broward and nine other counties plan to use the touch-screen machines designed by Electronic Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., during the Aug. 31 primary election and again for the November general contest.

But a glitch in the equipment's ability to audit some of those results forced ES&S to come up with new software that would correct the problem, and still leave counties enough time to install it.

State employees tested the new software for three days this week in Miami-Dade County.

''If we don't find anything adverse in the log files, I'll probably make a positive recommendation,'' the state's bureau chief of voting systems verification, Paul Craft, said Thursday afternoon. ``It went as expected, fairly uneventful.''

Craft said he expects Secretary of State Glenda Hood to certify the new software early next week. Then it should take a week to 10 days for the counties to install the program.

Craft, several other state workers, ES&S and county employees and an election official from Pasco County spent the past three days cramped in a back room at the county election department's West Miami-Dade office.

RELIEVED

A look of relief crossed their faces a little before 3 p.m. Thursday, when they determined that Miami-Dade's new program proved free of flaws.

''It's a permanent solution done correctly,'' said ES&S Senior Vice President Ken Carbullido.

Dade elections chief Constance Kaplan said the county will keep a backup plan in place just in case until the new system is certified.

''But we're certainly encouraged to see the process move forward,'' she said.

Broward County plans to put the new ES&S software in place, said Pete Corwin, an assistant to the Broward County administrator.

Some critics remain skeptical. University of Miami law professor Martha Mahoney, a member of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said the state needs to take a long, hard look at its certification standards. She noted that the state certified a flawed system in 2002, as well as the audit software that proved to be flawed.

''The state certainly has not been an effective safety net so far,'' said Mahoney. ``Just because we say it's certified, so far, that hasn't been enough.''

The audit system problem causes the machine to show the wrong serial numbers when its batteries run low, making it impossible to tell where votes come from. It was first discovered in 2002 in Lee County. But Miami-Dade knew nothing about it until a year ago, when a county employee discovered the problem. Still, the problem wasn't addressed until it was made public in May.

State officials spent Tuesday testing the iVotronic voting machine to see if the identified flaw was the real culprit. ''That seemed to be the problem,'' said Craft.

TESTING SOFTWARE

On Wednesday and Thursday, the group set out to the new software even creating a ''catastrophic'' event that would all but completely disable the machine, then transferring a chip to a good machine to see if the results were recorded.

The name they gave the good machine: The savior.

''We were able to replicate it every time we tried,'' Craft said.

There was a slight flaw observed by Craft, but it's a problem he said he was not very concerned with. It, too, involved the audit system.

There are two ways to get information from the audit system after the information is transferred to another computer in the event of a catastrophe.

In one of those cases when information is received from a flashcard instead of through a transfer the printout does not identify which machine the votes came from. But they can be identified if the poll worker keeps track of where the flashcard came from.

''I don't think it's a big deal, but I want ES&S to correct it in the future,'' said Craft.