Hundreds of thousands join 'Computer Ate My Vote' protest
Rob Lever
JULY 14, 2004
CRITICS of electronic voting rallied in 24 US cities and garnered 350,000 signatures on petitions Tuesday in a day of protest over technology that some say could yield inaccurate or unverifiable results in November's presidential election.

The 'Computer Ate My Vote' day of protest melded a movement of activists from the tech sector and various political organisations seeking to halt the use of touch-screen or other electronic voting machines that do not leave a paper trail that can be audited or recounted.

A total of 350,000 people signed petitions to be delivered to election officials in 19 states, calling for a voter-verified paper trail if electronic machines - similar to Automatic Teller machines (ATMs) - are used, organisers said.

"Without a paper trail, we would have no way to reconstruct the vote," said California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, who as the state's top election official, has banned some electronic machines and created guidelines for vote recounts.

"Nothing is more fundamental to our democracy than the right to vote, and it must be preserved and protected.

 "The arrival of touch-screen voting, while it was full of promise for the future, unfortunately has cast a cloud of doubt over whether or not we are conducting open and fair elections."

Mr Shelley was among those participating in the day of protest, along with former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.

Mr Dean said that the new technology was a response to the 2000 election debacle - in which officials had to decipher partially perforated punch cards, with 'chads' - but that the new system could be even worse.

"After the election in 2000 ... there was an enormous blow to people's faith in our democracy," Mr Dean said, while adding that the effort to use touch-screen voting "has made things far, far worse. It makes it more likely that our votes will not be counted."

Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation in San Francisco, said a coalition supporting the effort includes organisations with some three million people across the political spectrum.

While some critics of evoting are also opponents of President George W Bush, Mr Doherty said the movement is "completely non-partisan".

"There are as many Republicans as Democrats who want to see votes counted accurately," he said.

While manufacturers of the electronic vote machines insist they are more reliable than other systems, a series of glitches and errors involving evoting has led to protests and legal action seeking safeguards.

About 20 per cent of US voters have used new touch-screen or other electronic machines, according to the Information Technology Association of America and some estimates indicate that as many as 50 million may be using the new technology in the November 2 election.

Mr Doherty said the movement has made progress elsewhere, with the state of Nevada becoming the first with all-electronic machines that leave a paper trail.

In Ohio, he noted that 28 of 31 counties considering paperless evoting rejected the option.

David Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and a leader of the movement, said computerised systems are vulnerable to a variety of bugs and threats from tampering with software codes.

"As a computer scientist who has spent 20 years trying to make computers work right, I know better than to rely 100 per cent on them," Mr Dill said.

But Harris Miller of the Information Technology Association of America, which represents electronic voting machine makers, said opponents of the new technology have lost perspective.

"We came out of a situation (in 2000) where we almost had a constitutional crisis ... that's the system they want to go back to," Miller said.

"For all of the yelling and screaming, there has never been one documented case of any vote being improperly calculated or reported" with touch-screen machines, Mr Miller said.