Reformers' Now Attack Costly Election 'Reform' of E-voting

Jon E. Dougherty, NewsMax.com
Friday, July 30, 2004
Ever since the controversial recount of votes in a few Democrat-run counties in Florida after the 2000 election, there has been a push in some quarters to move from paper ballots to electronic voting.

But not all election "reformers" see the technology in a positive light. Some say it’s dangerous.

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Proponents have argued e-voting is more efficient, less confusing and would solve the problems ostensibly encountered with paper "chad" ballots four years ago.

And at least one organization, National Federation for the Blind, is asking a judge in Annapolis, Md., to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the legality of the machines, because advocates say it e-voting allows for complete voter privacy, CBS affiliate WJZ reports. Now, blind voters must bring another person with them to help them cast paper or punch-card ballots.

But opponents say e-balloting, a "reform" that has already cost taxpayers untold millions of dollars, could be hijacked by hackers, destroyed by computer systems' crashes or manipulated by political operatives to throw an election.

Also, e-voting is an expensive technology, which is why it hasn't spread everywhere, Wired Magazine reports.

Unsolved Problems

In some states, the ATM-like electronic voting machines, which are called direct-recording electronics, or DREs, must be equipped with a hard-copy backup, known as a voter-verifiable paper trail.

But it could "financially unsupportable" and "logistically dangerous," says Wired, which suggests even more problems:

Election officials say they expect challenges to any electronic voting tallies, which would be meaningless without a paper record. Some techno-wizards say they prefer encrypting voting tallies, but others say paper is king.

California officials convinced residents to set aside $200 million for new voting machines and an expert panel to review options. By March nearly one-third of the state's voters were to cast ballots using DREs, but the panel balked, a hacker found the code to one of the DRE machines, and widespread failures were reported in other machines.

A prime manufacturer of DREs, Diebold, has had its machine codes hacked, and came under intense scrutiny for being less than honest about certification.

In California, officials yanked the machines until a paper trail of balloting can be established and security requirements can be met. Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has called for a criminal investigation into Diebold.

Surprising Results

Wired detailed instances where new e-voting machines produced results many election observers and analysts believed surprising.

Diebold again came under scrutiny when it was discovered that certification requirements for machines used in Georgia's 2002 elections were fudged. Popular Democrats unexpectedly lost elections; Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell is a major Republican donor.

In India, 380 million people used more than 1 million e-voting machines and devices. The country's Congress Party won elections in an upset. A lawsuit was filed during the election to force a paper trail.

The results have some analysts leery. "Any time that many people vote on a first-time technology and the results are a surprise, I'm going to have questions," David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford and founder of Verified Voting Foundation, told Wired.

There have been other instances of e-voting failures in, naturally, Florida.

News services reported Wednesday that Miami-Dade County lost nearly all electronic voting records from 2002. What they failed to note is that Miami-Dade, like Florida's other counties that have such trouble running elections (notably Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia), are dominated by Democrats.

The balloting in Dade incorporated widespread use of touch-screen voting, but because of two computer crashes, no audit trail of the voting data remains. A county official said a new backup system would likely prevent loss of data in the future, but others weren't so sure.

"This shows that unless we do something now - or it may very well be too late - Florida is headed toward being the next Florida," Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer who heads Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, told the New York Times.

Some jurisdictions around the nation are suing to prevent the use of the e-voting machines.

Worse to Come?

Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that advocates privacy protection in the digital age, foresees worse election results in 2004, if e-voting is widespread throughout the country.

"The 2004 presidential election might not be flawed like the last one was; it might be even worse," the group says on its Web site. "Communities across America are purchasing electronic voting (e-voting) machines, but the technology has serious security problems that aren't being addressed."

EFF says many e-voting machines use "black-box" technology that hasn't been publicly reviewed for security and reliability.

Also, few provide voter-verifiable paper ballots to deflect fraud, even though "a recent analysis by several academic researchers outlines the many and varied ways that anyone from a technically proficient insider to an average voter could disrupt an e-voting system to defraud an election," EFF said.

Worse, says the group, some e-voting machine companies don't appear eager to fix security flaws.

Jane Eisner, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, says e-voting without a paper trail is senseless.

She says in today's electronic age, consumers, for instance, are used to receiving paper confirmation for all kinds of purchases and other modes of business to verify transactions.

"Then you step into an electronic voting booth to exercise the most powerful act of citizenship, choosing the leaders who will tax you, serve you, regulate you, maybe send you or a child to war, and there’s absolutely no written proof of how you voted," she says.

"This does not make sense, especially with the memory of the deeply flawed election of 2000 so raw. As many as one-third of Americans are voting electronically this November (up from 12 percent in 2000). And now we have documented evidence that questions the security and reliability of electronic voting machines," writes Eisner.

"… Voters should demand far more accountability and transparency than they now have."