Electronic voting at center of fight

Touch-screens' reliability debated

By Nancy Cook Lauer in the Tallahassee Democrat   09 August 2004

A cartoon about electronic voting in eWeek magazine shows a slot machine with a "vote" button on one side and the faces of President Bush and challenger John Kerry where the bars and cherries would normally be.

Florida elections officials would not be amused. They remain steadfast that computer touch-screen voting can be trusted to use for the first time in a presidential election this fall.

But a growing number of voting-rights groups and influential individuals are questioning whether Florida should take the gamble. Why not add printers to give voters a receipt? Why not offer a paper ballot in addition to an electronic ballot? And if the election is close, why not include the electronic votes in a recount?

Voting experts say those demands aren't practical or affordable, or would require a special session of the Legislature to change state law.
Trustworthiness of electronic voting systems has become an increasing concern nationwide. Ohio's secretary of state has asked for a waiver to postpone deployment of electronic machines there. In computer-savvy California, the state election commissioner has ordered machines to have paper receipts by 2006. Florida's U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat, has introduced legislation that would require printers to be attached to electronic voting machines everywhere.

The machines were added to Florida's array of election equipment after the divisive 2000 election exposed flaws in the punch-card systems that many counties were using. The 2002 gubernatorial elections using the new machines went off without much of a hitch.

"We've used them over and over and over, and there's been hundreds of successful elections; yet people don't want to acknowledge that," said Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who governs the Division of Elections.

Still, some voters worry that their votes could be lost without a paper trail to verify the results. Those worries have been compounded by a Division of Elections study showing that voters are twice as likely to skip candidates on electronic ballots than on paper ballots and showing two Miami-Dade area elections in which the machines failed to record known votes.

Republicans only added fuel to the paper-trail fire last month when the state party sent out fliers with a photo of President Bush urging Republicans to vote by absentee ballot because "the new electronic voting machines do not have a paper trail to verify your vote in case of a recount."

Choices limited by time

At issue isn't the ability to make a paper trail - the touch-screen machines are capable of being hooked up to a printer to print out an image of each ballot cast.

But if election officials gave in to the demand for a paper trail or were ordered to by the courts, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for them in the scant three months before the election to add machines that could print ballots that voters could verify before they left the voting booth.
Manufacturers have just recently started making the printers, and none has passed Florida's rigorous certification standards.

Even if the state could get printers tested in time and spent the money to buy one for every electronic voting machine and get them hooked up, Election Day could be pretty harried in the 15 counties that use touch-screens.

More than 54 percent of the state's registered voters live in those counties. As of June, that meant more than 5 million people. Even if only a fraction of them were to turn out Nov. 2, millions of people would have to have time to vote and wait for a printout before the polls closed.

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, filed suit in state and federal courts to require electronic voting machines to be able to print voter-verifiable receipts in time for the November election. A judge dismissed the state suit Friday. The federal suit will be heard in Atlanta on Aug. 20.

Counties choose own systems

On Thursday, legislative leaders and People for the American Way asked Gov. Jeb Bush to require the 15 counties to provide paper ballots for voters who don't want to use the electronic systems.

"Just saying that Florida voting machines are the envy of the nation doesn't make it so," said Senate Democratic Leader Ron Klein of Boca Raton.

Bush repeated his confidence in the touch-screen systems and also noted that state law gives the independently elected county officials the authority to choose whatever voting system they want out of those certified by the state.

If those counties wanted to offer the choice of paper ballots, millions would have to be printed. Optical scanning machines would have to be bought and installed in each precinct so the votes could be counted. Thousands of poll workers already trained in procedures for electronic balloting would have to be trained in paper-ballot procedures. Voters would have to be educated, too.

Touch-screens at issue in recounts

With county and state officials anticipating another presidential election determined by wafer-thin margins, the issue of electronic votes in a recount situation is perhaps the most sensitive.

George W. Bush won Florida by a mere 537 votes in the 2000 election, and the 15 counties using touch-screen voting systems are split almost evenly between voters registered as Democrats and Republicans.

"After election night, if it's close - and Florida is a battleground state - either George Bush or John Kerry will be in court, and what they will be debating are votes that are in cyberspace," said Lale Mamaux, spokeswoman for Wexler.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have challenged the state's declaration that state law doesn't require electronic votes to be included in a recount. That case will be decided by an administrative law judge before the month is out.

In a recount of paper ballots, optical scanning machines can sort out the questionable ones - those with "overvotes," or more than one candidate ed in a race, and those with "undervotes," or no candidate ed in a race.

State officials say the electronic voting machines can't. So instead of only some ballots having to be re-examined, an image of every electronic ballot would have to be printed out and manually recounted. State law allows only 11 days for final election results to be delivered to the state Division of Elections.

"If we got into a statewide recount, if we had to manually recount all those votes, we would not be able to get it done in that amount of time," said Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning.

If the judge agrees with the ACLU that the Division of Elections overstepped its bounds in excluding electronic ballots from recounts, the Legislature would have to call a special session either to write a more clear law or to give counties more than 11 days for a recount.

Even if the computerized ballot images are eventually included in recounts, it probably wouldn't change a close election, Browning said.

The machines don't allow overvotes, and in the case of an undervote, there's no way to tell what the voter intended. Unlike a paper ballot, there wouldn't be any stray pen marks or a candidate's name circled or checked instead of an oval being filled in.

Browning asks: "How do you count something that isn't there?"