Officials eager for change
BY CLAY BARBOUR
Of The Post and Courier Staff  15 August 2004

Problems with the state's election equipment have many officials anxiously awaiting the new iVotronic machines, despite the problems of electronic voting systems.

A recent study by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that electronic voting systems have had "significantly higher average rates of spoiled, uncounted and unmarked ballots than any of the other systems."

The study said computerized systems were new and with time could become more reliable.

In 2000, South Carolina had three types of voting machines: punch cards devices, optical scanners and older electronic machines. That year, the state lost more than 49,000 ballots, either by undervotes (ballots with no candidate ed) or overvotes (ballots with more than one candidate chosen).

Optical scan machines, in which voters pencil in circles on their ballots, had the worst record of lost votes at 5.1 percent. Worst among the optical scan counties were Williamsburg County with 14.5 percent and Lee County with 12.1 percent.

Punch cards, the same type of machine that introduced the term "hanging chad" to the American lexicon, came in second with an average of 4.22 percent lost votes.

The state's older electronic machines had an average lost vote count of 2.4 percent, comparable to the national average of 2.3 percent.

Charleston, Berkeley and Dorchester counties fared relatively well in 2000, with an average lost vote count of 2.36 percent, 1.20 percent and 2.29 percent, respectively.

Russell Barrett, director of Florence County Voter Registration and Elections, is excited about the change to the iVotronic system. Florence County currently uses a 20-year-old punch card system. In 2000, problems with the punch card equipment forced poll workers to work until 5 a.m. When final numbers were tabulated, officials found there were more than 2,500 lost votes.

Barrett, who served on the committee that helped start the move to a statewide system, said it would be "the best thing to happen to elections in this state in a while. Our workload will be considerably lighter, and the new machines will be a whole lot more accurate."

Berkeley County Elections and Voter Registration Director Wanda Farley said she has no major problems with the county's current electronic voting system, which has been in place since 1986.

"They are wonderful, but they are cumbersome," she said. Each voting machine weighs about 200 pounds, and it takes county work crews three days to truck them out to the polls.

Poll workers will be able to transport the new machines to the precincts, Farley said, thus eliminating the cost of using a truck and tying up manpower to deliver machines.

"We are experiencing more equipment failure because of the age of our voting machines, but they are still an extremely dependable voting system," Farley said.

Charleston County election officials are less kind. Jill Miller, the county's election director, said the county needs a new system "period." David Foust, machine custodian, said about 10 percent of Charleston County's machines break during each election.

So far the only holdout statewide is Georgetown County, which already purchased $480,000 worth of computerized voting machines following the 2000 election. That year, the county had lost 6.2 percent of its ballots.

Herb Bailey, chairman of the Georgetown County Board of Registration and Elections, said he has no problem with the computerized voting machines his county currently is using. "We looked at all of these companies and chose the Unilect system," he said.

DIEBOLD SECURITY FLAWS

Since the 2000 election, nearly every company marketing computerized voting machines has experienced problems. Few companies have made as many headlines as Diebold Election Systems.

Three recent studies, one by computer scientists at Rice and Johns Hopkins universities and two others by the states of Ohio and Maryland, were highly critical of Diebold systems. All three studies found them vulnerable to tampering.

The studies followed news that a freelance journalist, Bev Harris, had uncovered a Web site used by Diebold employees that showed how to hack into a system, change vote totals and erase audit trails. The same site showed how Diebold machines offered a function that created "minus" votes, which evidently could be used to reduce the number of votes for a candidate.

Adding fuel to this fire, in 2003 Diebold's chief executive officer, Walden O'Dell, wrote in a Republican Party fund-raising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

While O'Dell meant that he would work to raise money for the Bush campaign, many saw the statement as proof of a Republican conspiracy in the works.

Earlier this year, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned the use of a Diebold system after he found uncertified software and other problems that "jeopardized" the outcome of elections in several counties. Later, the company released a report that showed nearly 25 percent of its ballot encoders, which encrypt votes, failed during a March 2004 election in California. That meant 25 percent of the votes were lost. This admission came on the heels of similar failures on Super Tuesday in Newark, San Leandro, Emeryville, Oakland and across San Diego County.