Florida a Big Test of E-Voting 

By Jacob Ogles in WiredNews

02:00 AM Aug. 16, 2004 PT

ORLANDO, Florida Florida election officials will be relying on touch-screen machines to provide the sole storage of early voting data between now and the state's Aug. 31 primary election day, raising concerns that votes sitting in storage for two weeks could be susceptible to tampering.

Florida law allows voters who can't make it to the polls on election day to cast "convenience votes" up to 15 days before the election. So beginning Monday, the state will open hundreds of locations where voters can cast early ballots for the statewide primary. But to ensure that early voting doesn't sway election outcomes, state law forbids officials from tabulating any votes until the polls close on Aug. 31.
Counties using optically scanned paper ballots will store the ballots in locked iron boxes for two weeks. But 15 counties that use touch-screen machines for early voting will store the votes on the machines.

The machines are being relied upon even as criticism mounts about e-voting nationwide. Discussions of tampering and security have been the subject of numerous reports by academic institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and private entities like Raba Technologies. An Associated Press poll of Florida voters recently showed that less than half of respondents were "very confident" their vote for president would be correctly counted, and that only one in five respondents was "very confident" in the voting machines.

In lieu of the criticism, voter activists in the state are disappointed that election officials don't feel a need to back up votes cast through early voting. "It doesn't sound smart to me," said Sandy Wayman, legislative chairman for the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition.

But at this point, election officials who have opted to use touch-screen technology have little choice about backing up data. State law forbids any examination of ballots until the conclusion of an election.

"The alternative is the development of software that would allow the extraction of ballot data without inspection, but electronic voting is still an eccentric institution," said Douglas Jones, as associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa. "It's still not really on the map as far as writing laws goes."

Generally, election officials print out a zero-report from each machine at the start of an election day to show that no votes were cast on a machine before an election. But since voting for the Florida primary will run essentially for 15 days, officials can do this only on the first day of voting, since votes from each day will remain on the machines for two weeks. For every day that follows the first day, election officials will have to confirm each morning that the number of votes on machines matches the number of votes that were on the machines at the end of voting the night before.

In Miami-Dade County, where e-voting recently came under severe scrutiny when back-up files of the 2002 election went missing, armed guards will be on round-the-clock duty at each of 14 major voting locations to prevent anyone from tampering with the primary votes.

"Most of these locations have guards most of the day, but we will supplement the cost and provide security (where) there are not normally guards scheduled," said Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the Miami-Dade County Elections Department.

But in some counties, the votes will simply be kept under lock and key. Some election supervisors plan to remove electronic ballots that plug into the machines and store them in a different location than the touch-screen machines so that no one could add votes to the machine. Other officials, however, plan to leave the ballots in the machines.

In Charlotte County, officials will store the machines in vaults at the county's two voting locations. In Martin County, officials will put the machines in vaults and the electronic ballots in separate locked cabinets.

But Lake County plans to store the machines and ballots together behind locked doors at public libraries. Placing voter convenience over voting security, officials there plan to rotate the machines through different polling locations every few days on a pre-announced itinerary.

Election officials say there is little risk of vote tampering because each machine records three copies of votes in different places on the machine for redundancy. Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, who became the butt of national criticism during the 2000 election for the infamous butterfly design, said every election official in the state will be devoting unprecedented resources toward ensuring a fair vote. In her county, all functions on the machines that would votes have been physically cut off.

But critics of the technology are uncomfortable with the lack of physical back-up, much less a digital copy of the votes.

Jones recently inspected the machines in Miami-Dade County to ensure they were ready for early voting. He said the greatest threats to the process, such as theft, are just as germane to paper voting as e-voting, but the new technology does come with its own problems.

While those counties using paper ballots can transport the votes to a secure location regularly, the only way to do the same with touch-screen technology would be to have new personal electronic ballots put in the machines every day. "The economics of that would be very bad," he said.

Eleven Florida counties are using iVotronic machines, produced by Election Systems and Software. Four other counties, including Hillsborough and Palm Beach, use Sequoia Voting Systems.

LePore said the machinery is still better than the troublesome punchcard ballots used by most counties in 2000. She also defended the early voting as a way of increasing voter participation.

Anything that is of assistance in letting people vote is good, she said. "Hopefully things will work well, just like we hope they will on election day."