Vote of confidence?
Op-Ed in Brattleboro, VT Reformer. 24 August 2004

They're bought and paid for or leased by the American taxpayer.
They're used by the American voter.
They tabulate votes for both the presidency and candidates for local office.

But we won't know if 50 million touch-screen voting machines are ready to handle the November election.

We won't know because the companies that make sure the machines work properly won't say if there are flaws in the technology. That information, the companies say, is nobody's business but theirs.

Certainly, with so much on the line in this election and after the debacle of hanging chads during the last presidential election, voting machine accuracy should not be considered proprietary information. Since the companies that built the machines partially fund the testing, whether they work well or not at all is considered "secret" information.

Even federal regulators don't have oversight of the process. And critics claim the testing companies are using outdated techniques to test the machines.

If this makes voters who are still quivering since the 2000 election queasy about November 2004, there's more. In 2000, the Florida ballots at least had a paper trail those pesky hanging chads. But these electronic voting machines have no such documentation.

The electronic voting machines has experts worried: "I find it grotesque that an organization charged with such a heavy responsibility feels no obligation to explain to anyone what it is doing," said Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and electronic voting expert, according to the Associated Press.

Problems have already been uncovered with the machines in elections in at least three states this year and in a number of other elections. The problems included machines that quit, voters appeared to have used them but no results were registered, and, in one case, a microchip error that gave the election to the loser.

Lawmakers must step in and ensure that the voting process in November will be legitimate and free of quirky flaws. After all, this technology was supposed to be the answer to the problems in Florida.

Lawmakers must hold the machine makers Diebold Inc., Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. and Election Systems & Software Inc. and the machine testers The CIBER and Wyle Laboratories in Huntsville, Ala., and SysTest Labs in Denver accountable for providing dependable equipment. There's little time to waste.

Voters had enough of the ballot shenanigans in 2000 and they simply won't stand for it again in 2004.