Will computers eat their votes?
Machines crash, lose results, leave no paper trail Critics see a train wreck ahead — and not just in Florida

LYNDA HURST  in the Toronto Star   29 August 2004

The debacle of the Florida recount in 2000 may look like the good old days come the even more hotly contested U.S. presidential election this November.

Punch-card ballots won't be to blame this time.

The infamous paper "chads" that caused such vituperative chaos when the Democrats demanded recounts in several counties are no more.

In an embarrassed flurry of modernization, the State That Couldn't Vote Straight has gone high-tech.

Like 35 million other Americans in 29 states, voters in 15 of Florida's largest counties — including Miami-Dade, ground zero of suspicious recounts last time — will be casting their ballots electronically on ATM-like touch-screen computers, with nary a paper ballot in sight.

A failsafe solution?

Not a chance. A fast-growing anti-electronic movement spearheaded by computer scientists says an electoral train wreck is in the works for Nov. 2.

And it won't be confined to Florida. They say touch screens have repeatedly been tested in various state elections over the past two years with disastrous results.

Machines routinely crashed, effectively disenfranchising thousands who couldn't return to vote later.

In some states, voters touched the screen beside candidate X only to see it indicate a vote for candidate Y. Others were offered incomplete ballots.

Local poll workers, hired for the day, hadn't a clue how to fix or restart the machines. Time and again, votes were lost.

The audit logs in one Florida precinct with several hundred registered voters indicated that not a single one of them had voted.

In a California demonstration put on by one of the machine manufacturers this month, votes on the Spanish-language ballots simply failed to register.

The three major vendors — Diebold Elections Systems, Sequoia Voting Systems and Elections Systems and Software — have frantically rushed to upgrade their software.

Or say they have. Because they continue to refuse public scrutiny of their source codes, no one actually knows.

The suspicion level among tech-literate critics has been further upped by the insistence on secrecy by the three companies being used to officially test and certify the machines.

One prominent computer specialist, Michael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon University, has called it "grotesque" that the certifiers refuse to reveal flaws they may be finding. But that's no great surprise, critics say, given that it was the manufacturers that hired them.

In January, a team at RABA Technologies in Maryland managed to devise a half-dozen ways of compromising votes in Diebold's system and said security gaps could allow election results to be corrupted.

Diebold said the problems would be "mitigated" by November.

One problem that won't be fixed is the lack of a paper receipt that a voter can verify as correct and keep on file.

Only Nevada's machines will issue paper ballots for voters to check. Which means that only one-half of 1 per cent of American voters will see a record of their vote. Everyone else will have to trust that theirs hasn't been changed or lost.

The lack of a paper trail is at the core of the anti-touch-screen movement, one of whose leaders is Stanford University computer scientist David Dill, founder of the Verified Voting Foundation and its website, verifiedvoter.org.

"Suppose you had a situation where ballots were handed to a private company that counted them behind closed doors and burned the results," says Dill.

"Nobody but an idiot would accept a system like that. We've got something almost as bad with electronic voting."

All a touch-screen voting machine can do is spit out a reprint of its audit log, he says, not perform a recount.

Paper-receipt technology does exist, but with the exception of Nevada, states say it's too costly and too late to retrofit the machines for Nov. 2.

Consequently, says Dill, America "is going to be playing Russian roulette with our voting system."

Predictably, Florida has added a further wrinkle. This summer, Republican Governor Jeb Bush, brother of President George W. Bush, pushed through legislation prohibiting recounts period at all polls in the 15 counties using touch-screen machines. (The rest will use "optical-scan" paper ballots counted by computer.)

Therefore, even the audit logs — the black-box records of what occurs in a machine — won't be available.

An appalled Florida Democrat, Representative Robert Wexler of Boca Raton, sued the state, saying the move was illegal because federal law requires manual, ergo paper, recounts.

`They argue that these machine are infallible. It's an absurd argument'

Robert Wexler, Democratic congressman

"They argue that these machine are infallible," he said after his lawsuit was thrown out this month.

"It's an absurd argument. The last time we heard it was when the Titanic set sail."

Sandy Wayland, chair of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, is still infuriated by the governor's move.

Wayland wrote to Bush asking for, at least, "parallel testing" on Nov. 2 — one machine randomly pulled out of service and checked for glitches at each poll.

"Mere assertions that everything is okay do not restore voter confidence," she told him.

Wayland has yet to receive a reply. Bush's spokesman told reporters he wasn't "going to engage in every accusation du jour from people whose goal is to undermine democracy."

"They're blaming us for asking questions," says Wayland. "The problems with the machines are real, not faked, not exaggerated. But they won't even investigate."

Of the $3.9 billion (U.S.) allocated for upgrading voting systems under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, Miami-Dade County received $24 million to buy touch-screen machines. The state could and should have insisted, as Nevada did, that they produce a paper trail, says Wayland.

"Now, it's too late. The Democrats have finally come into the fight ... but the clock is running out. We will have no transparency in the election."

Which is why as many as one in three voters is expected to use absentee paper ballots.

In fact, the state Republican party sent out a flier last month urging party members to do so (before quickly repudiating the advice on an angry Jeb Bush's command).

If Florida goes awry once again, there will be plenty of people watching to see how and why it's happening. The Center for Democracy monitored the mid-term elections in 2002.

This time, everyone from verifiedvoter.org's tech-savvy members to filmmaker Michael Moore (who has promised to bring "an army of lawyers") and the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe will be observing at polling stations. (The United Nations declined a request by 13 members of the House of Representatives to send watchers.)

On the other side of the country, Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation, says "Florida has always run its elections like a Third World country." But she adds that irregularities could be far more widespread in November.

It wasn't till the 2000 debacle that problems festering for a long time in the voting system came to light, says Alexander: "That's when the rock got turned over."

Americans found out they were not all voting in the same way and many became concerned about vote security.

Thanks in the main to grassroots citizens' groups, says Alexander, Californians will have a choice of using the machines or paper ballots. Similar groups in the swing state of Ohio helped convince it to back off plans to buy the touch screens.

"We're doing triage right now," she says, adding that the situation could be worse. At one point, it looked like 50 per cent of voters would be using touch screens. Now, it's in the 29 per cent range.

Unlike Elections Canada, which oversees the vote across the country, the U.S. system is highly decentralized, with all 3,100 counties devising their own rules and procedures.

Alexander says many local election officials leapt on the e-voting bandwagon because not having to print, keep and perhaps count paper ballots makes their job easier.

But a lot of them are in over their heads with the technology and are dependant on the vendors for training.

Last week in Washington, the Election Center and machine-makers co-sponsored a four-day "parties, cruises, wining and dining" event for election officials.

That entwining of election officials and manufacturers, coupled with a lack of federal voting standards, is at the root of the looming disaster, Alexander says. "Washington just threw money at the problem. It didn't fulfill its promise to strengthen federal oversight."

She is keenly aware, of course, of the existence of a national whispering campaign. Many Americans are still bitterly convinced there was a Republican heist of the 2000 Florida vote and that there is more going on in the current uproar than faulty technology.

Alexander isn't one of them.

"No," she says. "I don't think there is a national conspiracy to rig the election, though plenty of people do. You'd be foolish not to have some suspicions."

Many do. It's frequently and ominously noted, for instance, that Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell was, until recently, the chief Republican fundraiser in Ohio. Last year, he told a reporter he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

As Newsweek columnist Stephen Levy dryly wrote in June: "It's nice to know that O'Dell is no longer working to elect one candidate in particular. It would be even nicer to know, beyond any doubt, that his voting machines weren't, either."

But nobody will in the 2004 election.

Carnegie Mellon's Shamos sees the the situation "as unfortunate — not evil, but screwed up. The voting-system vendors don't conspire with each other. In fact, they hate each other and are mutually distrusting."

And Doug Lewis at the Election Center? In the midst of one of the tightest, nastiest presidential campaigns in U.S. history, he's told reporters he's hoping for a "boring" election.

"All election officials have a prayer: `Dear God, please let the winner win big.' All of us are spending time on our knees."