Jittery about voting

Election reforms since 2000 have sparked new controversy

By Todd Engdahl
Denver Post Perspective Editor  05 September 2004

Could the 2004 election be hashed up or stolen?

A variety of activist groups, computer geeks and ordinary citizens, worried about the spread of new electronic voting systems since 2000, seems to think so.

But separating actual from theoretical dangers is tricky business, and there's no definitive way to know if the nation's election machinery is in worse or better shape than in the days of stuffed ballot boxes or hanging chads.

Why are some people so nervous, even paranoid?

If you answered "Florida," you would be right. The 2000 vote-counting meltdown in Florida consumed five weeks and ended with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave George W. Bush a victory by 537-vote margin.

That fiasco created "a distrust" in people's minds, says Secretary of State Donetta Davidson, who supervises voting in Colorado.

"Voters are more informed and less trusting" about elections than they used be, notes state Sen. Maryanne "Moe" Keller, D-Wheat Ridge, who monitors voting issues.

But, ironically, the fixes prompted by Florida have led many to conclude that the cure for malformed chads is worse than the disease.

After the 2000 election, Congress swung ponderously into action and produced the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The major effect was to essentially outlaw punch-card voting systems and their chads in favor of something new - DREs (short for Direct Record Electronic voting machines). An estimated third of American voters will use such devices this election, according to The New York Times.

The HAVA law also addressed such issues as fraudulent voting (that's why voters have to bring IDs to the polls in November) and voter access by allowing people whose IDs aren't in order or who aren't on precinct rolls to cast provisional ballots that are verified later and counted if cast by properly registered voters.

Now, let's go back to DREs. They're various types of voting machines on which voters directly record their choices by pressing a button (as on the system Denver uses) or by touching specified areas on a computer screen (as in Jefferson County). Once a voter finishes, the votes are recorded in the machine's memory (there typically are three redundant memory units). The recording devices are removed after the polls close and taken to a central location for counting. (The HAVA law also requires that machines have the ability to generate ballot printouts that can be used for recounts.)

The key here is that there's no piece of paper between the voter's finger and the machine's memory. That, along with other things, makes some people feel insecure.

Still, paper hasn't completely disappeared from the nation's polling places. Through assorted HAVA loopholes, punch-cards will still be used in some places. (Montrose County is the only place in Colorado.)

Scanning still around

More important, another time-tested voting technology, optical scanning, still is widely used. In these systems, a voter fills in circles, makes lines or otherwise marks a ballot that's counted by a scanning machine. In Colorado, 52 of 64 counties will continue using their scanners this year. Another seven Colorado counties (mostly small, rural ones) will use old-fashioned paper ballots, and Boulder is using a new, high-tech system that allows voters to mark paper ballots that are converted to electronic images for counting.

(It also should be noted that DREs - at least lower-tech versions - are nothing new. Many voters in Denver and elsewhere will remember the lever machines used for decades. There were no memory chips in those refrigerator-sized babies, but there was no paper trail, either. There weren't a lot of complaints about that.)

There are arguments for and against DREs.

Technology drives much of the momentum behind adoption of the systems. The computer revolution has changed the way we get cash, make airline reservations, shop, manage our investments and do a thousand other things. It should be no surprise that computers have moved into vote tabulation, a relatively simple process, compared to many other things computers do.

"Electronic voting is no doubt the wave of the future," noted an April 2004 editorial in The New York Times, which nonetheless is critical of electronic voting systems and whose editorial page is campaigning for reforms and safeguards.

Election officials appreciate DREs (once they scrape up the money to buy them) because they seem more reliable than older voting systems that may be more vulnerable to human error.

"There are issues \[with DREs\], but it's almost always tied to human error," says Davidson.

Critics offer a lengthy, and sometimes theoretical, indictment against DREs.

Computerized voting equipment may be vulnerable to hacking.

Like any other machines, the devices can break down.

The technical nature of the new equipment puts too much power in the hands of voting-machine makers, who closely guard their software, meaning election officials may not be able to prevent fraud or malfunction.

The lack of paper receipts means voters have no way to review how they voted, and some critics fear for the accuracy of recounts.

Critics feel that scattered recent events around the nation bolster their case. Florida didn't seem to have recovered well from 2000. In the last two years, officials there have been embarrassed by glitches during the 2002 election, a mishandled and perhaps misguided purge of felons from voter rolls, accusations that state police harassed black voter-registration workers and computer glitches that erased some 2002 voting records.

Voting machine conflict

Conspiracy theorists also like to point fingers at Diebold Election Systems, one of the largest voting-machine makers. Diebold machines have been criticized by some experts, and it certainly didn't help matters last year when CEO Walden O'Dell of the Ohio-based firm wrote an unbelievable fundraising pitch to Republicans, saying he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." The company this year restricted political activities by executives.

The voting machine debate is tinged with more than a little red state/blue state divisiveness. Much of the criticism comes from the liberal and progressive side of the political spectrum. Many in the voting public, unfortunately, is left not knowing what to believe.

Supporters of electronic voting systems are asking you to believe in something you can't see and whose workings most of us don't understand.

Critics of electronic voting are telling you that a problem exists because you can't prove that it doesn't.

What are voters to think?

Fear of hacking and conspiracies probably is more theoretical than real, for the moment anyway.

"There has never been a verified incident in which a DRE machine was manipulated to alter the outcome of an election," said computer scientist Michael Ian Shamos of Carnegie Mellon University in testimony to a congressional committee last July. In the world of computer hackers, such a statement could be seen as a dare, or at least a challenge.

Fear of machine malfunction is more real, and there have been incidents across the country of crashes, miscounts and other problems in the past couple of years.

But whether the error rate of DREs is necessarily higher than that of other, older systems, and whether it's high enough to endanger whole elections, is open to debate.

It's the question of paper receipts and ballots, though, that sparks the most intense debate.

Election officials find electronic systems "cleaner" than paper, which they see as vulnerable to human error and subject to its own forms of fraud. They worry that providing paper receipts to voters could slow voting, run the risk of printer malfunctions and even compromise voter privacy. Some officials dismiss critics as technophobes.

Purists among the critics call for all-paper elections, never mind human error and delayed vote counts.

There's little chance that will happen, but the jury on paper receipts still is out.

"If they solve some of the issues with paper, I think we may have to go to paper so that the world will know we're doing the right thing," Davidson notes.

Paper will get a test this coming Tuesday during the Nevada primary. Officials are using DREs statewide - but voters will be able to review printed versions of their ballots.

And there was a hopeful straw in the wind last Tuesday, when the Florida primary went pretty smoothly. Maybe there will be less to worry about on Nov. 2 than some of us fear.

Like it or not, electronic voting is here to stay. Whatever happens in November, the challenge for officials, critics and voters is to further fine-tune voting systems so that, hopefully, nobody is worrying about all this in 2008.

Coloradans may have little to worry about

Colorado seems an unlikely candidate for vote recording and counting problems this November.

Murphy's Law reminds us that if something can go wrong, it will.

But if history is any guide, Colorado voters shouldn't fret. The voting systems used by Colorado counties are essentially the same as the ones used in 2000 and 2002. While there were isolated problems in those elections, as there are in every election, no major questions were raised about the integrity of vote recording and counting in Colorado.

Most Colorado counties will continue to use the scanner systems that they've had for several elections. Direct-record electronic devices will be used in Arapahoe, Denver and Jefferson counties, as well as for early voting in a few other counties. But those systems aren't new for this election.

Boulder, the only major county with a new system this year, uses paper ballots that are converted to images for counting. No major problems were reported in the August primary.

State election officials believe that Colorado has a strong system of election laws and testing and audit procedures that help achieve reliable vote counts.

Critics are less sure: "We don't have transparent elections in Colorado," claims Margit Johansson of the Colorado Voter Integrity Project. But no one has offered proof of any substantial problems in Colorado voting systems.

There is potential this year for closer major races than is usually the case in Colorado (president and U.S. Senate come to mind). A close count in a key race could focus attention on any voting problems that do crop up. We'll find out in November.