The paper trail

Who will bear the costs of upgrades if, when, voter-verification mechanisms put in place?

 

Inside ...

Chris Graham

chris@augustafreepress.com

 

 

What happens in Augusta County if Congress decides to mandate that localities across the country equip their electronic voting machines with the capability of spitting out voter-verified paper ballots?

"It wouldn't be a matter of replacing the machines. It would be a matter of upgrades. The machines could be upgraded if that was the new requirement," said Susan Miller, the voter registrar in Augusta County, which recently decided to commit $330,000 toward the purchase of electronic voting machines from the Dublin, Calif.,-based UniLect Corp. that should be in place in time for the November 2005 state elections.

At question is whether the purchase agreement worked out between the two would require UniLect to eat the costs of the upgrades that would be needed to have the machines produce voter-verified paper ballots - which has come up for discussion both at the federal level and in the Virginia General Assembly.

"That is a matter that would have to be required by the State Board of Elections, and right now, that's not part of the state board's certification process," Miller told The Augusta Free Press.

"That's an important question to ask, because if Congress or the General Assembly is going to begin to require that there be a voter-verified paper trail, who pays the bills? Is that something that is negotiated into the contract with the vendor? Or is that something that the locality is going to have to eat on their own?" posed Will Doherty, the executive director of the San Francisco-based Verified Voting Foundation.

The issue of requiring machines to provide voter-verified paper ballots has arisen in light of the numerous reports of e-voting machines suffering Election Day breakdowns - in addition to instances where outright voter fraud has been alleged to have occurred.

"The e-voting machine companies talk around the issue and make it seem like it's not important," Doherty told the AFP.

But it is a matter of import - one, because a voter-verified paper ballot would give voters the ability to see for themselves that the computerized voting machine has indeed registered their vote choices correctly; and two, because the paper ballots would provide a paper trail for local boards of elections to use for auditing and recount purposes.

The Verified Voting Foundation has recommended taking things one step further with e-voting - with its call that a mandate be handed down to localities that they count by hand a percentage of the paper ballots that would be produced by the voter-verified paper ballot system as a check of the accuracy of their e-voting machines.

The counts would provide a test of whether or not votes were tabulated correctly throughout the day - or whether some glitch, manmade or otherwise, might have thrown the results off in some way that might not come up without some form of auditing having been performed.

"It would be a great disincentive to someone who might be thinking about perpetrating a fraud, for one thing," Doherty said.

An electronic trail is less foolproof, Doherty said - because auditing of e-voting machines can range from a simple review of the electronic vote tally to a more sophisticated look at the e-vote tally as compared to ballot images that are basically snapshots of individual votes as they were cast.

An issue with both of the above-described forms of accounting is that neither is a failsafe way of checking for malfunctions, errors and attempts by those with access to the machines to commit voter fraud.

"Whether it's a manipulation or a failure, these glitches do occur," Doherty said. "It's just like with the computer you use on your desktop every day. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, it will decide that it has had enough, and it shuts down. Sometimes when that happens, you lose everything you've done up to that point.

"These e-voting machines are nothing more than computers, so they are susceptible to the same issues. The difference here being, when they shut down and lose information, they're losing votes that have been cast," Doherty said.