Electronic voting machines used in Phila. spark concern
By Byron Kho  The Daily Pennsylvanian
September 21, 2004

With the November presidential election quickly approaching and election reform a hot issue in the wake of the contested 2000 presidential election, electoral officials locally and nationally must contend with the growing uproar over the latest in a series of electoral system controversies voting by electronic machine.

Nationally, a projected 28.9 percent of registered voters, almost 43 million people, will use electronic machines in the upcoming presidential election, compared to 12.6 percent in the 2000 presidential race. Use of these machines replaces antiquated voting methods like punch cards, mechanical lever machines and, most controversially, hand-counted paper ballots.

Much of the debate centers on technical limitations of the electronic voting machines, known as direct recording electronic machines. Opponents of electronic voting point out the possibility of hacking or tampering with program code on purpose or by accident, creating the possibility of altered voting results.

"One only has to change one line of code, and votes can be switched around," said Rebecca Mercuri, a computer security expert and fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.

Electronic voting machines have several built-in safeguards. Precautions include full-ballot user interfaces that can be checked before submittal, push buttons, two vote counters, cartridges individual to each machine and a printer that prints out seven copies of the results only after the polls close.

In Philadelphia, one copy is immediately posted publicly, while the rest are delivered to officials for safekeeping. One copy goes with the cartridges to the regional tabulation center, where the data are recounted and sent to the state Board of Election's main office.

However, Mercuri and others point to voters' inability to retain a physical record of their vote after completing the electronic ballot.

"Voters can't verify their votes after they have voted, as they don't get a receipt, and there is no way to perform an independent recount of the votes using these machines. Printing out election results from the machine cartridges after the polls close ... is merely a reprint, not a recount," she said.

Kenneth Farrall, a second-year doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication, pointed out that "printing out ballots at the end of the day only gives a computer tally, not necessarily what each voter actually voted. There is no reliable audit."

To combat some of these allegations, U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) proposed mandatory "paper trails" for electronic voting machines nationwide in legislation introduced early last year.

This was only one of many election reform laws introduced in response to the 2000 Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore, which declared the Florida recount unconstitutional. Judicial review pronounced the lack of uniform standards to be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment opening up questions of the extent of federal oversight in election procedures.

While the federal government is generally disallowed from mandating voting system changes within the states, it has authorized a total allocation of $3.8 billion through the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to any state or territory that should want to replace its old systems with electronic and optical machines.

Pennsylvania officials plan to use HAVA funds to replace 55 percent of machines statewide by 2006.

Philadelphia and seven other Pennsylvania counties currently use DREs. The city itself uses machines that were installed in 2001, following the findings of the Election Reform Task Force created in 1995 by Mayor Ed Rendell.

Proponents of electronic voting machines say that the machines are reliable and not prone to error. The Committee of Seventy, a non-partisan political watchdog group active in Philadelphia politics since 1904, has been in support of the use of electronic voting machines for many years.

"These machines are great and easy to use. You can't hack into them, and there are random audits, and the counting is automatic and error-free. People counting individual votes make mistakes," said Frederick Voigt, executive director of the Committee of Seventy, in defense of the machines.

Voigt also pointed out that there have been no contested elections in Philadelphia that involved the use of electronic voting machines since the machines were first introduced.