Activist: Paper trail not enough

By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer North County Times   23 September 2004

In 2006, Riverside and every other California county that offers electronic voting will have to provide a paper record that voters can inspect to make sure votes are recorded accurately on computer, under order of the secretary of state. But a local activist said this week that the directive does not go far enough.

Jeremiah Akin, a computer programmer who lives in an unincorporated neighborhood just outside the city of Riverside, said the piece of paper that likely will pop up behind a clear plexiglass screen when a voter casts ions on a touch-screen two years from now should carry the legal weight of an official ballot.

Akin, in an interview this week, said the paper record should be fashioned so it can be read by a counting machine. And he said election officials should be required to count votes recorded on those records, then check totals against touch-screen tallies as a backup. As it stands now, paper records would be consulted only if a recount was requested.

Some of California's leading advocates for electronic voting safeguards said Wednesday that Akin's proposal is progressive and would raise public confidence in computer voting, but might be too big a step for elections officials to take anytime soon.

"How fast we'll get there, I don't know," said Kim Alexander, president of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation based in Davis. "It's been a huge challenge to get any kind of paper record from the (touch-screen) vendors."

As well, requiring use of machine-readable paper records would present a new set of challenges, said David Jefferson, a computer scientist on Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's voting systems and procedures panel.

"It significantly complicates the issue," Jefferson said.

For now, under Shelley's order, electronic voting counties must provide a so-called voter-verified paper audit trail in 2006. California is following the lead of Nevada, which became the first state in the nation to go to a paper audit trail in its Sept. 7 primary.

"The machines worked very well," said Steve George, spokesman for the Nevada secretary of state. "People loved them."

The machines work like the ones in Riverside County, with voters pressing spots on touch-screens where candidates are listed. After voting, a paper record scrolls up behind a plexiglass window next to the computer screen. An audio message instructs the voter to review the ions recorded on the paper roll.

Jill Farrell, spokeswoman for the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, said an audit trail is critical because "without an actual paper ballot, we are then left with only the computer's 'word' for the election results. ... It's a voter-confidence issue, as much as anything else."

And it's hardly asking too much to produce such a record, Farrell said.

"You can get a receipt at the grocery store. You can get a receipt from the ATM machine," she said. "You should be able to see a paper record of how you voted."

But providing a piece of paper that both records votes and can be counted by machines requires special paper, Jefferson said.

"Flimsy roll paper won't work," he said. "It's got to be relatively stiff."

It must be durable because state law requires official ballots to be preserved 22 months, Jefferson said. It would probably require watermarks to guard against forgeries. And he said there would have to be a way for a machine to read the paper record, such as through bar codes. Nevada's paper records come with just such a code.

But a bar code presents another problem just as people can't see what's inside a computer and verify what it is recording without a printout, they cannot verify that a bar code reflects their preferences, Jefferson said.

"You lose transparency when you do that," Akin said. "Transparency is the key element in election security." And for that reason, he said, he would prefer a system that relies on machines that reads candidate names.

For her part, Barbara Dunmore, Riverside County registrar of voters, said she doesn't have a preference on the matter.

"We'll abide by whatever is required by the secretary of state," Dunmore said. "Whatever is determined to be the official ballot, whether that be the electronic ballot or the paper trail or both, we'll certainly abide by the secretary's directives."

For now, Riverside County is focusing on November, when it will have to furnish 125,000 traditional paper ballots to give voters an alternative to voting on touch-screens because an audit trail is not yet available. The number is a quarter of the half-million expected voters.

Dunmore said county voter registration has been soaring in recent weeks, reaching a total of 715,772 as of Wednesday, nearly 10 percent above the number in March.

"This is the first time in the county's history that we've had over 700,000 registered voters," she said. Oct. 18 is the last day to register for the Nov. 2 election.

Dunmore said close to half 47 percent are Republicans, while 35 percent are Democrats. Fourteen percent declined to state an affiliation, 2 percent declared allegiance to the American Independent Party and about 1 percent were listed as members of either the Libertarian or Green parties.