E-Vote Fears Soar in Swing States 

By Jacob Ogles Wired News

02:00 AM Sep. 23, 2004 PT

Roughly a third of the votes cast in the November presidential election will be made on controversial paperless electronic voting machines, but as any political analyst can tell you, the only votes that will matter a great deal will be cast in a handful of swing states.

And just as the Kerry and Bush campaigns are spending most of their efforts in those states where neither holds a heavy margin in the polls, voting advocacy groups concerned with the integrity of voting technology are devoting their resources toward the states which matter most.

"Florida. Pennsylvania. Ohio. These are the states that can most affect the outcome of this election," said Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation.

And in a post-recount world, the campaigns themselves will be devoting more attention than ever to making sure votes for their candidates count. On Tuesday, the Kerry-Edwards 2004 campaign announced it would begin raising funds for a potential recount situation, pointing out that the Bush campaign spent $14 million during the Florida recount in 2000 while the Gore campaign spent just $3.2 million.

"Our campaign is already considering our options should John Kerry or George Bush pursue a recount like the famous Florida ballot dispute of 2000," wrote Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill in a press release.

Republicans will also have attorneys waiting to challenge voting results should problems be reported. "Attorneys are always present in any election these days," said Mary Tucker Fletcher, spokeswoman for the Republican Party of Florida.

If problems do occur, election watchers think they know where the problems will be. In many cases, it is just a matter of following the electrical wires.

"Florida remains a concern," said Matt Zimmerman, a spokesman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Even though there appeared to be a smooth primary, whether you get the same results when you are stressing the system remains to be seen."

Following the 2000 election, when problems with punch cards left Florida's electoral votes in flux for 36 days before Bush was declared the winner with a 537-vote margin, state law was changed to require massive upgrades in nearly every county.

Now more than half of the voters in the state are expected to vote on touch screens this November, but that technology hasn't always proved itself a perfect fix. The 2002 gubernatorial primary became controversial when there were reported input problems in south Florida, and the March presidential primary also had thousands of under-votes counted when only one race was on the ballot. While the 2002 general election and a statewide primary in August went well, there were no significant close elections. Advocacy groups remain concerned.

The political parties in the state are not as upset, at least publicly. "The Department of State did a demonstration of the new equipment for both political parties, and everybody left very confident," Fletcher said.

But some factions of both major parties in the state clearly have concerns. Both parties are conducting major absentee ballot drives, a method which guarantees a paper trail. At the Florida Democratic Party convention last year, e-voting technology with a paper trail but without state certification was showcased. And while the Republican Party has officially defended the machines, a flier was sent out in a south Florida primary earlier this year encouraging absentee voting because the paperless system at the polls was unreliable.

The controversy over e-voting has made some states reluctant to take the plunge at all. In Ohio, controversy about a specific Diebold Election Systems memo uncovered last year has all but stopped any plans to upgrade technology in the state. Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell wrote in a message leaked to the media that he would deliver the state of Ohio to Bush in November. Right now, polls show the state is up for grabs.

Unfortunately, some of the comments of Mr. O'Dell have made people reluctant to upgrade," said Dan Trevas, communications director for the Ohio Democratic Party.

When further problems with Diebold machines were exposed earlier this year, all counties with any plans to upgrade to e-voting technology opted to stick with their old-school punch card technology. 
 
Doherty considered this a victory, even though the punch cards were such a source of woe in Florida.

"We want to get rid of the punch cards too. We're not anti-technology," he said. "But we need to have confidence in the program we go to. We have (a) long-standing tradition of open voting systems with secret ballot. I think we should try and keep it that way."

Trevas said he would like to see an upgrade to better technology, but said many in the state are reluctant to go to e-voting without a paper trail. Besides, Ohio has better-defined laws for dealing with punch cards than Florida had in 2000, Trevas said.

Doherty and Zimmerman point to Nevada, where the entire swing state will use touch-screen technology this year. "Nevada is interesting because it is the only state with a voter-verified paper trail," Zimmerman said. "Their primary went smoothly, and there was a lot of attention from the media and election officials all over. There will continue to be a lot of attention there."

Other states seem to be resistant to upgrading. Most of Virginia, another swing state, still uses lever voting machines, an antiquated system that also leaves no paper trail in many cases.

But officials in the state seem largely unconcerned. Laura Bland, communications director for the Democratic Party of Virginia, said the party is pushing for fair voting practices but little has been discussed about the technologies used.

There is also heightened concern in some states that can't be considered swing states. Zimmerman said he is concerned about South Carolina because the state just upgraded to new technology a few months before the election; in Georgia, the entire state will use paperless ballots. But these states are firmly pro-Bush. California state officials have banned touch-screen voting in November entirely, but Kerry will most likely win that state regardless of how the votes are cast.

But there should be no great surprise that most poll-watching resources will be spent in those areas where the polls are close. The Election Protection coalition, a group of dozens of special-interest groups concerned with voting integrity, will send precinct observers into battleground states to guard against a variety of improprieties, including technology issues. The group already conducted a small effort in Florida in the August primary.

Zimmerman said the efforts on the technology end are as much about voter confusion with the newfangled systems as they are with concerns about voter security.

"As we've seen, the personnel and procedures are just as important as the technology security in terms of areas where problems may occur," he said.