Firm caused anxiety over vote security

Palladium-Item   23 September 2004

Elections are serious business. They are where the people decide who will make laws and policies and levy taxes.

But voters have to know that the voting system is secure. There should never be a question about whether any vote will be lost because it's been miscounted or not counted.

So it's good news for Wayne County that the Indiana Elections Commission announced Wednesday that voters on Nov. 2 will be allowed to use previously uncertified iVotronics touch screen computers. It means the state has reviewed the software that runs the machines called firmware and it does what it is supposed to do. The decision means the election will run a lot more smoothly because poll workers and election officials won't need to be trained on a substitute system.

There are plenty of questions about how votes will be counted this election, many resulting from the 2000 election that was thrown into the Supreme Court after weeks of bickering over how votes were counted on another system in Florida.

Election officials in the past four years have had to scramble to replace older voting systems. New systems were reviewed by federal and state officials who told local officials which ones they could buy. In Indiana, county clerks, such as Wayne County's Sue Anne Lower, had few choices and based their decisions largely on what they had been told they could do.

It must be hoped that the system's maker, Election Systems and Software, will have learned a lesson. The company had sold Wayne and several other Indiana counties machines with a certain type of firmware inside. But before the machines were sent, ES&S put a different version of firmware in the machines without getting it certified by the state.

The firmware apparently was simply an upgrade. Installing it on new machines would have been natural. But especially with the questions about vote security, ES&S should have received state certification first.

The problem was discovered not long before the May primary and so the state allowed Wayne County to use machines with the uncertified firmware.

Still, the firmware upgrade was supposed to have been certified by the state before the coming election. Until Wednesday, that had not been done, and it left at least four counties, including Wayne, not knowing what kind of voting system would be used in an election that is only six weeks away.

ES&S could have avoided this problem and the resulting anxiety simply by complying with state procedures. Let's hope they don't put voters and election officials through this kind of experience again.