U.S. Elections Under a Microscope 

By Laila Weir   Wired News  02:00 AM Oct. 05, 2004 PT

As the self-appointed guardians of democracy, Americans are used to monitoring elections overseas in contested hot spots and fledgling democracies. But amid memories of Florida 2000 and concerns about electronic voting and voter-registration lists, Americans are finding the tables have turned.

This year, one monitoring project invited more than 20 international observers from 15 countries including Australia, Argentina, South Africa and Zambia to help monitor the presidential election and increase voter confidence. In addition, more than 60 domestic groups have mobilized volunteers to monitor the election, including a group with technical expertise that will evaluate the performance of e-voting machines.
The program for international observers, Fair Election, is run by Global Exchange, a nonprofit, nonpartisan human rights group based in San Francisco.

"It seemed to us that the Florida experience combined with new concerns over touch-screen voting and long-standing controversies about the role of money and politics had diminished public faith in our democracy," said Jason Mark, of the Fair Election project. "So we invited the observers here to do whatever they could to help restore some of that public confidence."

Twenty international observers came to the United States for about a week in mid-September as part of a preliminary trip to examine election procedures and become familiar with issues of voter disenfranchisement, e-voting systems and campaign finance reform.

The observers include election officials, experienced election monitors, human rights lawyers and others. They traveled to five states Georgia, Ohio, Missouri, Florida and Arizona ed because they exemplify particular election processes. The observers will release a report of their findings later this month. A second round of monitors will arrive in late October to observe the election in Ohio, Missouri and Florida.

In Georgia, where observers met with community groups and election officials, the focus was on the touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems, which counties will be using statewide. Controversy about the security of the machines and the state's previous use of them in 2002 has left some voters jittery.

"In Georgia, they do not have printers installed to produce the voter-verified paper receipt, or paper trail," said John Gibler, who led the Georgia team for Fair Election. "This has caused a lot of concern in the citizen groups we met with."

Monitor Elijah Rubvuta, executive director of the Foundation for Democratic Process in Zambia, said Georgia officials could allay voters' fears by requiring the state's voting machines to produce a paper trail. But there has been no indication that Georgia officials will make the move that California and other states have made.

The issues noted by the advance teams will provide the second round of observers with guidance about what to watch out for during the election itself. Gibler said there are a number of questions about e-voting machines that monitors should answer.

For example, "Have the poll workers received the kind of training to know how to educate the voters and make sure they feel comfortable with the machines?" Gibler asked. "And to deal with any problems that arise? Or will the governments be relying on the representatives of the companies (to handle problems)?"

The Fair Election project is mainly focused on gauging citizen confidence in the election systems, however, and the foreign observers do not include computer scientists focused on thoroughly evaluating the technical aspects of e-voting machines. This task will be left to more than 1,400 techies participating in a domestic monitoring project of the Election Protection coalition, organized by almost 60 U.S. groups.

The coalition will disperse 25,000 monitors to voting sites in 17 states around the country. One of the coalition's projects is TechWatch, run by the Verified Voting Foundation. TechWatch has recruited technology professionals to observe the operation of voting technology during tests before the election and on Election Day itself.

The Verified Voting Foundation has also developed a web-based software application that will allow coalition volunteers to respond to voting incidents in real time. The coalition runs a hot line that voters can call to report problems. When they do, hot-line operators enter the details into the Election Incident Reporting System. The system maps the problems and sends an alert to a monitoring team leader in the area, who can then dispatch a mobile response team of volunteer lawyers, techies or others to observe how the problem is handled.

The groups tested the system during the Florida primary election, when 296 hot-line calls were entered into the system, of which 18 were voting machine problems.

Another group, Votewatch, will collect statistical data on the election. Among other things, Votewatch will compare the vote tallies posted in polling places at the end of the day with cumulative unofficial counts for an entire area reported later that night. If the numbers differ, it would indicate that the counting software at individual polling places failed to count some votes. Volunteers would make note of the technology that was used at those polling places to gather statistics on the accuracy of systems.

The Election Protection coalition also includes groups that will monitor issues besides voting technology, including voter intimidation and disenfranchisement.