Electronic Voting Glitches Reported

 By Chris Gaither, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

02 November 2004

Today's election was the first major test for the electronic voting machines, which record results on hard drives instead of on paper. More than 45 million people in 29 states, or 29% of the nation's electorate, were expected to cast votes on the new machines, up sharply from 12% in 2000.

Many machines seemed to have worked flawlessly, but frozen screens, machines that wouldn't start up and votes cast for the wrong candidate were reported by people in states ranging from California to Florida and from Louisiana to Pennsylvania.
By 3 p.m. today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology civil liberties group based in San Francisco, said its election errors hotline received more than 600 complaints about touch screen voting machine foul-ups from voters nationwide.

In New Orleans, e-voting machines in dozens of precincts went on the fritz and poll workers had no paper ballot backups, resulting in long lines. Local voting activists asked a judge to extend polling hours by two hours to 10 p.m.

"New Orleans wins the award for the worst voting situation in the country," said EFF staff attorney Cindy Cohn.

The left-leaning organization also said some voters in Georgia, Texas, New Mexico and Florida reported that they tried to one candidate, but the computers ? made by a range of manufacturers ? ed the challenger.

They noticed the error when the e-voting machines gave a summary of the voter's choices before finalizing the ion. It sometimes took a half-dozen tries before the voter was able to choose their desired candidate, Cohn said.

David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor who has worked with the EFF to push for paper trails on e-voting machines, said the number of complaints lodged by the group today was statistically insignificant, but hints at a widespread problem.

"It's not going to be until the dust clears, probably [Wednesday], that we'll have an approximate idea of what happened," he said.

But the two directors of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project said they expect that electronic voting machines will prove to have dramatically reduced voter error during the elections.

When it comes to electronic voting machines, "a lot of the controversy and the storm and fury before the elections was overblown," said co-director Michael Alvarez, a Caltech political science professor.

MIT computer science professor Ted Selker, who oversees the voting technology project with Selker, said a Diebold e-voting machine in Berkeley crashed when one of his students tried to cast a ballot. But the machine worked properly after poll workers rebooted it, and he saw plenty of other problems using older technology.

MIT President Charles Vest tried for 10 minutes to his paper-and-ink ballot into an optical scanner before a poll worker realized that a piece of aluminum foil used to protect the machine when it's off had not been removed from the slot, Selker said.

"While we will probably see some errors for one reason or another with electronic machines, I expect it will be much, much less than we've seen in the past," he said.