E-voting irregularities raise eyebrows, blood pressure

USA Today    03 November 2004
Concern over electronic voting technology was not assuaged Tuesday as glitches, confusion and human error raised a welter of problems across the country, even while e-vote watchdogs prepared to file suits challenging the results derived from the controversial machines.

New rules, new voters and a tight presidential contest combined to create "a recipe for problems," said Sean Greene, who was watching Cleveland polls for the Election Reform Information Project, a nonpartisan research group on election reform.

Nearly one in three voters, including about half of those in Florida, were expected to cast ballots using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticized for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning.

In South Carolina, problems were reported in a handful of precincts in two counties using electronic machines. Officials said voters were forced to switch to paper ballots while technicians got the iVotronic touch screens from Electronic Systems & Software up and running within about 90 minutes.

And in Volusia County, Fla., a memory card in an optical-scan voting machine failed Monday at an early voting site and didn't count 13,000 ballots. Officials planned to feed the ballots, in which voters fill in a bubble, and count them Tuesday.

Many of the problems with electronic voting ? whether accidental or intentional ? may not be known until well after Tuesday, if at all. Most of the ATM-style machines, including all of Florida's, lack paper records that could be used to verify the electronic results in a recount.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's VerifiedVoting.org, which has been monitoring the implementation of e-voting machines in the U.S., warned on Monday that over 20 percent of the machines tested by observers around the country failed to record votes properly. The organization recommended that voters choosing to use touchscreen voting methods be sure to double-check the summary screen to confirm that their votes had been properly registered.

BlackBoxVoting.org, the site organized by e-voting activist Bev Harris, announced early Wednesday that it plans to conduct what the site describes as the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history, requesting internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships using electronic voting machines.

According to a release posted on the site, "Such a request filed in King County, Washington on Sept. 15, following the primary election six weeks ago, uncovered an internal audit log containing a three-hour deletion on election night; 'trouble slips' revealing suspicious modem activity; and profound problems with security, including accidental disclosure of critically sensitive remote access information to poll workers, office personnel, and even, in a shocking blunder, to Black Box Voting activists."