E-voting problems scarce, but are still a cause for concern
Editorial   Athens Banner-Herald   09 November 2004

A few years ago, as electronic voting began to replace punchcards and levers at polling places across the country, warnings about the potential for abuse of the technology began to surface. At the time, those warnings were written off as conspiracy theory-fueled rantings from the sort of folks who hear black helicopters humming in the night or who spend summer vacations aiming cameras across the Area 51 boundary line.

There doesn't seem to be any immediate need for worrying that e-voting will open the door to a world where election results can be manipulated by any hacker with an agenda. But some reports on e-voting in this year's presidential balloting are a cause for concern on the question of whether kinks have been worked out of the technology to the degree that it should be the new standard for elections.

According to the Associated Press, for instance, an Ohio precinct in which only 638 people voted reported 4,258 ballots cast for President Bush. Ohio officials who found the error later said Bush tallied just 365 ballots in the precinct, to John Kerry's 260 votes.

In Florida and some other states, according to CNN, a small number of voters said touchscreen voting machines incorrectly recorded their choices. The maker of the machines, Sequoia Voting Systems, told CNN poll workers might not have calibrated the machines properly.

But perhaps the most serious e-voting problems came in Louisiana, where some voters were apparently turned away from their precincts when e-voting machines wouldn't "boot up," according to CNN.

In Georgia, there were relatively few problems reported, and the bulk of those concerned incidents in which encoding equipment was not loading ballots onto the plastic cards voters ed into machines to case their votes. Two years ago, Georgia became the first state in the nation to use electronic voting machines as the statewide standard.

The scope of e-voting problems on Election Day was admittedly narrow. The non-partisan Election Protection coalition took several hundred reports of alleged e-voting irregularities, a relatively insignificant number when compared to the fact about one-third of the more than 100 million people who voted Tuesday cast ballots electronically.

Nonetheless, even the limited number of reports remains vaguely troubling, leaving the nagging feeling that e-voting does carry with it some potential for tampering with election results.

One thing that could go a long way toward easing those nagging doubts is some provision for a paper record of ballots cast. A paper record would provide individual voters with confidence their choices had been tallied correctly. Similarly, a paper record would provide for a high degree of confidence in election results if problems developed for local elections officials in the tallying of electronic ballots.

At present, only the state of Nevada requires that voters be supplied with a paper record to verify their vote. But as the nation moves toward wider use of e-voting - the Help America Vote Act of 2002 requires counties to move toward elimination of punchcard- and lever-based systems within the next two years - officials at the local and national levels might want to consider applying the Nevada standard nationwide.