Vote of confidence?

Officials wonder if election audit will answer all questions

By MAUREEN HAYDEN Evansville  Courier & Press November 17, 2004

What if Vanderburgh County's new touch-screen voting machines are like the VCR you got for Christmas a few years ago?

You pull it out of the box, plug it in, try to figure out how to program it, and then when you can't follow the directions, you curse and holler, "Stupid machine!" Or what if the machines are like that lemon of a car you once bought - a pricey but unreliable heap, sold to you by a dealer who keeps insisting he can't find anything wrong. That's the dilemma Vanderburgh County officials find themselves in as they venture into the complicated territory of electronic voting. On Tuesday, the first of two audits of the Nov. 2 election results got under way, when the company that has a five-year, $2.9 million lease to provide electronic voting machines to Vanderburgh County voters launched a self-assessment of how its equipment worked Election Day.  
The results aren't expected until Friday, when officials with the Omaha, Neb.-based company, Election Systems & Software Inc., plan to meet with county officials for a "debriefing." But some county officials wonder whether Election Systems & Software's self-review will be able to answer this question: Were the problems that occurred during the Nov. 2 election - which included crashing computers, up to three-hour voting lines and reports of machines gone haywire - because of human error or machine malfunction? Or both? Vanderburgh County Clerk Marsha Abell is leaning on the side of human error, and faults in large part the more than 280 poll workers who failed to show up for training on how to use the machines. But she isn't ruling out computer error, which is why she spent much of Tuesday watching Election Systems & Software officials begin their review of each and every one of the county's 550 touch-screen machines. Election Systems & Software officials estimated it would take until Friday to complete the audit and gather data, including vote tallies, from each machine.

"By Friday, the big story, or the small story, will be when (Election Systems & Software) print all this out,'' said Abell. "Will everything they print out Friday be identical to what we found out on (Election Day)?" Looking for that answer are three technically savvy staff members who began downloading information from every touch-screen voting machine early Tuesday.

They came equipped with a few portable laptops, some proprietary software, some cable wires, a lot of compact flash discs for memory storage, and pieces of equipment called "personalized electronic ballot" counters, or PEBs, that look a lot like the old Nintendo 64 games. Assisting them in loading and unloading the voting machines from shelves in the county Election Office, where the voting equipment has been stored since Nov. 2, were two inmates from the SAFE House.

Among those looking over the shoulders of the Election Systems & Software workers were members of the media and two volunteer "overseers" appointed by the Vanderburgh County Commissioners on Monday. One was Evansville attorney Tom Massey, a Republican; the other was Tammy Barnett, a Democrat and volunteer poll worker. Election Systems & Software project manager Gary Olsen spent the morning explaining the auditing process and the series of safeguards built into the machines to guard against voter fraud and computer error.

"You could smash this (voting) machine to pieces with a hammer, and because you have three independent chips in here, you could still pull out any one of them and download the information to another machine and get the election results,'' said Olsen.

But it's not some crazed hammer-wielding voter officials such as Susan Kirk fear.

The Republican was elected as county clerk in the Nov. 2 election and will take over for Abell in January, and in that role will have to oversee the next election. Kirk isn't sure the average voter will take the word of a computer expert when it comes to casting a ballot.

She wants a paper trail for every vote, and would like to see a receipt generated on paper every time a voter casts a ballot on the touch-screen machine. Those receipts, she said, could be kept and maintained by the election office and used as a backup if questions arise. "Look, I don't understand anything more than I did when I first walked in here,'' said Kirk, after spending about an hour listening to the explanations of Election Systems & Software staffers. "This is over my head and I think most voters feel that way. This has got to be about voter confidence. Does the voter believe that his vote is going to count?"

By late Tuesday, Election Systems & Software officials had made their way through almost half the touch-screen voting machines and the only errors they had found were ones made by humans.

Poll workers were required to make a printout of totals both before and after the voting - to show the machine had been cleared out initially, and had then recorded votes throughout Election Day. However, some poll workers placed those printouts in the wrong location, and in at least one case, the poll workers made no printout of the final vote tally. The information, however, remained stored in the voting machine and the Election Systems & Software workers were able to make a printout.

Also, Abell and her staff confessed to making their own error when they took the advice of Election Systems & Software trainers and ordered inexpensive "night-lights" to use to test electric outlets at the polling places. Turns out the night-lights had tiny light-sensors on them that allowed the light to come on only in the dark. Abell came up with a quick solution: A piece of tape over each sensor. Tuesday's audit is the first of two to be conducted on the touch-screen machines. The Vanderburgh County Commissioners, after fielding a litany of complaints from voters, agreed to pay for an independent audit of the Nov. 2 election results. On Monday, the commissioners voted to support a request to pay $37,500 to SysTest Labs of Denver to conduct the audit. But Abell and others question how objective that audit can be. SysTest, a private software testing company, already has certified the Election Systems & Software software used in the touch-screen machines in Vanderburgh County. The field for electronic-voting testing is narrow. SysTest is one of just two test centers authorized by the National Association of State Election Directors to provide independent testing of electronic voting systems. "Can (SysTest) be independent, after already certifying the software?" said Abell. Her proposal? Wait until the results come in Friday from the Election Systems & Software audit before making the decision to pay for an independent audit. County commissioners, led by Democrat Catherine Fanello, have made it clear, though, that they support someone from the outside coming in to look at the Nov. 2 election results. At Monday's meeting, Fanello said she is convinced voters want to be confident the voting process works.

"We're making a $2.9 million investment in these machines," said Fanello. "To spend $37,500, while that is a lot of money, it's still a in the bucket."