Election proves need for an e-vote paper trail

By Thomas D. Elias   Ventura County Star
December 10, 2004

Lawsuits and recount demands have piled up in Ohio and Florida ever since the November election. They charge everything from targeted disenfranchising of minority voters to computer hacking to denying voters enough time to mail in absentee ballots.

What does all this have to do with California, where elections went off without many hitches everywhere but in San Diego, scene of a strong mayoral write-in campaign that bollixed up the counting process and delayed results for weeks?  
Simply this: All the problems in those other states easily could have happened here and might have if California's presidential vote had been more closely contested. That's because machines just like those questioned in other states also are used in some California polling places. This reality solidly reinforces the need for a new law passed last fall that will require paper trails from every electronic voting machine in the state starting with the June 2006 primary election.

The new law angers some local officials, who would rather save a few dollars than offer voters a guarantee that results are completely accurate.

Riverside County Registrar Barbara Dunmore, for one, says paper trails are little more than expensive excess baggage. She wants her county exempted from the new law.

"I think the parallel monitoring and the small number of paper ballots requested at the polls show that people in this county are comfortable with our process and confident with our machines," she said.

Only about 1.1 percent of Riverside County voters asked to use paper ballots in November instead of the touch screens in use. Parallel monitoring saw six state monitors randomly choose two electronic voting terminals and record results on them over 13 hours using a video camera. Does anyone really think checking two machines out of hundreds could amount to thorough verification of accuracy?

True, there were no recounts requested in Riverside County this year. But if there had been, the fact touch screens this time produced no paper records meant any recount would merely be a rehash. There's usually no point in a recount when the only records are on computer tapes and disks.

Meanwhile, the problems in other states make clear the need for paper trails. In New Hampshire, this year's results in many precincts were vastly different from previous experience. About three-fourths of those changed precincts used Diebold voting machines produced by a company whose chairman promised in writing in 2003 to help President Bush win re-election.

In Ohio, dozens of precincts in minority areas reported having too few voting machines, with resulting long lines. Many of those waiting could not stick around long enough to vote. Meanwhile, almost 100 usable voting machines remained in storage and were never deployed. Some question whether that was accidental, as Ohio's top election official, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, was state co-chairman for Bush, an obvious conflict of interest.

Also in Ohio, a county with just 800 registered voters recorded 3,893 votes for Bush on Diebold machines.

And a UC Berkeley statistical analysis found that in Florida, Bush may have received as many as 130,000 extra unexplained votes from counties with electronic voting machines. Also, in Florida, some computers inexplicably began counting backward.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, computers left out 4,500 votes.

While Bush's semi-official 4 million vote national margin was large enough that none of these episodes appears likely to have affected the election's outcome, similar problems in a closer election like that of 2000 would have caused days or weeks of uncertainty and untold voter distrust of the electoral system.

While none of this happened in California, every such episode probably could have.

"We didn't experience a complete meltdown in November, but all the questions surrounding the reliability of electronic voting are far from being answered," noted Democratic state Sen. Debra Bowen of Redondo Beach, chair of the Senate's elections committee.

One thing many of the questionable incidents shared was a lack of paper trails from the machines involved. Plus, in one incident, election officials reportedly tossed out paper produced by their machines at the end of Election Day.

All of which means that even if they cost something to produce and store, even if they irritate some local officials, producing and keeping voter-verified paper trails remains the best way anyone knows to assure honest elections while allowing for meaningful recounts in this advancing electronic age.