Investigator calls voting machine problems a shock
Rick Martinez, Beaver County Times Capital Bureau
02/16/2005

HARRISBURG - About halfway into Tuesday's five-hour hearing on voting machine irregularities in Beaver and Mercer counties last November, the man hired by the state to investigate called the incidents "disturbing."

Turning to Jack Gerbel, president of the voting machine company UniLect, Michael Shamos asked if voting officials had been inadequately trained.

"No reason to disclaim that. I wasn't there," said Gerbel, who noted that his company trained workers on the Patriot voting machines in 2000, not in 2004.

So Shamos then asked why someone voting a straight ticket in the 4th Congressional District in November had difficulty voting for president.

"I have not a clue," said Gerbel. "When I appeared in front of the (Mercer County) committee, I learned things that shocked me."

What might have been a code error in some of UniLect's Patriot voting machines led to chaos at some Mercer County polls in November.

Shamos told of voting machines working for 45 minutes, then only sporadically, then not at all.

That led Gerbel to suggest that some of the problem might have been due to a lack of voter training. To which Shamos shot back: "There's 105 million voters in this country."

Shamos, a professor in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and co-director of the school's Institute for eCommerce, has been hired by the Pennsylvania Department of State to examine the UniLect system. And while his report to the department won't be ready for another two to three weeks, he did tip his hand about one change he will advocate.

"I'm going to be recommending something about an undervote warning," Shamos said.

For example, he suggested when a machine recognizes that a voter is pushing buttons for district justice and congressional races, but skipping the presidential race, a popup warning appear on the computer screen.

That is what other states do, and Gerbel said his system has the capacity to do it, as well.

In November, Beaver County's undervote in the presidential election amounted to 4,500 voters. That's an improvement from 2,000 when the undervote was 5,313, but a far cry from the total of 820 in 1996 when the county still used paper ballots.

The undervote in Mercer County was 3,455 out of 51,162 who showed up to the polls.

During the hearing, Gerbel demonstrated how the Patriot machines work and took it through a mock election while Shamos asked questions.

It was an examination that Rebecca Mercuri said she would have conducted differently. Attending the hearing at the request of Mercer County voting activists, the Harvard University fellow and computer security expert said she didn't like that UniLect was allowed to do a "horse and pony show" with "smoke and mirrors."

Mercuri was critical of the voting system running on an MS-DOS computer system, which she said anyone can break into. She also said a "very serious" security flaw was the use of a phone jack to transfer voting data from the polling place to a county courthouse.

"The person who hooks it up could be hooking it up to his house," Mercuri said.