Voter verification critical for touch-screen machines

By SUSAN PYNCHON
COMMUNITY VOICES?? Daytona Beach News-Journal? ?April 24, 2005

I am appalled that Secretary of State Glenda Hood and state elections officials have been promoting touch-screen voting machines with all the enthusiasm of hired salespeople, in spite of mounting evidence that these machines have failed miserably in elections nationwide.

Hood stated recently that touch-screen machines are "not vulnerable to hacking." This is patently untrue. A government-authorized hacker recently showed North Carolina legislators how easily the state's touch-screen machines could be hacked. In Maryland, officials commissioned a computer-security expert to rig a fake election using the state's Diebold machines. The authorized hacker broke into the computer at the state Board of Elections, completely changed the election results, erased his trail and got out without a trace . . . a feat accomplished in under five minutes.

Both the optical-scan machines (used now by Volusia County voters) and the touch-screen machines (which Volusia County Council recently approved for voters with disabilities) are computers and are highly vulnerable to hacking through wireless technology or through access to the central tabulator. These machines also are vulnerable to faulty or malicious programming, human error, screen freeze-ups, breakdowns and other problems all too familiar to anyone who owns a computer. The important difference is that optical-scan machines have a fail-safe ability to independently recount paper ballots.

Hood needed only to look to Miami-Dade County to realize that her rosy analysis of touch-screen voting is somewhere out in la-la land. The Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections recently resigned, under pressure, due to lost votes on iVotronic touch-screen voting machines. In addition to 1,200 votes lost in one election, Miami-Dade officials believe that five municipal elections also were compromised.

Miami-Dade, after spending $24.5 million on touch-screen technology, is considering junking those machines and purchasing the far-more reliable and independently verifiable optical-scan machines. The sad truth is that, without independent paper ballots to verify election results, no one can accurately recreate what happened or didn't happen in Miami-Dade County.

Hood speaks of the "redundant" memories in touch-screen machines as though that provided a fail-safe backup. Yes, the memories are redundant. And when there is faulty programming or human error, the results are exactly the same (and equally wrong) on all the redundant memories.

It should be noted that California decertified the same model Diebold touch-screen machines that the state is forcing on 30 Florida counties, including Volusia (since Diebold is already the optical-scan vendor in those counties). While many states are heading toward or returning to optical-scan voting, Florida is heading in the opposite direction, setting itself up for future election debacles.

And then there's cost. Touch-screen technology is, in the long run, far more expensive than optical-scan. If Volusia County were to someday go completely to touch-screen machines, as other counties have done, the cost would be approximately $10 million, more than 10 times the cost of optical-scan machines.

Most counties are ill-equipped to handle or maintain touch-screen machines. They would have to pay vendors for maintenance, depend on vendors to solve machine problems, and place responsibility for election results in the hands of voting-machine companies.

Hood has said that no vendors have submitted applications for a system with voter-verified, paper-receipt capabilities. Yet the state has no standards in place to certify such a system, nor has the state requested vendors to provide such a system, even though California and other states are requiring voter-verified paper receipts.

There is, however, a paper-ballot-marking system in the last stages of federal certification and this company has submitted its application to Florida. This ballot-marking system provides accessible voting for disabled voters and works in conjunction with optical-scan voting machines. This machine is already used by a number of organizations for the sight-impaired and was successfully tested in Arizona in the November 2004 election.

All states but Florida are waiting until the federal deadline of Jan. 1, 2006 to comply with disabled-voting requirements. Florida set an arbitrary deadline of July 1, 2005. As a result, Florida is forcing touch-screen voting machines down the throats of many unwilling citizens because no alternatives will be available until after July 1.

Disabled voters, who have waited years for the opportunity to have a private and independent vote, stand to lose their votes completely without a verifiable, fail-safe voting system in place. Accessibility and verifiability should not be mutually exclusive. The mandated purchase of touch-screen machines is shameful, irresponsible, unnecessary, a waste of taxpayer dollars and should be stopped in the courts.

Florida does not need to buy pig-in-the-poke technology that is being disproved nationwide. It does not need to assault the rights of citizens to have their votes counted accurately and verifiably. It does not need to put election results in the hands of private vendors. It does not need its secretary of state to promote touch-screen machines through inaccurate and misleading statements. Our state and our democracy deserve better.

Pynchon of DeLeon Springs is executive director of Florida Fair Elections Coalition.