Diebold touch screens don't meet disability requirements

By SUSAN PYNCHON
Community Voices

Last : June 28, 2005

The Diebold voting machines being proposed for Volusia County don't meet the requirements of the Help America Vote Act. The shocking part is, they don't have to. It's only 2005 and the law doesn't go into effect until Jan. 1, 2006, so vendors are able to sell, this year, whatever type of voting systems they can get away with selling.

As I write this, states and counties across our nation including Volusia County are being sold a bill of goods with respect to their purchases of new voting-machine systems to meet the requirements of HAVA, which include accessible voting machines for all voters. Voting-machine vendors are having a heyday because they have recognized a loophole in HAVA that is large enough to drive a truck (or push a voting machine) through.

Unwitting states and counties, believing that the systems being presented to them are HAVA-compliant, are being duped. Unless vendors offer a specific guarantee of HAVA compliance, hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers' money may be squandered on equipment that will have to be scrapped or retrofitted at taxpayers' expense after Jan. 1, 2006.

While the proposed Diebold touch screens may provide accessibility for the blind, they are impossible to use for people with many other types of disabilities, including quadriplegics or those with severe manual impairments. Where is the sip/puff feature, the foot pedal or the joy stick offered by the competing AutoMark Voter Assist Terminal that Volusia County, with due diligence, had originally contracted to buy?

The AutoMark, developed in concert with the disabled community, offers a full guarantee of HAVA compliance that can be incorporated into a contract with the county, thereby indemnifying the county and assuring compliance.

In a blatant display of preferential treatment, the state required that the AutoMark receive federal certification (which it now has) before the state would begin the state certification process. However, the state did not require the same of Diebold. The Diebold system being proposed to Volusia County is not federally certified. State law does not require federal certification. Furthermore, state certification is not a guarantee of HAVA compliance since the state's standards for error rates and accessibility requirements are less stringent than those found in Section 301 of HAVA. Section 301, which is only 3 pages long, is the sole standard for HAVA compliance for the current round of voting machine purchases, as confirmed by Peggy Sims, National HAVA Coordinator. (Federal certification does not mean HAVA compliance either; it simply sets minimum performance standards.)

The board of directors of Florida Fair Elections Coalition supports purchase of the AutoMark. If the state were operating with due diligence, it could have the AutoMark certified within a matter of weeks, in plenty of time for Volusia County's fall elections. There would be no need for all the extra training of poll workers that would be required with the Diebold touch screens. The AutoMark works in conjunction with the county's current optical scan machines and would provide a fully accessible, verifiable election.

Add Diebold's lack of HAVA compliance to the fact that the Diebold "paperless" touch-screen machines do not provide a verifiable election; take longer to use than the AutoMark (31 minutes on Diebold vs. 9 minutes on AutoMark in a recent comparison); will keep the disabled waiting, possibly for hours, to be able to vote at a precinct; and are more expensive to maintain, as delineated in the recent Miami-Dade report; who would purchase these machines?

The Volusia County Council should be joined by the entire community of persons with disabilities, as happened in California recently, to reject these Diebold voting machines that do not meet the needs of all voters and do not provide verifiable elections. We urge concerned residents of Volusia County to show up at the special County Council meeting, held strictly on the subject of voting machines, at 9 a.m., Wednesday at the County Administration Building at 123 W. Indiana Ave. in DeLand. The Council is planning to vote, one last time, on whether to accept the Diebold machines.

Pynchon is executive director of Florida Fair Elections Coalition, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to fair, transparent, accessible, reliable, verifiable and secure elections. She does not have any interest, financial or otherwise, in any voting machine company nor do any members of the FFEC staff or board.