Take care with choice of new voting machine

By John Wages
Special to The Clarion-Ledger   15 August 2005

When I was growing up, a radio commercial for a Tupelo appliance store observed: "Only the rich can afford cheap appliances," meaning that real costs are often higher than a low purchase price implies.

Here in Mississippi, our secretary of state has chosen the Diebold AccuVote touchscreen computer voting machine for statewide use.

The AccuVote is a sleek piece of technology, the same color as my laptop, with a touchscreen like a bank ATM machine. It will not allow overvotes, and it reduces unintentional undervotes. It stores the vote totals on a memory card from which they are easily uploaded to a central computer, allowing the public to know the results just a few minutes after the polls close.

Security primary concern

The machine comes equipped with earphones for blind voters. It can present the ballot in a variety of languages, including Spanish. And, it can be in your county by Election Day 2006 for the low, low price of nothing! Here we have a cutting-edge voting machine paid for by our friends in Washington at no cost to the county or state.

Why are so many voters and election officials concerned?

The first reason is security. To throw an election in the old days, someone had to physically dump the ballot boxes into the river. With computer machines, invisible changes to computer memory can alter vote totals in ways that are impossible to detect on a scale and with an ease that was not possible with older technologies.

In 2003, Johns Hopkins computer security expert Avi Rubin studied a Diebold voting machine and concluded that"this voting system is unsuitable for use in a general election."

Rubin became so interested in elections that he volunteered as an election judge in Maryland. Afterwards, he commented, "If we continue to use the kind of insecure DREs that were used in this election, it is only a matter of time before somebody exploits them. And the worst part is that we may never know it."

Now that Secretary of State Eric Clark has announced the purchase of the voter-verified audit trail printers, we need a statewide plan to actually use the printouts for mandatory, random audits of voting machines after each election.

The second problem with these machines is that they are not accessible to the disabled. While they make it easier for the blind, they do not accommodate paralyzed voters. Other machines are available with a "sip and puff" device. We can do better.

Confidence required

Mississippi's citizens have not always found it easy to vote. African Americans in many parts of the state were discouraged from voting by various means. At one point, the federal government intervened to register voters. These federally registered voters, even today, cannot be removed from the pollbooks for any reason, even if they are known to be deceased, without federal permission.

Our history should make us proactive to ensure that all our citizens are able to vote with ease and confidence.

Mississippi should lead the nation in election reforms, beginning with a voter-verified paper trail and mandatory statewide audit for whatever machines are purchased and moving ahead to ranked-choice (instant run-off) voting and other innovations to save taxpayer dollars and increase citizen and candidate participation.

Only the rich can afford to squander $15 million in one-time federal funds, and Mississippi is not a rich state.