Electronic voting is the future of democracy

Joe Andrew    Opinion   15 August 2005

MOST Americans were aghast at the debacle of the Florida recount during the 2000 presidential election. Because I was the chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2000 when election officials painfully scrutinized hanging chads and thousands of citizens' votes went uncounted, I have devoted much of my time since then trying to fix America's broken voting system. I've given speeches, had endless meetings with election officials and eventually received the attention of the voting machine manufacturers, who didn't mind being criticized as long as the critic was using facts and not fantasy.

Unfortunately, the recent attacks on touch-screen electronic voting in California have been based more on fantasy than facts.

Here are the facts. In 2002 a bipartisan effort in the U.S. Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, known as HAVA, which steered election officials toward touch-screen voting systems for the simple reasons that they are more accurate, more accessible and more secure than alternative systems in place. No system is perfect, but if you compare touch-screen machines with punch cards, mechanical lever machines, optical scan or plain old-fashioned paper ballots, a half dozen studies, including a recent CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project report, show that your vote is more likely to be counted if you vote on a touch-screen. In the CalTech/MIT report, researchers reported that improvements to voting machines and election administration, partly funded by HAVA, saved more than 1 million votes that otherwise would have gone uncounted in the 2004 elections.

One million votes ? that's 999,488 more than the 512 votes that George Bush won the state of Florida by in 2000.

Responding to demands that electronic voting machines create a paper trail for each vote, manufacturers recently added printers to their systems to produce voter receipts. A couple of weeks ago, Diebold Election Systems tested 96 of its touch-screen voting machines in a San Joaquin County warehouse in California. In that test, 10,720 votes were recorded on the 96 voting machines with 100 percent accuracy. Despite 11 paper jams and 21 screen freezes that happened on the new machine/printer combination, not a single ballot was lost. The State of California has understandably asked Diebold to fix the printers before the new machines can be used in real, live elections.

Those are the facts, and here is the fantasy: Media coverage of this test sensationalized the results so that any reader would imagine complete chaos and a failure in tabulating results. A number of articles claimed that the machines had a 10 percent error rate, and one newspaper even reported that the paper jams caused long lines, "causing voters to give up and go home," when the actual test consisted of a handful of volunteers voting repeatedly on the machines in a warehouse.

Paper jams on these printers occurred in roughly 1 out of 1,000 cases, which, while not perfect, is consistent with similar tests on receipt printing for ATMs and cash registers. Diebold is now working to make minor adjustments to the printing units to improve their performance and is also working to reduce or eliminate the screen freezes.

Do these problems need to be fixed? Absolutely; but let's not lose sight of the benefits. With touch-screen voting systems, blind, visually impaired and physically challenged voters are able to cast ballots unassisted and in complete privacy for the first time in their lives.

The touch-screens also match California's great diversity by enabling its citizens to vote in their native languages. In fact, the machines that were recently tested allow ballots in eight different languages, including those that use complex characters.

But even more importantly, we should be realistic about our choices. As described in the CalTech/MIT study, the national average rate for residual (missing) votes in the 2000 elections ? conducted overwhelmingly using punch card or paper ballot systems ? was 1.9 percent. If you apply that ratio to this test of 10,720 ballots, you would lose 203 votes.

The Cal Tech/MIT study also indicated that switching from punch card technology to a touch-screen voting system reduced voter error by a substantial 1.46 percent, resulting in thousands of additional votes being counted, a 30 percent improvement when compared with switching from punch cards to optical scan technology. With these kinds of results, the contest between touch-screens and hanging chads should be a landslide.

Joe Andrew is a lawyer, former election official and former National Chair of the Democratic National Committee. He advises Diebold Election Systems on voting industry standards.