Group of professors in battle with state over voting machines
   
Associated Press    December 7 2005

HARTFORD, Conn. A group of Connecticut academics is urging the state's top election official to scrap the bidding for new electronic voting machines, saying she favors models that could be prone to glitches.

The group wants Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz to consider a different device because mistake-prone machines could discourage people from voting.

"You don't have to assume chicanery," said Ralph Morelli, who teaches at Trinity College in Hartford. "If the machine can't be booted up in the morning, nobody gets to vote. If they miscalculate how many voters can be handled on a machine, you're going to have huge lines and people are going to be turned away. Why go through this?"

Morelli and his group, TrueVoteConnecticut, have launched a Web site and a letter-writing campaign that they hope will generate support to restart the bidding process. But Bysiewicz questions their impartiality and said the device they favor doesn't meet state law.

Bysiewicz's office has demonstrated two ATM-style machines and one electronic lever machine that could eventually replace Connecticut's old, mechanical lever machines under the federal Help America Vote Act.

Under the new state law, machines must have paper trails so voters can check somewhere on the machines that their votes were cast properly.

Connecticut hopes to have the new machines in place by the 2006 election.

Bysiewicz, who disagrees with TrueVoteConnecticut's conclusions, said her office is also looking at adding more optical scan devices to polling places, which Morelli's organization favors because they create a paper trail.

Several Connecticut municipalities already use the machines.

Bysiewicz said her office wants to give municipalities a choice, especially after a federal agency recently suggested that all of Connecticut's old mechanical voting machines should be replaced because they don't meet federal requirements, such as being fully accessible to the handicapped.

Bysiewicz said the device that Morelli and TrueVoteConnecticut favor, the ES&S AutoMARK Voter Assist Terminal, is only a ballot-marking device. State law requires that an entire system - the optical scan machine and the device used to mark the ballot - be federally certified.

The AutoMARK is referred to as a "sophisticated pen." A blank ballot is placed in the machine. The ballot then appears on a screen and a voter is able to "mark" it. A marked ballot can be audibly read back to someone who is blind.

The device does not actually retain or count votes.

Bysiewicz said her office twice offered AutoMARK the opportunity to bid for Connecticut's voting machines if the company felt it could comply with state and federal requirements. But AutoMARK did not submit a bid, she said.

"I cannot force a private company to apply to our procurement process," she said.

The battle between Bysiewicz and the professors has been going on for months.

Bysiewicz has questioned TrueVote's claim that the organization is a nonprofit, nonpartisan community advocacy group that has no relationship with any vendor.

In an Oct. 5 letter, she outlines how TrueVote has written numerous letters about the AutoMARK, testified at legislative committees, posted materials on its web site and made statements at a forum on voting technology.

"The Department of Administrative Services has advised us that it would be inappropriate to meet with advocates of a specific vendor. Therefore, it is not appropriate to meet with your organization while we are engaged in the purchasing process," Bysiewicz wrote.

Morelli denies that he or Michael Fischer, a Yale University computer science professor, have any financial dealings with the makers of the AutoMARK.

He said the members of TrueVote have covered the cost of their organization themselves, including a Web site.

Joseph Vaneck, co-founder of the AutoMARK, said he doesn't know the Connecticut professors or have any financial ties to them. He said professors throughout the country back his machine because they see it as a way to have both a paper trail for votes and an opportunity for the disabled to vote in private.

"It's really a reaction, I think, to the fear that people have to a completely electronic system," Vaneck said. "When this issue came up, something struck a chord. We've had this kind of spontaneous activism all over the country."

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