New voting machines to debut

by Michelle Himple
November 25, 2003

Hanging chads soon will be a memory. The now infamous method of casting a vote will go the way of the Lite-Brite.

Voters gathered Tuesday in the Bellingham Public Library to voice concerns about new voting systems that the Help America Vote Act could mandate for Whatcom County.

The act requires that new machines replace the punch-card machines by Jan. 1, 2006.

The 2004 elections will allow Whatcom County voters to try various new voting machines and answer questions and concerns before a permanent replacement for the punch-card voting machines is implemented.

Whatcom County will receive $578,500 from federal HAVA funding to assist with the replacement of punch-card voting, Whatcom County Auditor Shirley Forslof said. This, however, will not cover the entire cost of switching to a new system.

"If we have Direct Recording Systems at the polls, I estimate it would be about $2 million, so it would be close to 1.5 million of taxpayers' money," Forslof said. "I'm not saying Whatcom County is going it do it. ... Whatcom County really does not have a plan. I'm recommending that Whatcom County wait until the spring of 2005 to implement a new voting system."

The four-person education panel addressed how errors and manipulation can occur with touch-screen voting machines.

The forum gave community members a chance to hear some of the positive and negative aspects of new voting machines.

"If you cannot trust the way your vote is counted, then not much else in politics matters," said Marian Beddill, a computer technologist and member of the League of Women Voters.

Guest speaker Bev Harris, author of the book "Black Box Voting," said she has been investigating voting systems for the past 13 months and has discovered numerous security flaws in electronic voting devices.

"I got ahold of the exact software used to tabulate the votes in King County, and I rigged it in 10 minutes," Harris said. "This is a backdoor (that) you can open up, walk in, change the votes and leave all evidence that you were ever in there, and it is in a system that was certified."

Harris said she documented more than 100 elections in which machines miscounted votes enough to flip landslide elections in favor of the losing candidate.

Having a paper trail, which enables two independent sources to audit the votes, is the only way to help protect against fraud, Harris said.

"We have got to have a paper ballot that we verify," Harris said. "It must be robustly audited against the machine so that we know whether the machine is counting our votes."

Robbi Ferron, chair of Whatcom Fair Voting, one of the organizations that sponsored the event, said she agreed with the panelists as to why Tuesday night's educational forum was so important.

"All of our political activity doesn't matter if our vote doesn't count," she said.