December 15, 2003

NEW ECONOMY

Considering Computer Voting

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Gaithersburg, Md.

HIGH-TECH voting is getting a low-tech backstop: paper. Most new voting machines are basically computers with touch screens instead of keyboards. Their makers promise that the new machines will simplify voting and forever end the prospect of pregnant and hanging chads. But as the market for computerized voting equipment has intensified, a band of critics has emerged, ranging from the analytical to the apoplectic.

The opponents of the current machines, along with the people who make them and election officials who buy them, gathered to spar in Gaithersburg, a Washington suburb, last Wednesday and Thursday, at a symposium optimistically titled, "Building Trust and Confidence in Voting Systems."

The critics complained that the companies were putting democracy into a mystery box, and that the computer code for the systems was not written to standards that ensure security. Critics are uneasy about the major vendors' political ties, and they worry about what a malevolent insider or a hacker could do to an election. But above all, they complain that few of the new machines allow voters to verify their votes, whether with a paper receipt or another method, an idea favored by computer scientists including David L. Dill of Stanford University.

The companies generally respond that the lever-style, mechanical voting machines offer no such backup, either. The critics counter that the computerized systems are the first to need voter verification methods.

Now a growing number of election officials and politicians seem to be agreeing with the skeptics. Last week, Nevada said it was buying voting machines for the entire state, and it demanded paper receipts for all voters. Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller said he received an overwhelming message from voters that they did not trust electronic voting. "Frankly, they think the process is working against them, rather than working for them," Mr. Heller, a Republican, said. Last month, the California secretary of state, Kevin Shelley said that his state would require all touch-screen voting machines to provide a "voter-verified paper audit trail."

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, has introduced a bill that would require a paper trail and security standards for voting machines. Her bill is similar to an earlier entry sponsored by a fellow Democrat, Representative Rush D. Holt of New Jersey. "What's required for money machines should be required for voting machines," Senator Clinton said in introducing the bill. "We must restore trust in our voting, and we must do it now."

Rebecca Mercuri, an expert on voting technology who is affiliated with Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and attended the symposium, said the tone of the discussion had changed from acrimony and accusation to the beginnings of civil conversation. The old corporate view, she said, was that "we have the safest, most secure voting machine - and by the way, it's a secret," Ms. Mercuri said. But that "is not going to provide the trust and confidence that we need," she said.

The symposium was at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The institute, part of the Commerce Department, plans to develop programs to test and accredit voting systems under the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002 after the bitterly contested 2000 elections. That law requires state and local officials to replace outdated voting systems, calls for minimum standards for the systems and provides federal funds to move the process along.

Companies that make electronic voting machines have scrambled to dominate the lucrative new market. They include Diebold Election Systems (a division of Diebold Inc.) Sequoia Voting Systems, Election Systems and Software, and Hart InterCivic.

The industry insists that its systems are secure and trustworthy, with or without paper. Harris Miller, who leads a new trade association for the industry, said that the group had no position in favor or against paper trails, but dismissed the issue as a "theological debate within the academic community." Mr. Miller, who is also president of the Information Technology Association of America, called some opponents of electronic voting "black helicopter theorists" and Luddites who "want to go back to the bad old days" of stuffed ballot boxes and chad wars.

But some of the critics know a lot about computing, security and elections - like Prof. Aviel D. Rubin at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that analyzed purloined code from Diebold and found flaws that he said even basic training in secure coding would prevent. His work was cited in Nevada's decision to choose Sequoia's machines over Diebold's. "The only way that vendors are going to produce auditable machines is if they are forced to,'' Professor Rubin said. "So the recent moves of California and Nevada to require voter verifiable paper are huge steps in the right direction."

A spokesman for Sequoia said that providing paper had less to do with security than with voter confidence. "I still don't believe that paper is essential," the spokesman, Alfie Charles, said. "But it's becoming more important - for perception if nothing else, and perception is critical in the voting process."

A spokesman for Diebold, David Bear, said that the company did not oppose the idea of voter receipts, and was happy to sell whatever kind of voting machine election officials wanted to buy. "We're in the business of providing products that our customers need," he said. In fact, the company's machines already have thermal printers that are used to produce end-of-day reports, so providing individual receipts would not necessarily require an enormous change.

Not all of Diebold's employees are so supportive of change, as Web sites that have sprung up in opposition to the machines have shown. Among the thousands of internal e-mail messages from the company that have made their way to anti-Diebold Web sites is a Jan. 3 message to colleagues by an employee identified only as Ken. Referring to criticisms of the Diebold, he wrote that news articles about a paper trail missed an important point, which he italicized: "they already bought the system."

"At this point they are just closing the barn door,'' Ken wrote. "Let's just hope that as a company we are smart enough to charge out the yin if they try to change the rules now and legislate voter receipts." In a later note he explained that he meant, "Any after-sale changes should be prohibitively expensive."

Mr. Bear, the spokesman for Diebold, said, "It's safe to say that an e-mail does not represent the policy of Diebold."

Professor Rubin said he was heartened by the increasing demand for a paper trail, but said it was only the first step toward ensuring that election security moved forward instead of backward. "We still don't have a process for ensuring that the people writing the code of those machines know what they are doing, or are not malicious," he said.