Foes of computer voting are getting heard

John Schwartz NYT Thursday, December 18, 2003

GAITHERSBURG, Maryland 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 week, 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 had not been written to standards that would 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.

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. 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 had 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," 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. "What's required for money machines should be required for voting machines," Clinton said.

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," 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 presidential election.

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 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." Miller 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 Aviel Rubin at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that analyzed purloined code from Diebold, said they had found flaws that 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," Rubin said.

The New York Times 

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