Paper trail stirs debate over voting machines

12/22/03

Julie Carr Smyth
Plain Dealer Bureau

Columbus - It seems simple enough: Gas pumps print receipts, so why can't voting machines?

But the debate over whether the electronic voting machines sweeping America should allow voters to see a printout of their ballot before it is cast is nearly anything but simple.

It is dividing computer programmers, scholars and elections officials, rattling civil rights activists, and alarming advocates for the blind and the illiterate. It is angering some machine makers, few of whom have such a system for sale, and perplexing politicians.

All over a little slip of paper.

In the national debate, the receipts go by a fancy name: the voter-verified audit trail. What that means, in English, is that a voter gets to lay eyes on a printout of his or her vote before leaving the polling place - and to leave behind a piece of paper in a locked ballot box that could be physically counted if results are in dispute.

To David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University, requiring such receipts is the key to the future of fair elections in the electronic age. Computers are convenient, he says, but not failproof.

"Since there is no way to make sure that the computers are honest, or that they're error-free, we can't be trusting any computer count that can't be independently verified," said Dill, one of the leading voices for the mandated paper trail.

At the heart of the debate is mistrust across the country of converting to a fully electronic elections system. The uneasiness has been magnified by a stream of recent studies - including a security review conducted in Ohio - indicating that computer voting machines are not yet secure from fraud and tampering.

The replacement of punch-card and lever voting machines was laid out under the Help America Vote Act that followed the disputed Bush-Gore presidential contest of 2000. The idea is to help underwrite a nationwide upgrade that would eliminate the problems of dangling and hanging chads that that election brought to light.

But U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Toledo, said many of her constituents are skeptical. One voter waved a finger in the congresswoman's face after using one of Lucas County's new electronic machines and demanded: "Where is my vote in there?"

"In there" is inside the so-called black box where computer source code converts voter choices entered on a touch-screen into cash register-style ticker tapes of each ballot cast. A Web site with which Dill is affiliated, www.verifiedvoting.org, offers visitors a chance to cast votes on-screen, and runs two scenarios of code - one where votes are totaled accurately, and one where they're falsified - to illustrate the problem.

Kaptur and state Sen. Teresa Fedor, another Democrat from Toledo, are so concerned that they are backing a bill to mandate the verified paper trail in Ohio. The issue has become a particular concern to Democrats in the wake of reports that the chief executive of one of the machine companies, Walden O'Dell of Diebold, is active in the re-election efforts of President Bush, a Republican. Some have even suggested that Republican candidates have won under mysterious circumstances in states where Diebold machines are in operation; those allegations have been denied both by the company and by elections officials.

Many people, including Dill and Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, believe optical-scan machines - which resemble a sort of big dollar-changer for a paper ballot card - may be a good compromise. They feature automated counting, but allow the voter to fill out a ballot card by hand and then it into the machine personally.

Yet, Lloyd Leonard, national advocacy director for the League of Women Voters, said any kind of paper system might be riddled with risks.

He said Dill and other computer scientists critical of electronic technology may be "experts who know too much" - and who are unaware of the relative risks of all voting systems.

Leonard called paper receipts "just a bad idea" that would cause chaos at polling places and disenfranchise those with visual or language barriers, such as illiteracy or being non-English speaking. Barbara Pierce, president of the Federation of the Blind of Ohio, said the blind had been promised they would at last be able to vote without help on electronic machines, an advance that could be undermined by paper-receipt requirements.

Leonard said, "If there is a moral to the Florida story from 2000, it's that paper ballots are insecure and unreliable. So it seems strange to us to want to enshrine a paper ballot system."

Blackwell has not taken a position on paper receipts, said spokesman Carlo LoParo, but the secretary has assured that machines certi fied for sale in the state comply with the sort of paper back-up required by the Help America Vote Act. The act requires that a paper back-up of each ballot cast be printed after the polls have closed.

LoParo said no machine certified for use here - manufactured by Diebold, Sequoia, Hart InterCivic and Election Systems & Software - is equipped to produce a paper receipt for each voter. Each company has said it could install such a system but it would add up to 25 percent to the cost of each machine, he said.

Blackwell has said he negotiated some of the best prices in the nation on electronic voting machines - just under $3,000 apiece. He has put deployment of the machines on hold while security issues discovered during a statewide review are addressed.

As evidence of how perturbed the debate has made the machine makers, one need only look at an internal e-mail by a Diebold employee named "Ken" that was widely circulated on the Internet and in print. He 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."

Terry Casey, a former chairman of Ohio's Board of Voting Machine Examiners and a Republican elections consultant, blamed much of the current debate on irrational paranoia over computers.

"When you go to the gas pump, are you really getting a gallon? Is your electric meter logging a real kilowatt hour? They could be listening to our phone conversations, too," he said. "Could it happen? Yes. But how realistic is it? And at what cost do you solve every theoretical problem?"

Casey said voters could put the receipt from an electronic machine in their pocket, for example, rather than in the ballot box. They could do this deviously: to prove how they voted to an employer, a violent spouse, a labor union, or to sell their vote. Or they could do so mistakenly, negating their electronic vote in the event of a recount.

"I've seen lots of elections on lots of machines," Casey said. "On one hand, nothing's perfectly perfect. But you kind of have to have the best technology available, and good, well-intentioned people running things, and you're going to find things are as near perfect as you can humanly get it."

Dill, the computer science professor at Stanford, said paper receipts could be left under glass, so that voters could see them but not take them out. He advocates the paper ballots taking precedence over digital vote counts in any recount - something many critics say would negate the value brought by computerizing voting in the first place.

LoParo said Blackwell is "listening to the debate" but that Ohio's certification process has guaranteed that every machine sold here will count votes 100 percent accurately.

Dill said such a promise is impossible. "Your secretary of state must not have a degree in computer science," he said. "There is a phrase well known in the software testing world: Software testing can show the presence of bugs but not their absence.' Computers freeze, they lose votes occasionally. There are an astronomical number of things that can go wrong."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

jsmyth@plaind.com, 1-800-228-8272