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West Virginia has been a crucial state in presidential elections. This state set John Kennedy on the path to the presidency, and we all know that George W. Bush would not be president without West Virginia. What part will the Mountain State play in 2004?
In response to “Florida 2000,” Congress passed the Help America Vote Act and appropriated almost $4 billion so states could acquire voting equipment to ensure an accessible, honest, reliable vote in 2004 and thereafter. For the most part, states are going for Direct Recording Electronic voting machines, also known as touch-screen computerized voting machines.
The technology has pizazz. It is certainly no surprise that salespeople push DREs, since they cost about 10 times as much as the next most expensive machine, the optical scanner (although this doesn’t include the cost of ballots for the latter).
But many computer experts, such as groups from Johns Hopkins, MIT, Cal Tech, Rice University and Stanford and other independent gurus, are shouting loudly (it’s all over the Internet) that DREs have big problems.
To paraphrase and summarize their concerns: When a vote is cast on a DRE, there is no way of knowing whether what you see and touch on the screen is at all related to what is happening inside. Experts have shown that it is possible to touch the screen to choose the Democrat and have the Republican candidate get the vote (or vice versa), and the voter will never know.
Software makes it possible, and the way the machines are checked now, your election officials would not know, either. Electrons don’t leave tracks. All votes are counted in secret because they are counted in “the black box.” The votes are scrambled randomly in the machine. A total is produced in the end, but there is no way to check it, not ever. A meaningful recount is impossible. So the touch-screen machines are unverifiable.
Furthermore, they have secretly programmed software, not open to scrutiny by election officials or by computer experts. According to Andrew Gumbel, writing in Britain’s Independent, it is “under a strict trade secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal — on pain of stiff criminal penalties — for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly.”
Although this is a nonpartisan issue, as every party has been suspected of fraud in the past, it isn’t reassuring that owners of the three major companies (Diebold, ESS and Sequoia) are staunch Republicans. Walden O’Dell of Diebold has bundled large contributions for President Bush. He wrote in a campaign letter saying he is “committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president [Bush] next year.” Surely he meant legally, but how does it make you feel when you know that Ohio is making a large purchase of Diebold machines? An analogy about foxes and henhouses might come to mind.
People want to trust technology, but relying on trust is not a good election systems strategy. Every system is open to tampering, and if a system can be tampered with, it will be. But in the past it had to be done machine by machine or ballot by ballot. Now the software can be erroneous or rigged or hacked systemwide.
Depending on the setup, voting machines can even be entered by remote control. In case you think this is all theoretical, there have been questions about the outcomes of DRE elections in 1996 in Nebraska, and in 2002 in Georgia, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, New Hampshire, Florida and Alabama and at three separate locations in Texas. In each case, there were very unusual voting patterns or statistically highly unlikely outcomes, such as three absolutely identical vote totals. Were they quirks or fraud? Were there other problems that weren’t as obvious? We will never know because the votes could not be recounted.
Fortunately, there are solutions. Optical scanners are computers that read paper ballots. The ballots can be read by two different scanner models to cross-check each other. When questions arise, there is a paper trail to examine. Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, a computer security expert, has suggested that every DRE be required to have a voter-verified paper ballot, saved in a secure ballot box, and counted openly in public as the law requires. A secret count is illegal (which one would think would apply to the black-box DREs as well).
Canada used paper, and counted all the ballots in its last election in four hours. It is far and away the least expensive method, even counting the cost of printing ballots. Oregon has opted for a mail-in paper ballot. Wisconsin is using optical scan machines and will definitely not get DREs. In November, California’s secretary of state issued a directive requiring that all DREs have a voter-verifiable paper audit trail because voter confidence in the election outcome is considered paramount.
Fortunately, in West Virginia, our secretary of state has committed to not purchasing new voting equipment until he can be sure it is tamper-proof and provides the opportunity for a meaningful recount. Many West Virginia counties already use optical scanners. Only Cabell County now uses touch-screen voting machines for all elections.
Interestingly, the HAVA law requires a voter-verifiable permanent paper record that is available for manual audit. Mysteriously, this has been loosely interpreted to require only a printed total at the end of the vote.
Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey (who, by the way, has a Ph.D. in physics) is sponsoring the Voter Confidence and Increased Accountability Act of 2003, HR 2239, to require that any computerized voting machine have voter-verified ballots, a code that may be copyright protected but is not secret (which computer experts and election officials can therefore examine), and that it not be accessible to any outside contact or manipulation by modem or any other means. The bill now has over 80 sponsors, but deserves still more support in the House of Representatives and a companion bill in the Senate.
One of the motivations leading to the drive to touch-screen voting is the desire to have as many of the handicapped as possible vote without assistance. It’s hard to argue with that, but we agree with the secretary of state of California that this can be done without sacrificing the integrity of the entire election.
We feel it is absolutely essential that we all have confidence in the outcome of next year’s election. None of us wants to see the chaos that would result otherwise. We encourage all readers to support Secretary of State Joe Manchin in his commitment. Make his day and call his office. Learn about the issue at various Web sites including verifiedvot
ing.org, blackboxvoting.org, no
tablesoftware.com or wheres
thepaper.org, to name a few.
It is also important that we make our voices heard nationally, since we all live under a national Congress and president. Urge our representatives to support HR 2239 and our senators to propose and support a companion bill.
Let’s have West Virginia be a leader in real election reform. Our democracy depends on it.
Dr. Haning, a Charleston anesthesiologist, is a member of West Virginia Citizens for HAVA, a committee formed by public-interest groups.
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