GUEST COLUMN
Electronic voting can and will be fine-tuned

By BILL BOZARTH

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently wrote about concerns being raised nationally regarding the security of electronic voting systems. Because Georgia is ahead of all other states in this area, he casts doubt on our experience.

My organization, Common Cause Georgia, has invested a great deal of effort in trying to determine if there is any credible evidence that the 2002 Georgia election was corrupted. We find absolutely no reason to question the integrity of the Georgia voting process now in use. It's not perfect, and tightening the process must be an ongoing priority.

We are satisfied that the Georgia election officials are on top of this issue. All of the top recommendations made by Science Applications International Corp. to the state of Maryland will be incorporated into Georgia's equipment and revalidated by the 2004 election.

We need to keep in mind that our investment in electronic voting reduces the error rate (estimated at about 9 percent in Georgia's 2000 election) to nearly zero. That's a tremendous step forward. In addition, this technology has clear advantages in delivering a better system to handicapped voters and second-language voters. We don't need to be looking at ways of going backward.

I respect the concerns that electronic voting must be implemented without putting us at risk of having our elections stolen. I would be the first to raise the flag if I felt that were the case. So far, no one has shown me a credible scenario where that is likely to take place in Georgia.

When Diebold Chief Executive Officer Wally O'Dell says he will do everything he can to deliver votes to President Bush, it shows he's terribly naive about public relations, but it doesn't mean he has the wherewithal to engineer the rigging of an election using his company's voting systems.

There are just too many safeguards for something like this to happen.

Rather than spending our energies on heading off conspiracies, I suggest a concentrated effort to continue to improve the process we have and make our investment work. I encourage Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox to listen to the critics and provide a continuing report to the people as to how we are working to answer legitimate concerns about security and further tightening the process around our electronic voting systems.

Bill Bozarth is executive director of Common Cause Georgia.