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U.S. ELECTION: Unease Over E-Voting
By Katherine Stapp
NEW YORK, Nov 16, 2004 (IPS) - For its boosters - technology vendors and the
election officials who spent millions on their wares - electronic voting
(e-voting) passed the test of Nov. 2 with flying colours, withstanding
unprecedented scrutiny and making life easier for millions of disabled and
non-English-speaking U.S. voters.
To detractors - mostly computer security experts and voter protection
groups - it is only a matter of time before paperless elections invite
wide-scale fraud.
And politicians are starting to listen. Some states have already passed
laws banning systems without voter-verified paper ballots, and there is
support among both opposition Democrats and President George W Bush's
Republican Party for similar federal legislation.
While most of the 175,000 machines appeared to operate normally, the
balloting was far from flawless. Computers in North Carolina failed to log
some 4,500 votes, others in Florida inexplicably started counting backward,
and voters in several states complained that when they tried to cast a
ballot for challenger Senator John Kerry, it was recorded as a vote for Bush.
In Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes proved decisive to Bush's victory, a
county with only 800 registered voters ended up with 3,893 votes for the
incumbent, an error too glaring to be missed. The over count was eventually
traced to a faulty memory cartridge.
"Unless something currently unknown emerges about the election, we narrowly
escaped disaster," said David Dill of Stanford University, a leading critic
of paperless voting systems. "Machines broke all over the country,
contributing to long lines, and weird behaviour was reported by voters all
over the country."
"There is no independent check on e-voting machines," he added in an
interview. "If this many obvious problems are showing up on election day,
how many votes are being silently lost or changed?"
His question looms large because 40 million people relied on a computer to
record and tabulate their ballots this year, thanks to a 3.9-billion-dollar
federal initiative, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), to permit states to
upgrade their machinery after the hotly-contested - some people say
"stolen" - election of 2000, finally decided in Bush's favour by the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Some e-voting critics have focussed on the close links between machine
makers and the Republican Party, such as Diebold Inc CEO Wally O'Dell, who
said in 2003 he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes
to the president next year."
The absence of a paper trail in many precincts this year fuelled
speculation, first on the Internet and later in the mainstream press, that
the Bush camp had "hacked the vote."
While these claims mostly appear to be unfounded, the problem that keeps
computer security experts up at night is that because of software loopholes
in nearly every commercial e-voting system, such manipulation could easily
be undetectable.
"In my view, the lesson is that voters are not confident in the accuracy
and reliability of computerised elections, both in terms of voting systems
and tabulating systems, and that this lack of confidence is well-founded in
real problems, observed in real elections," said Dan Wallach, a computer
security expert at Rice University in Texas.
"I expect a serious backlash against paperless electronic voting systems,"
he predicted in an interview.
The states of California and Nevada already have laws requiring voter
verified ballots - Nevada did it in time for this election - and at least
20 others are considering similar moves. Bills on voter verified ballots
were introduced this year in the federal House of Representatives and
Senate, but bogged down in committee.
Pamela Smith of the Verified Voting Foundation, which has compiled a list
of more than 33,000 election "incidents," noted that while HAVA was
intended to make voting more convenient, many of the new electronic systems
had the opposite effect.
"If a voter is unfamiliar or has problems with the equipment - which
happened extensively in this election - they must spend significantly
longer at the voting booth than they would with a lower-tech method such as
marking a paper ballot," she said.
One solution is to use an optical scanner, a simpler system that marks but
does not tabulate ballots. If the machines break down, Smith told IPS,
ballots can still be marked to be scanned later, which is not the case for
e-voting.
For states that have already invested in paperless systems, adding printers
is the next best thing, she suggested, and should not be an insurmountable
expense. Congress still has about three billion dollars in HAVA funds to
allocate.
"Vendors are competitive on this issue," Smith said. "Any election official
should let their vendor know that if they want to continue doing business
in the jurisdiction, they should provide verifiability at a reasonable cost."
Other experts say the voting went surprisingly smoothly, and believe the
majority of glitches had little to do with the actual machines.
"The problem on election day turned out to be similar to 2000," said Ted
Selker, director of the Caltech/Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Voting Project, "registering and problems of polling place check-in being
major issues."
"We expected much worse than what we had," he told IPS. "I presume that
there were a few more problems from careless set-up or shutdown procedures
- certainly watching for any error message would have saved 4,500 votes
(in North Carolina)."
Doug Jones, a computer scientist at the University of Iowa and member of
the National Committee for Voting Integrity, said he was concerned about
reports that some observers, including those sent by the Organisation for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had trouble gaining access to
polling places.
And independent monitors who did watch the count may not have been trained
in how the e-voting software works. "There are some counties where there
are reports that nobody was allowed to observe the vote tabulation - one
in Ohio - and even if you can observe the tabulation, in many counties
using computer systems, all you see is the backs of technicians hunched
over computer displays," said Jones.
"What can you tell about what is really going on when you can't see the
screen itself and you have no idea what the commands to the system mean?"
he asked.
Officials say it too early too tell which incidents are technical errors
that require further action, and which were caused by fraud, human error or
uncertified systems.
"One highly referenced source I have seen quoted as documenting hundreds of
problems with the voting actually only has a few incidents but lists dozens
of news articles across the country reporting the same few incidents," said
Steve Freeman of the National Association of State Election Directors in
Washington, DC, which selects the independent testers for electronic voting
machines.
"The impression is the problem is widespread but, in the scope of the
election across the country, the number of distinct incidents may be
actually small and consistent with simple operational errors and individual
machine failures, which need to be corrected locally."
Freeman told IPS the systems are still being perfected, and the newest
versions are more reliable and voter-friendly.
(END)
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