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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Electronic voting a hard sell


A record number of absentee ballots are sorted at the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections office Friday.  More than 20,000 absentee ballots have been sent in for Tuesday's primary. 
 (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Rachel La Corte Associated Press

MIAMI — Cheryl Roberts was impressed with Florida’s new voting machines in the 2002 primary, when she cast an electronic ballot for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill McBride.

But a series of computer glitches — including startling cases of corrupted or missing data — has undermined her faith. So for Tuesday’s primary in Florida, Roberts is turning to an absentee ballot so Broward County has a paper record of her vote.

“Everyone is psychologically wary of elections this year,” said Roberts, a field coordinator for the American Civil Liberties of South Florida. “My biggest concern is whether or not voters’ intentions will be counted by elections departments.”

Whether paperless touch screen voting terminals will accurately record people’s votes — and whether those votes could be recounted in a close election — are open questions in Florida, epicenter of the 2000 presidential election fiasco. Polls in the crucial swing state show a dead heat between President Bush and Democrat John Kerry.

On Tuesday, voters in 15 of Florida’s 67 counties will cast ballots on touch screen computers that do not produce paper records of every ballot. Voters in those counties make up more than half of the state’s registered voters.

Voter advocates promise to scrutinize election results to see if tallies match exit polls, threatening to sue over suspicious results. Computer programmers say touch screens, which as many as 50 million Americans are eligible to use in the November election, are vulnerable to software glitches, hackers, power outages and other problems.

“I’m very worried that if the election is very, very close, the outcome will not be believed by a lot of people,” said Avi Rubin, professor of computer science and technical director of the Information Security Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

More than 100,000 touch screens have been installed nationwide, particularly in California, Maryland, Georgia, and battleground states of Florida, New Mexico and Nevada.

Gov. Jeb Bush and his top elections official, Secretary of State Glenda Hood, say touch screens are secure and recountable. Big manufacturers such as Diebold Inc. and Election Systems & Software Inc. say touch screens minimize errors such as overvoting, when the accidental selection of two candidates disqualifies a ballot.

But shocking problems have undercut attempts to promote touch screens. A study by the American Civil Liberties Union after the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2002 concluded that 8 percent of the votes on Miami-Dade County’s touch screen machines in 31 precincts were lost.

Audit logs of ES&S machines deployed in 11 Florida counties were corrupted by a software flaw caused by low batteries. ES&S and state officials issued a software patch this summer and said the mishap wouldn’t affect elections.

“We’re putting all our faith in these machines to work,” said Ben Wilcox, executive director of Common Cause Florida, a Tallahassee-based government watchdog group.