Electronic voting has some groups worried

OLYMPIA – When voters show up to the polls in Snohomish County these days, they don’t choose candidates by pulling old-fashioned metal levers, or scribbling in ovals, or poking out tiny squares on punch cards.

Instead, they vote by touching the screen of what looks sort of like an old-fashioned photocopy machine.

These kinds of machines are about to get a lot more common. Already, 50 million Americans are expected to use touch-screen voting in November. Under the terms of the federal Help America Vote Act, a handicapped-accessible voting device must be available for all voters by 2006.

“That probably means an electronic machine at every poll site in America,” said Nick Handy, director of elections for Washington’s secretary of state’s office. The electronic machines are much more easily adaptable for people with disabilities ranging from blindness to paralysis.

In entirely vote-by-mail counties, the law could probably be met by having just one machine at county elections headquarters, he said. Idaho doesn’t use the machines yet, although Secretary of State Ben Ysursa said the state will comply with the 2006 deadline.

“We’re in wait-and-see mode,” said Ysursa.

Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton said her office will begin looking into touch-screen voting next year.

Because of the cost – $2,000 to $2,500 per machine – it’s likely that the county will do away with its current system of polling places within most precincts and instead create 10-15 community voting centers. People would be able to vote at any one of these with real-time connection to a central system, Dalton said. That would prevent people from voting more than once.

Coming on the heels of Florida’s 2000 election mess, however, the prospect of recording votes by computer – perhaps with no paper backup – has some groups worried about errors and high-tech election fraud.

“We know that computers make mistakes,” said Linda Franz, with a Washington group called Citizens for Voting Integrity.

Critics point to incidents like California’s October 2003 recall election, when a software glitch shifted thousands of absentee votes for Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to a socialist candidate, according to the legislative news service stateline.org. The error was caught only when election officials compared the electronic count to the paper ballots.

Several groups of computer scientists have also demonstrated how to hack into election computers or voting machines. This week, a group called black box voting staged a demonstration at which five individuals, ranging from a computer expert to a trained chimp named Baxter, hacked into popular election equipment.

Franz and others want lawmakers to require that voting machines produce a “voter-verifiable” paper record of every vote. One of the most widely used is the Sequoia machine, which prints out and shows each voter a record of how they voted. That way, if there’s any doubt about the machine’s counting, elections officials can check the results against that paper record. Under federal law, the paper scrolls must be kept for 22 months. Voters don’t get a receipt showing how they voted, however, because that would make it easy to sell your vote to the highest bidder.

According to stateline.org, four states – Oregon, Illinois, Nevada and New Hampshire – have banned paperless electronic voting machines.

This month, Nevada became the first to run a statewide election with a system with paper backup. Many state and federal election officials, including some from Washington and Idaho, went to Nevada to see how the system performed. Despite some minor glitches, they said, the election went well.

“It’s very, very popular,” said Handy, describing how Las Vegas elections officials set up the voting machines in casinos, grocery stores and malls.

Some election officials have been reluctant to add printers to the machines, saying that they’re expensive and can break, causing problems on Election Day.

In Washington, Snohomish and Yakima counties both use touch-screen voting machines at poll sites. But neither county has the system set up to produce a voter-verified paper ballot. At a hearing in Olympia Tuesday, Snohomish County Auditor Bob Terwilliger urged lawmakers not to require paper forms.

“There might be other solutions that are even more elegant” and demonstrate the same certainty for voters, he said.

Some Washington lawmakers balked at that.

State Sen. Pam Roach, R-Auburn, said she was reluctant about “trusting cyber-anything to something that’s as important as the franchise (of voting).”

“The paper trail is about as low-tech as you can get, but it’s something concrete and tangible,” said Sen. Jim Kastama, D-Puyallup. “It’s such a sensitive issue, that I think right now the public wants a paper trail.”

Critics of electronic voting are also unhappy that Secretary of State Sam Reed approved an emergency change to the federally certified software used in the optical-scanning ballot counters used in six Washington counties, including the state’s three most populous: King, Pierce and Snohomish. The reprogramming was required for Washington’s Sept. 14 primary, to allow voters to pick a party. Elections officials say it’s too late now to change back in time for the Nov. 2 general election, though the pick-a-party feature will be disabled.

“We tested it exhaustively,” said Handy.

Critics like John Gideon, an electronic voting watchdog, are uneasy about the modified vote-counting software.

“That is setting the state of Washington up for lawsuits” by losing candidates, he predicts.

Changing software even a little can cause unintended changes in how a program works, said Ellen Theisen, another critic of purely electronic voting.

“It’s like sprinkling pepper into a stew and saying it’s just in one place,” she said.