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From the Los Angeles Times
THE STATE
Questions about the reliability of electronic ballots
combine with changing regulations to fuel confusion and debate over technology.
By Noam N. Levey
Times Staff Writer
January 3, 2006
Five years after the vote-counting debacle in Florida
suspended the election of a new U.S. president, California and other states are
embroiled in a contentious debate over how voters should cast their ballots.
The maligned punch cards that snarled the 2000 count are all
but gone. But with electronic machines under attack as unreliable and
vulnerable to hackers, there is little consensus about what the new technology
should look like.
That has left many counties nationwide in turmoil as they
struggle with unproven technology while state regulations remain in flux and
the federal government offers minimal guidance.
In some places, voters are facing their third balloting
system in five years.
In California, counties have lurched from one voting system
to another as the state has written and rewritten standards. Several counties
are scrambling to redo their June election plans after the state's top
elections official raised new questions last month about an electronic voting
machine in use for years.
Miami officials talk of scrapping their 3-year-old
electronic machines, while Mercer County, Pa., officials want to keep theirs
but were ordered by state authorities to take them out of service after
glitches during the 2004 presidential election.
"It pretty much left the county up a tree," said
Tom Rookey, elections chief of the Steel Belt county on the Ohio border.
In Connecticut, the secretary of state is tussling with the
federal government over how quickly the state must replace its decades-old
lever-style voting machines with electronic machines.
Indiana's largest county has sued the company that sold it
electronic voting machines. Across the border in Ohio, the same company has
sued the state.
"It's been crazy," said San Diego County Registrar
of Voters Mikel Haas, who said he is returning to paper ballots because the
state refused to recertify more than 10,000 electronic machines the county
bought two years ago. "Everyone is in uncharted territory here."
The arcane world of voting technology and ballot counting
once drew little attention from anyone other than elections officials.
But 2000 changed everything.
"Everyone looked at what was coming out of Florida —
scenes of judges squinting to look at ballots — and agreed there had to be a
better way to do this," said Doug Chapin, head of the nonpartisan Election
Reform Information Project. "There was a real push toward computerized
paperless machines to get away from these chads."
Congress in 2002 passed the Help America Vote Act, pledging
nearly $4 billion to help states upgrade their voting systems. The same year,
California passed its own $200-million bond for the same purpose.
The flood of money fueled a nationwide spending spree on
high-tech machines that were expected to revolutionize vote counting.
But the machines often have not proved as reliable as hoped.
And while states and counties rushed to buy them, elections
officials struggled to regulate how machines should record votes and safeguard
results.
Although the Help America Vote Act set up a federal
commission to assist the states, the Election Assistance Commission did not
come into existence until 2004, more than a year late. And only in December did
it release voluntary voting-machine guidelines.
"In voting technology, the pace of innovation was
outpacing the regulation," Chapin said.
The result has sometimes been chaotic.
In Orange County, thousands of voters got the wrong ballots
when they tried to use the county's electronic machines in March 2004.
In coastal Carteret County, N.C., more than 4,400 electronic
votes were lost in the November 2004 election, throwing at least one close
statewide race into uncertainty for more than two months.
And in Dade County, Fla., home to Miami and a central
battleground in the disputed 2000 presidential election, the elections chief
resigned earlier this year amid revelations that a coding glitch in the
county's 3-year-old electronic voting system had resulted in hundreds of lost
votes in six elections.
The new elections chief, Lester Sola, is talking about
replacing the $24.5-million system with paper ballots that can be counted by an
optical scanner.
"I think the state may have overreacted," Sola
said, explaining that the pressure to replace punch cards caused many elections
officials to turn to untested systems. "That created a really difficult
situation not only for Miami-Dade but for other Florida counties as well."
Many jurisdictions, to be sure, have seen improvements. And
although there were scattered problems in the 2004 presidential election, there
were no vote-counting crises on the scale of Florida's 2000 fiasco.
Georgia, which spent $54 million in 2002 to switch to a
single electronic voting system, has dramatically reduced the number of so-called
lost votes, according to a recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
But the problems that hit other states came as something of
a surprise, said Michael Alvarez, co-director of the Caltech-MIT Voting
Technology Project, which was created by the two universities after the 2000
elections. "Most of us had hoped the new electronic voting machines would
be superior," he said.
Adding to the difficulties was the unexpected emergence of
security as a central issue in the modernization debate.
Soon after 2000, a cadre of activists and computer
scientists began raising alarms that electronic systems could be breached by
hackers who could change election results with just a few keystrokes.
Critics focused much attention and suspicion on Ohio-based
Diebold, the industry leader, whose chief executive had written in a
fundraising letter that he was committed to helping President Bush carry Ohio
in 2004.
Many elections officials and manufacturers initially
dismissed the activists, arguing that the new systems were more reliable and
tamper-proof.
"There was a level of trust with vendors, who said,
'Don't worry; it's a computer,' " said Pam Smith, nationwide coordinator
for the Verified Voting Foundation, one of several advocacy groups.
"It would have been good for people to recognize that
these were computers. And as such, they were subject to all the glitches and
errors and vulnerabilities,"
To date, there has been no verified tampering with an
electronic voting system during an election. But the controversy has had an
effect.
Two years ago, California's then-secretary of state,
Democrat Kevin Shelley, announced that electronic voting machines would be
required to produce a paper record of each vote. Today, more than half the
states require such records, according to Verified Voting.
Officials have also begun putting new demands on
manufacturers to prove that their systems cannot be compromised.
Last month, Shelley's successor, Republican Bruce McPherson,
ordered more testing on a popular Diebold machine used by several of
California's largest counties.
In Leon County, Fla., home to the state capital of
Tallahassee, elections supervisor Ion Sancho announced in mid-December he was
scrapping a Diebold system after he said computer experts had successfully
hacked into it.
Even Georgia, considered a model of successful reform, is
seeing a spirited debate over the security of its Diebold machines.
Diebold has fiercely defended its systems. "Whenever
you change technology, there will always be select individuals who will be
resistant," said Mark Radke, a Diebold marketing director. "When ATMs
were introduced, people were saying, 'I don't want to get my money out of that
box.' Now, hardly anyone walks into a bank."
But the new requirements have added to the disarray.
California's Orange County is retrofitting its voting
machines with printers, a task that Neal Kelley, acting registrar of voters,
said will require the county to cut open thousands of machines. Voters there
will use paper ballots for an April special election to fill a state Senate
seat.
Other California counties have pulled electronic systems out
of service while the state reevaluates whether the machines are vulnerable to
hacking.
That has jeopardized plans by several counties to use the
machines in the state's June 6 primary election.
"The frustration level is very, very high," said
Elaine Ginnold, acting registrar of voters in Alameda County, whose plans to
purchase a new voting system have been thrown into disarray.
Many California counties, including Los Angeles, are in open
revolt against the secretary of state's office, which they charge is
arbitrarily setting and resetting standards to appease a few outspoken
activists.
"This all started with paranoia over technology, even
though we trust it in our banking and we trust it to fly airplanes," said
Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack, one of the nation's
leading local elections officials. "This is about change management, and
people are not managing."
Los Angeles County uses some Diebold touch-screen machines
for early voting but decided three years ago to defer spending $100 million on
a new electronic system until the technology became more reliable and
regulations stabilized. The county turned to the InkaVote system — paper
ballots marked with an ink stamp and then optically scanned — to replace the
punch cards used since the late 1960s.
Caren Daniels-Meade, chief of elections in the secretary of
state's office, acknowledged that the last several years have been trying. But
she said the state has to ensure that voting systems are as secure as possible.
"It's frustrating for us too," Daniels-Meade said,
noting that the lack of guidance from the federal government has contributed to
the confusion.
Daniels-Meade said she hoped that 2006 would bring more
stability.
But McCormack, though sanguine about the long term, said no
one should expect the debate to quiet down soon.
"Possibly by 2010," she predicted, "we will
be through this decade of turmoil."
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Election reform
Since 2000, election officials nationwide have labored to
impose new regulations on electronic voting even as the systems have become
more popular.
2000
Dec. 12: Ruling on Bush vs. Gore, a divided U.S. Supreme
Court stops six weeks of ballot counting in Florida and effectively hands
victory in the presidential election to George W. Bush.
2001
Sept. 18: Then-California Secretary of State Bill Jones
orders California counties to scrap punch-card systems by 2006.
2002
Feb. 13: A federal judge in California rules the state must
replace punch-card voting systems by the 2004 presidential election.
March 5: California voters approve Proposition 41, a
$200-million bond measure to help counties modernize voting systems.
Oct. 29: Bush signs the Help America Vote Act, which promises
nearly $4 billion to states to help them modernize voting systems.
2003
Nov. 21: California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley
announces that by 2006 all electronic voting machines must produce a paper
record for voters
2004
Nov. 2: In the presidential election, an estimated 29% of
voters have access to electronic voting machines, up from 13% in 2000.
Source: Times reporting and Election Data Services
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times