Teresa Hommel
www.wheresthepaper.org
Statement Against the Use of Money
Allocated under the Help America Vote Act
for the Purchase of Electronic Voting
Systems for New York
Before the Governmental Operations
Committee
of the New York City Council
October 18, 2004
Thank you
for the opportunity to speak before you today. My name is Teresa Hommel. I have
been working as a citizen activist on the issue of electronic voting for the
last 16 months. My professional credentials are that I have worked with
computers since 1967 as a programmer, technical writer, corporate trainer, and
consultant.
I am here
today to caution New York City against urging our state to move forward with
the purchase and use of electronic voting systems.
There are
two alternative approaches: One is for New York State to keep our old lever
machines, and add one accessible ballot-marking device per polling place. The
other is to switch to paper ballots and precinct-count optical scanners, with
one accessible ballot-marking device per polling place.
What’s wrong
with electronic voting systems?
(1) They
don't work reliably.
Attached to
my testimony is a packet of materials. The first item is 63-page list of
failures of electronic voting systems. Only six vendors are represented.
There are 13 pages for Sequoia, and I put these pages first because many people
think Sequoia will be the vendor selected in New York, if we go to electronic
voting.
For every
failure on this list, I would assume that there were many others that went
undetected -- errors that you need an audit to find: votes recorded
incorrectly, and wrong final tallies. Since no electronic voting system has
ever been audited, we can't know how many errors of that kind have been made.
(2) Federal
certification does NOT mean that a voting system works. "It has to have [certain] functions.
But it doesn’t have to work."
The second
item in your packet is the I-Team
interview with MicroVote Executives. MicroVote makes electronic voting
systems. This quote comes from page 2, the candid remarks about certification
made by Bill Carson.
We’ve had
hundreds of failures of certified voting systems in this country, but some
people need to read an interview like this to bring it home – certification
does not mean the systems work.
(3) Even if electronic
voting systems worked perfectly today, they may not work tomorrow because they
are so easy to hack.
A person
with moderate computer skills can read information that has been on the
internet for over a year, and then hack these systems to give falsified
election results. The hack takes less than a minute. You don't need direct
physical access, because it can be done over a phone line and modem, a wireless
communication device in the voting system, or over the internet.
Last month
in Washington D.C., Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org held a press conference
where she demonstrated how to change the votes
in a Diebold GEMS central tabulator and in a Sequoia system. She was dismissed
by the major media, but in fact the "Trusted Agent Report"
commissioned by the Maryland General Assembly said the same thing last January
about the Diebold GEMS central tabulator (they used more technical language,
and didn’t publicize the exact methods like Bev Harris did).
"Given
either physical or remote access ... it is possible to modify the GEMS database
... without detection. Furthermore, system auditing is not configured to detect
access to the database."
(4) The security
of these systems cannot be monitored or enforced by the people responsible for
them.
The vast
majority of elections professionals are not computer experts. Once they convert
to electronic voting, they become dependent on vendor technicians to handle the
computers. And they can’t monitor what's going on because they don't know the
technology.
For example:
A technician walks over to the computer and says, "I better check the
files." Who's going to question that? Or understand the answer if they do
ask? Yet that brief access to the computer is a large-enough window of
opportunity for someone to falsify an election.
(5)
Computers conceal the process of ballot recording and vote counting, which is
contrary to democracy.
The
2500-year history of elections tells us that whenever some part of an election
procedure is concealed from public view, errors and fraud will occur.
Electronic voting systems convert the heart of our elections to an invisible
process, and we shouldn't do that.
(6)
Computers give you speed. Audits give you accuracy.
In Albany we
had two one-house bills on voting system standards that passed in February,
2004. Both bills required a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). One bill
required a 2% surprise random recount, the other required 3%.
The VVPAT is
essential with electronic voting, but it’s only the first of two requirements.
To detect all errors and fraud, we have to use the VVPAT to perform a complete
audit on every election.
If a
surprise random check of a small percentage of transactions could ensure the
accuracy of a computer system, no bank or other company would ever spend the
time and money to perform a complete audit. Companies do complete audits of
their computer systems on a continuous basis, because that’s the only way to
find and correct errors which, if your customers see them, you'll lose your
customers.
An audit
performed by counting the voter-verified paper ballots in public would restore
public oversight. If the tallies of paper ballots and electronic ballots
differ, however, this requires an investigation into the conduct of the
election (to determine whether there were irregularities by people) AND a
computer audit (to determine whether the computer made an error).
Does any
Board of Elections have the staff, expertise, or resources to perform a
computer audit? One obstacle is that a computer audit requires thorough
knowledge of the software used, and to my knowledge, all major vendors claim
that their software must remain a trade secret.
At any rate,
a complete audit of an election run with electronic voting systems would be far
more complex, costly, and time-consuming than the effort required to securely
guard paper ballots that were marked by hand, and to recount them before an
audience of observers.
(7) The Help
America Vote Act requires voters with disabilities to have a "private and
independent vote."
This
requirement should mean more than a private and independent experience in a
voting booth, fiddling with a touchscreen or some assistive devices.
But in fact,
electronic voting systems don’t give anybody a private and independent VOTE.
Every vote
cast is handed over to a large number of anonymous technical people who have
been responsible for the system from its initial design, programming, testing,
maintenance, storage, programming for the ballot, transportation, and
installation in the polling site. And another cast of characters after the
election.
A computer
is only an instrument created and managed by people. Every voter using the computer is being assisted by these people,
so the vote is not unassisted, private or independent. Without the complete
audit I discussed before, we can’t know if these assistants are recording our
ballot choices, or counting our votes, honestly and without mistakes.
Voters who
are blind, or have visual impairments, would get accessibility, privacy, and
security if they mark paper ballots by using ballot templates like they have in
Rhode Island and in other countries. There are data-to-voice scanners that can
read the paper ballot back to the voter through headphones. There are
accessible ballot-printing and ballot-marking machines, such as Populex or Automark, that
can assist voters with a wide variety of disabilities.
(8)
Elections are not about "my vote," they are about the will of the
people.
In states
with electronic voting, some people have suggested that if any voter doesn't
want to cast his or her vote on a computer, they should request a paper
absentee ballot. But elections are not just about "my vote," they are
about the will of the people--all votes. If computers are the wrong technology
for elections, as I believe they are, they are wrong for all voters.
(9) You
can't fix a broken democracy by throwing a computer at it.
If democracy
is government "of the people, by the people, for the people," I think
it is time we ask, "Where are the people?" We need to put people back
into the center of our elections, and not replace citizen participation by
computers.
If people
knew how desperately their participation was needed, more would respond.
(10) States
and big cities that use paper ballots and optical scanners.
Illinois,
Chicago. 83% of the
population of Illinois (10 million) votes using such systems, including
Chicago. One Illinois County’s
rationale:
http://www.willclrk.com/votingsystem.htm#Why%20was%20the%20optical%20scan%20system%20selected?
80% of
Arizona, including Phoenix.
http://www.azsos.gov/election/voter_outreach/info.htm
Michigan
Secretary of State’s recommendation:
http://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,1607,7-127-1640_9150-43906--M_2001_5,00.html
States that
use mostly precinct-count optical scan systems also include
South Dakota
http://www.sdsos.gov/2000/00pripre.htm
Minnesota http://www.sos.state.mn.us/election/Interactive%20Election%20Guides/HTML/15.htm
Seattle:
http://www.metrokc.gov/exec/news/1998/vote421d.htm
(11) The
CalTech/MIT study of voting systems found that precinct-count optical scan
systems outperformed DRE voting systems in terms of residual voting errors and
cost per voter.
CalTech/MIT
Voting Project,
http://www.vote.caltech.edu/Reports/