http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/us/politics/24voting.html?ei=5065&en=6b0e970ef2f47cab&ex=1159675200&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print
The New York Times
September 24, 2006
Chris Gardner/Associated Press
Electronic voting machines in Maryland, where several
counties reported problems during the primary.
By IAN URBINA
WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A growing number of state and local
officials are getting cold feet about electronic voting technology, and many
are making last-minute efforts to limit or reverse the rollout of new machines
in the November elections.
Less than two months before voters head to the polls, Gov.
Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Maryland this week became the most recent official to
raise concerns publicly. Mr. Ehrlich, a Republican, said he lacked confidence
in the state’s new $106 million electronic voting system and suggested a return
to paper ballots.
Dozens of states have adopted electronic voting technology
to comply with federal legislation in 2002 intended to phase out old-fashioned
lever and punch-card machines after the “hanging chads” confusion of the 2000
presidential election.
But some election officials and voting experts say they fear
that the new technology may have only swapped old problems for newer, more
complicated ones. Their concerns became more urgent after widespread problems
with the new technology were reported this year in primaries in Ohio, Arkansas,
Illinois, Maryland and elsewhere.
This year, about one-third of all precincts nationwide are
using the electronic voting technology for the first time, raising the chance
of problems at the polls as workers struggle to adjust to the new system.
“I think there is good reason for concern headed into the
midterm elections,” said Richard F. Celeste, a Democrat and former Ohio
governor who was co-chairman of a study of new machines for the National
Research Council with Richard L. Thornburgh, a Republican and former governor
of Pennsylvania.
“You have to train the poll workers,” Mr. Celeste said,
“especially since many of them are of a generation for whom this technology is
a particular challenge. You need to have plans in place to relocate voters to
another precinct if machines don’t work, and I just don’t know whether these
steps have been taken.”
Paperless touch-screen machines have been the biggest source
of consternation, and with about 40 percent of registered voters nationally
expected to cast their ballots on these machines in the midterm elections, many
local officials fear that the lack of a paper trail will leave no way to verify
votes in case of fraud or computer failure.
As a result, states are scrambling to make last-minute fixes
before the technology has its biggest test in November, when voter turnout will
be higher than in the primaries, many races will be close and the threat of
litigation will be ever-present.
“We have the real chance of recounts in the coming
elections, and if you have differences between the paper trail and the
electronic record, which number prevails?” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor
at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the author of the Election Law blog,
www.electionlawblog.org.
Professor Hasen found that election challenges filed in
court grew to 361 in 2004, up from 197 in 2000. “What you have coming up is the
intersection of new technology and an unclear legal regime,” he said.
Like Mr. Ehrlich, other state officials have decided on a
late-hour change of course. In January, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico
decided to reverse plans to use the touch-screen machines, opting instead to
return to paper ballots with optical scanners. Last month, the Connecticut
secretary of state, Susan Bysiewicz, decided to do the same.
“I didn’t want my state to continue being an embarrassment
like Ohio and Florida every four years,” said Mr. Richardson, a Democrat,
adding, “I also thought we needed to restore voter confidence, and that wasn’t
going to happen with the touch-screen machines.”
In Pennsylvania, a state senator introduced a bill last week
that would require every precinct to provide voters with the option to use
paper ballots, which would involve printing extra absentee ballots and having
them on site. A similar measure is being considered on the federal level.
In the last year or so, at least 27 states have adopted
measures requiring a paper trail, which has often involved replacing paperless
touch-screen machines with ones that have a printer attached.
But even the systems backed up by paper have problems. In a
study released this month, the nonpartisan Election Science Institute found
that about 10 percent of the paper ballots sampled from the May primary in
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, were uncountable because printers had jammed and poll
workers had loaded the paper in backward.
Lawsuits have been filed in Colorado, Arizona, California,
Pennsylvania and Georgia seeking to prohibit the use of touch-screen machines.
Deborah L. Markowitz, the Vermont secretary of state and the
president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said that while
there might be some problems in November, she expected them to be limited and
isolated.
“The real story of the recent primary races was how few
problems there were, considering how new this technology is,” said Ms.
Markowitz, a Democrat. “The failures we did see, like in Maryland, Ohio and
Missouri, were small and most often from poll workers not being prepared.”
Many states have installed the machines in the past year
because of a federal deadline. If states wanted to take advantage of federal
incentives offered by the Help America Vote Act, they had to upgrade their
voting machines by 2006.
In the primary last week in Maryland, several counties
reported machine-related problems, including computers that misidentified the
party affiliations of voters, electronic voter registration lists that froze
and voting-machine memory cards whose contents could not be electronically
transmitted. In Montgomery County, election workers did not receive access
cards to voting machines for the county’s 238 precincts on time, forcing as
many as 12,000 voters to use provisional paper ballots until they ran out.
“We had a bad experience in the primary that led to very
long lines, which means people get discouraged and leave the polls without
voting,” said Governor Ehrlich, who is in a tight re-election race and has been
accused by his critics of trying to use the voting issue to motivate his base.
“We have hot races coming up in November and turnout will be high, so we can
expect lines to be two or three times longer. If even a couple of these
machines break down, we could be in serious trouble.”
Problems during primaries elsewhere have been equally
severe.
In the Illinois primary in March, Cook County officials
delayed the results of the county board elections for a week because of human
and mechanical problems at hundreds of sites with new voting machines made by
Sequoia Voting Systems.
In the April primary in Tarrant County, Tex., machines made
by Hart InterCivic counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000
more votes than were cast. The problem was attributed to programming errors,
not hacking.
In the past year, the Government Accountability Office, the
Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and the Congressional
Research Service have released reports raising concerns about the security of
electronic machines.
Advocates of the new technology dispute the conclusions.
“Many of these are exaggerated accusations by a handful of
vocal activists,” said Mark Radke, director of marketing for Diebold Election
Systems, one of the largest sellers of touch-screen machines. “But if you want
to talk about fraud and tabulation error, the newer technology is far more
accurate.”
Mr. Radke cited a study from the California Institute of
Technology that found that between the 2000 election, when touch-screen
machines were not used, and the 2004 election, when they were, there was a 40
percent reduction in voter error in Maryland, making the vote there the most
accurate in the country.
“There is always the potential for human error,” Mr. Radke
said, “but that is easily correctible.”
But critics say bugs and hackers could corrupt the machines.
A Princeton University study released this month on one of
Diebold’s machines — a model that Diebold says it no longer uses — found that
hackers could easily tamper with electronic voting machines by installing a
virus to disable the machines and change the vote totals.
Mr. Radke dismissed the concerns about hackers and bugs as
most often based on unrealistic scenarios.
“We don’t leave these machines sitting on a street corner,”
he said. “But in one of these cases, they gave the hackers complete and
unfettered access to the machines.”
Warren Stewart, legislative director for VoteTrustUSA, an
advocacy group that has criticized electronic voting, said that after poll
workers are trained to use the machines in the days before an election, many
counties send the machines home with the workers. “That seems like pretty
unfettered access to me,” Mr. Stewart said.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company