http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_2930200,00.html
Rocky
Mountain News
Electronic voting plan
needs work
May
30, 2004
The
state legislature intended to keep "Fraud-o-meters" out of Colorado
polling places, but the measure it passed in the recent session, House Bill
1227, falls short of the goal in several crucial ways.
The
Fraud-o-meter is the invention of computer scientist Teresa Hommel
to simulate a rigged electronic voting device, the possibility of which is
alarming an increasing number of experts and regular voters alike. Hommel and others advocate a voter-verified paper audit
trail to forestall the sort of fraud that is demonstrated on her Web site,
wheresthepaper.org. When the fraudulent program is "tested" it
provides an accurate count of whatever votes you cast. But if it's in the
"real election" mode it alters them to achieve a predetermined
result.
And
you can't even tell the difference! In each case, you're asked to verify your
choice, but in reality you are verifying only what you want to do, without any
way to know whether the software will tally your votes correctly.
Suppose
election workers in your precinct go to read the data from their machines at
the end of the day and they show that 231 people voted but all the candidates'
vote totals are zero? At least then election officials would know something was
wrong, though they couldn't fix it.
But
if - like Hommel's Fraud-o-meter - the state's
machines were rigged but the results they produced were still plausible, no one
would know.
The
only sure protection is to print a paper ballot for verification while the
voter is still in the voting booth, for the paper ballots to be collected and
saved, and for the paper ballots to be the deciding factor in any recount.
These safeguards are consistent with HB 1227, but they are not required by it.
They should be.
The
bill gives the secretary of state authority to certify voting equipment if it
meets certain requirements. One is that the equipment give
the voter the choice of verifying his or her vote before the ballot is cast.
Another is that the voting machine produce a permanent
paper record with a manual audit capacity. The secretary of state has the
choice of whether to use the paper record in a recount.
Why
isn't that good enough? Because a secretary of state could
certify a voting system that used onscreen verification and never allowed voters
to see the print version of their ballots. Moreover, even in voting
machine systems that did provide properly verified paper ballots, the secretary
of state would have no obligation even to count them.
Still,
the bill remedies some of the problems with Colorado's existing election law.
We hope that in the next legislative session lawmakers will push for even
stronger safeguards so the state is not in the position of certifying or
purchasing inadequate voting systems.
Copyright 2004, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
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