Headlines, North America

U.S. ELECTION: Electronic Voting No Quick Fix

Peter Costantini

SEATTLE, Oct 26 2004 (IPS) - In the wake of the electoral roller coaster in Florida following the 2000 polls, many officials around the United States looked to new voting technologies to help provide a smoother ride in the future.

The “hanging chads” and other widely publicised problems with old punch-card voting machines four years ago have been enshrined in U.S. political lore, providing grist for comedians and lawyers.

In contrast, direct recording electronic (DRE) systems with touch-screen voting machines – similar to automated teller machines (ATMs) at banks – promised to eliminate the embarrassing foibles of paper ballots.

The beckoning electoral freeway of electronic voting, though, has rapidly developed new kinds of potholes.

In an ironic twist, many experts and officials are now calling for a return to paper, this time in the form of a printed audit trail that officials can use to verify electronic results.

While technical problems with DRE technology have been broadly recognised and some solutions already identified, the underlying economic, social and political context of its introduction continues to generate controversy.

Conflicts of interest among public officials and voting equipment makers, partisan manoeuvres to exploit new systems, and problems inherent in introducing new technologies into wide public use have all thrown off sparks in the politically charged atmosphere of a bitter presidential campaign.

In 2002, in response to the 2000 Florida State fiasco, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which mandated improvements in voting practices for the whole country. But federal funding for the changes has been slow in coming and many have not been widely implemented in time for November’s vote.

“It appears à that the momentum for implementing the reforms was slowed following delays in the appointment of the Election Assistance Commission and belated allocation of federal funds to individual states to update their voting equipment,” says Urdur Gunnarsdottir, spokesperson for the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The ODIHR, an inter-governmental organisation that deploys election observation missions, is monitoring the U.S. electoral process.

Countries participating in the OSCE, including the United States, are obligated to invite other participating states to monitor their elections, and previous ODIHR delegations have observed voting here in 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002.

OSCE observers here for the Nov. 2 vote will pay particular attention to the issues raised by the introduction of new electronic voting equipment, Gunnarsdottir said in an email interview.

“The new equipment has been already the subject of litigation, and has the potential to become a serious controversy during the 2004 elections. The software used in the electronic voting machines has not been made available for public scrutiny, and several states have invested in new electronic equipment that does not provide for a manual audit and recount capacity,” she added.

Compounding budgetary and technical questions have been accusations of conflict of interest and partisanship levelled by governmental and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) against certain manufacturers.

After an August conference in Washington, DC, where voting-machine vendors wined and dined election officials, Chellie Pingree, the president of Common Cause, a DC-based non-partisan advocacy group, criticised the lobbying efforts:

“As Election Day approaches amid serious concerns that our nation’s voting system has not been fixed since the debacle in 2000, the spectacle of elections officials sailing down the Potomac on a dinner cruise sponsored by voting machine vendors sends the wrong message to voters,” said Pingree in a news release.

A major storm around conflict of interest broke in 2003 when the Cleveland, Ohio ‘Plain Dealer’ newspaper reported that the chief executive of one voting machine company wrote in a Republican fund-raising letter he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

The depth of the criticism directed at an election-equipment manufacturer for taking sides “blind-sided” Walden O’Dell of Diebold, Inc, he told the ‘Plain Dealer’.

Finally this June, reported the paper, the firm adopted a new ethics policy that bars political donations and any other political activity, except voting, on the part of top company executives.

But Diebold’s troubles were not limited to accusations of partisanship.

This April in California, after electronic voting machine failures caused serious problems in the state’s March primary elections, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified Diebold’s AccuVote-TSx electronic voting system for use in California.

Shelley’s order found the system to be “defective and unacceptable for use” because of “failure of the hardware and firmware à to receive federal qualification” and “disenfranchisement of voters” attempting to use the system in the March vote.

A staff report to Kelley also said Diebold “marketed and sold the TSx system before it was fully functional,” “misrepresented the status of the TSx system in federal testing in order to obtain state certification,” and “installed uncertified software on election machines in 17 counties.”

Meanwhile, for the first time in the country, the neighbouring state of Nevada successfully deployed a new DRE voting system in the September primary election that printed out a reel-to-reel paper record voters could review.

The paper tally created by the equipment, produced by Sequoia Voting Systems, reportedly coincided exactly with the electronic one.

In the United States, the states provide much of the framework of electoral law, and even counties make significant choices on how to run elections, so legislation varies widely among jurisdictions.

In this decentralised environment, attempts to introduce new voting technologies over the past few years have proven contentious in many states, including Florida, Maryland, Georgia, Nebraska and Indiana.

Despite four years of efforts to correct problems encountered in 2000 by the state of Florida – which is governed by President George W Bush’s brother Jeb Bush – political trench warfare continues in some localities over efforts to introduce electronic voting.

An October report by the Florida chapter of Common Cause highlights unresolved questions about the introduction of DRE voting equipment in 15 of Florida’s 67 counties, citing numerous reports of problems with the technology and studies casting doubt on its security.

The report cited an ‘St Petersburg Times’ article quoting Mark Pritchett, executive director of the Governor’s Select Task Force on Election Procedures, who recommended, “counties wait for touch-screen technology to improve before buying the machines.”

The Common Cause report also faulted Florida for failing to order an independent audit of the state’s touch-screen voting machines, for failing to ensure a voter-verifiable paper trail to enable recounts in close votes, and for issuing a rule in April prohibiting manual recounts on DRE systems.

Despite recognising that voting in the state’s Aug. 31 primary went relatively smoothly, the report notes that a higher voter turnout is expected for the presidential election, and recommends that citizens in the 15 counties with DRE systems vote by absentee ballot to ensure a paper record of their vote.

A few days before early voting began in Florida on Oct. 18, the crash of a server computer that tabulates the touch-screen votes forced one county to postpone a pre-election test of its DRE system, according to ‘Wired’.

And the ‘Miami Herald’ newspaper, after monitoring the pace of early voting on the new touch-screen machines in three Miami-area counties, reported that it took voters longer to cast ballots than with the old punch-card system, which could cause slow voting and long lines on Election Day.