Headlines, North America

U.S. ELECTION: Unease Over E-Voting

Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Nov 16 2004 (IPS) - For its boosters – technology vendors and the election officials who spent millions on their wares – electronic voting (e-voting) passed the test of Nov. 2 with flying colours, withstanding unprecedented scrutiny and making life easier for millions of disabled and non-English-speaking U.S. voters.

To detractors – mostly computer security experts and voter protection groups – it is only a matter of time before paperless elections invite wide-scale fraud.

And politicians are starting to listen. Some states have already passed laws banning systems without voter-verified paper ballots, and there is support among both opposition Democrats and President George W Bush’s Republican Party for similar federal legislation.

While most of the 175,000 machines appeared to operate normally, the balloting was far from flawless. Computers in North Carolina failed to log some 4,500 votes, others in Florida inexplicably started counting backward, and voters in several states complained that when they tried to cast a ballot for challenger Senator John Kerry, it was recorded as a vote for Bush.

In Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes proved decisive to Bush’s victory, a county with only 800 registered voters ended up with 3,893 votes for the incumbent, an error too glaring to be missed. The over count was eventually traced to a faulty memory cartridge.

"Unless something currently unknown emerges about the election, we narrowly escaped disaster," said David Dill of Stanford University, a leading critic of paperless voting systems. "Machines broke all over the country, contributing to long lines, and weird behaviour was reported by voters all over the country."

"There is no independent check on e-voting machines," he added in an interview. "If this many obvious problems are showing up on election day, how many votes are being silently lost or changed?"

His question looms large because 40 million people relied on a computer to record and tabulate their ballots this year, thanks to a 3.9-billion-dollar federal initiative, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), to permit states to upgrade their machinery after the hotly-contested – some people say "stolen" – election of 2000, finally decided in Bush’s favour by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Some e-voting critics have focussed on the close links between machine makers and the Republican Party, such as Diebold Inc CEO Wally O’Dell, who said in 2003 he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The absence of a paper trail in many precincts this year fuelled speculation, first on the Internet and later in the mainstream press, that the Bush camp had "hacked the vote."

While these claims mostly appear to be unfounded, the problem that keeps computer security experts up at night is that because of software loopholes in nearly every commercial e-voting system, such manipulation could easily be undetectable.

"In my view, the lesson is that voters are not confident in the accuracy and reliability of computerised elections, both in terms of voting systems and tabulating systems, and that this lack of confidence is well-founded in real problems, observed in real elections," said Dan Wallach, a computer security expert at Rice University in Texas.

"I expect a serious backlash against paperless electronic voting systems," he predicted in an interview.

The states of California and Nevada already have laws requiring voter verified ballots – Nevada did it in time for this election – and at least 20 others are considering similar moves. Bills on voter verified ballots were introduced this year in the federal House of Representatives and Senate, but bogged down in committee.

Pamela Smith of the Verified Voting Foundation, which has compiled a list of more than 33,000 election "incidents," noted that while HAVA was intended to make voting more convenient, many of the new electronic systems had the opposite effect.

"If a voter is unfamiliar or has problems with the equipment – which happened extensively in this election – they must spend significantly longer at the voting booth than they would with a lower-tech method such as marking a paper ballot," she said.

One solution is to use an optical scanner, a simpler system that marks but does not tabulate ballots. If the machines break down, Smith told IPS, ballots can still be marked to be scanned later, which is not the case for e-voting.

For states that have already invested in paperless systems, adding printers is the next best thing, she suggested, and should not be an insurmountable expense. Congress still has about three billion dollars in HAVA funds to allocate.

"Vendors are competitive on this issue," Smith said. "Any election official should let their vendor know that if they want to continue doing business in the jurisdiction, they should provide verifiability at a reasonable cost."

Other experts say the voting went surprisingly smoothly, and believe the majority of glitches had little to do with the actual machines.

"The problem on election day turned out to be similar to 2000," said Ted Selker, director of the Caltech/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Voting Project, "registering and problems of polling place check-in being major issues."

"We expected much worse than what we had," he told IPS. "I presume that there were a few more problems from careless set-up or shutdown procedures – certainly watching for any error message would have saved 4,500 votes (in North Carolina)."

Doug Jones, a computer scientist at the University of Iowa and member of the National Committee for Voting Integrity, said he was concerned about reports that some observers, including those sent by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had trouble gaining access to polling places.

And independent monitors who did watch the count may not have been trained in how the e-voting software works. "There are some counties where there are reports that nobody was allowed to observe the vote tabulation – one in Ohio – and even if you can observe the tabulation, in many counties using computer systems, all you see is the backs of technicians hunched over computer displays," said Jones.

"What can you tell about what is really going on when you can’t see the screen itself and you have no idea what the commands to the system mean?" he asked.

Officials say it too early too tell which incidents are technical errors that require further action, and which were caused by fraud, human error or uncertified systems.

"One highly referenced source I have seen quoted as documenting hundreds of problems with the voting actually only has a few incidents but lists dozens of news articles across the country reporting the same few incidents," said Steve Freeman of the National Association of State Election Directors in Washington, DC, which selects the independent testers for electronic voting machines.

"The impression is the problem is widespread but, in the scope of the election across the country, the number of distinct incidents may be actually small and consistent with simple operational errors and individual machine failures, which need to be corrected locally."

Freeman told IPS the systems are still being perfected, and the newest versions are more reliable and voter-friendly.