12/12 Daily: County to vote on voting system finalist

[Doug Grinbergs <saule@xxxxxxxxx>]

<http://www.coloradodaily.com/articles/2003/12/12/news/news04.txt>
County to vote on voting system finalist 
Richard Valenty
Colorado Daily
Dec. 12, 2003 


Don't look now, but it's almost 2004, and we're due for a presidential election. Before the balloting, Boulder County officials still need to select a voting system, train election judges on brand-new equipment and deal with normal registration and ballot procedures.

In the words of Tom Halicki, Boulder County election manager, "It's time to get cracking."

Boulder County's Voter Equipment Review Committee will meet Friday at 9:00 a.m. to recommend a finalist vendor for the voting system(s). Diebold Election Systems of Ohio, Sequoia Voting Systems of California, Avante International Technology, Inc. of New Jersey and Hart InterCivic of Texas are the four current finalists.

In recent weeks, the group Citizens for Verifiable Voting (CVV) has been attempting to raise citizen awareness about security issues involving electronic voting systems known as Direct Record Electronic (DRE) machines.

Most DRE systems on the market record voter decisions in the memory inside of the machine without producing a paper ballot.

CVV maintains that a paper ballot should be the record of voter intent, partially because paper can be hand-counted if a recount or random sampling is required.

Paper ballots can also be read with an optical scanner, which is how the mail-in ballots used in the 2003 county election were tabulated. Most election system vendors offer a system to scan paper ballots as well as a system that can be used unassisted by the disabled, which normally involves a DRE.

Neil McClure, general manager/vice president for the Colorado operations of Hart InterCivic, has seen recent media coverage of CVV activity and believes that a simple decision to use only paper ballots won't solve voter security issues.

"Since when did paper become a tamper-proof media? I could print ballots on my $175 home printer that would look like real ballots," said McClure. "If a group says that tampering and election fraud has been a way of life in this country, you've just put a media that everyone is accustomed to right back into their hands."

Some form of optical scan system will probably be necessary in 2004, since absentee voters won't be able to use DRE's at a precinct. Halicki has indicated in a past interview with the Daily that Boulder County will use the optical scan system for absentees, and may also use it for general voting purposes.

Hart is pitching two systems to Boulder County. One, the "eSlate," is a DRE that allows voters to review their entire list of votes before casting their electronic ballot. The second, the "Ballot Now," creates a ballot that can be tabulated by an optical scan system.

"'Ballot Now' was originally created for absentees, but it was just used for the full election in Orange County, California, for their governor recall election," said McClure.

McClure, who works from the Hart office in Lafayette, said he regards himself as the "principal architect" of the eSlate. Under current Colorado law, recounts must be performed on the same media on which the vote was originally cast. McClure explained the eSlate recount procedure.

"We store the votes in three physically separate memory locations. There's a primary path from what we call a 'mobile ballot box,' which is just a flash memory card. We provide a software application that will collect and store the alternative storage of those electronic ballots, and allow you to compare that with the primary data path," said McClure.

CVV is currently attempting to get Boulder County to delay purchasing a new system. According to a position statement from the CVV Web site, http://coloradovoter.net, technical standards for voting systems "have not yet been developed by National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) as required under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA)."

McClure called the Daily from Washington, D.C. on Thursday, where he was attending a NIST conference titled "Building Trust and Confidence in Voting Systems." According to McClure, standards do in fact exist despite the claims of CVV and other nationwide groups.

"There are standards in existence, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) standards of 2002," said McClure. "In the HAVA, it's required NIST to manage the voting system certification process. The NIST people have been involved with the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED).

"Voting systems are now being built to a set of standards. To think that NIST is going to come up with a set of standards that are completely and absolutely different is inaccurate. What NIST is looking at doing is taking FEC standards and doing some incremental improvements on them," said McClure.

He added that state authorities nationwide are certifying systems for use in 2004, under existing standards and processes. Also, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has been working on voting systems standards for over a year, said McClure.

"I'm the project manager for the IEEE voting systems standards committee," said McClure. "There's a federal law that says if there's a commercial standard, a government entity must adopt it. I will tell you that the IEEE standards have taken FEC standards as their starting point."

According to Halicki, Boulder County will select a finalist Friday, along with an alternate in case negotiations fall through with a vendor. The selection will be evaluated by Boulder County Clerk Linda Salas and given to the three-person Boulder County Board of Commissioners, who will vote to approve or deny a purchase in late December or early January. Halicki could not provide a date for the Commissioners' meeting.

Halicki also said that an unnamed representative from Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson's office was asked to attend the Friday vote.

At a Dec. 4 meeting, Commissioner Paul Danish mentioned that there would be a public hearing before a final purchasing decision is made. McClure said he recognizes the concern of citizens over voter security, but compared the concern to the "Y2K" issue.

"What happened then is that companies and people got organized and addressed the issue. At the stroke of midnight, planes didn't fall out of the sky and financial markets didn't crash. As engineers, we have to say 'Sure, problems are possible, but are they likely?' I'm confident in the accuracy and integrity of an election conducted on eSlate," said McClure.