NY Times Editorial - A Tale of 3 (Electronic Voting) Elections

["Margit Johansson" <margitjo@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/opinion/31observer.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
Editorial Observer


A Tale of Three (Electronic Voting) Elections





    By ADAM COHEN


Published: July 31, 2008


         Electronic voting has made great
strides in reliability, but it has a long way to go. When reformers
push for greater safeguards, they often argue that future elections
could produce the wrong result because of a computer glitch or be
stolen through malicious software. That's being too nice.

There have already been
elections in which it is impossible to be certain that the right
candidate was declared the winner. Here are three such races. It is not
just remarkable that these elections were run so badly, but also that
the flaws are still common — and could easily create havoc in this
fall's voting.1. The 2002 Georgia Senate and Governor Races
— Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was defeated
for re-election and Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, was unseated. Polls
had suggested that both men would win. The votes were cast on
Diebold A.T.M.-style machines. A whistle-blower who helped prepare the
machines reported that secret "patches" — software intended to fix
glitches — were installed late in the process without being certified
by the state, as the law required.The unexpected outcomes were
likely because of heavy turnout by rural whites, prompted by a
Confederate flag dispute, not faulty voting machines. Still, skeptics
wonder if the patches contained malicious software that changed votes.
Because the Diebold machines did not produce paper records, there is no
way to put those doubts to rest.Lesson:
Electronic voting makes large-scale vote theft easy. A patch slipped
onto voting machines or centralized vote tabulators can change an
election's outcome. Every piece of software must be scrutinized by
neutral experts. If there is not enough time, election officials need a
backup plan, such as conducting voting entirely on paper ballots.2. The 2006 Congressional Race in Florida's 13th District
— The machines said that Republican Vern Buchanan defeated Democrat
Christine Jennings by 369 votes. But in Sarasota County, a Democratic
area, up to 18,000 ballots, about 13 percent of the total cast, did not
record a vote for Congress. That is extraordinarily high; in Republican
Manatee County, only 2 percent of ballots didn't contain a vote for
Congress.Sarasota's low vote may have been because of a bad
ballot design, which made the Buchanan-Jennings race hard to find. But
the Jennings campaign said it received hundreds of complaints that the
machines would not accept a vote for Ms. Jennings, or recorded a vote
for her as a vote for Mr. Buchanan.Did Ms. Jennings lose a seat
in Congress because of a glitch? Could there have been sabotage? We'll
never know, because there are no paper records. Lesson:
Electronic voting machines must produce a voter-verifiable paper trail
for each vote so voters can see that their choices register properly.
In a disputed election, the paper, not the machine tallies, should
decide who wins.More than half the states require votes to be
recorded on paper, but many still don't. These include battleground
states like Virginia. 3. Alabama's 2002 Race for Governor
— Former Gov. Don Siegelman has been in the news because it appears
that federal prosecutors may have put him in prison for political
reasons. The controversy has brought attention to the odd way he lost
the governorship. Mr. Siegelman went to sleep on election night
thinking he had won. But overnight, Republican Baldwin County reported
that a glitch had given Mr. Siegelman, a Democrat, about 6,000 extra
votes. When they were subtracted, Republican Rob Riley won by roughly
3,000 votes.James Gundlach, a professor at Auburn University,
crunched the numbers and concluded that Mr. Siegelman lost because of
"electronic ballot stuffing," possibly by an operative who accessed the
computers and "edited" the results, though others dispute his analysis.Baldwin
County used paper ballots that were then read by an optical scan
machine. Mr. Siegelman says local officials gave him permission to
count the paper ballots by hand, but the attorney general threatened to
arrest anyone who did. No count was done.Lesson:
Paper ballots alone are not enough. There must be strong audit laws
that mandate comprehensive hand recounts when an election is close.After
the 2000 election debacle, Americans demanded a better system of
voting. What we have gotten is new technology with different flaws. If
the presidential race is close, this year's "hanging chad" could be a
questionable result on electronic voting machines that cannot be
adequately investigated.
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