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<back | home Faith-Based Voting by Mike Zelina After the 2000 election it was clear that our voting system had some problems. The fact that a Diebold electronic voting machine in Volusia County Florida initially transmitted negative 16,022 votes for Al Gore received little media coverage. Instead, the news was filled with poll workers squinting at paper ballots with dimpled, pregnant, and hanging chads. Armed with this media frenzy about the problems with paper ballots, voting companies lobbied Congress and the States to replace existing voting equipment with electronic voting machines with no paper trail. Unfortunately, electronic voting has proven to be a leap of faith rather than a marvel of technology. Problems in California There are two styles of electronic voting in use in California — scanning and touch-screen machines. Scanning machines read a paper ballot that the voter fills out and touch-screen machines use a computer screen to vote and the results are stored in the computer. Both systems have problems but touch-screen machines cause the most concern because they have no paper trail to verify the electronic record. During the 2003 recall election in Alameda County, a poll worker noticed a surge in votes for John Burton, a socialist. For unknown reasons, the voting machines began to award votes for Cruz Bustamante to Burton. The rest of the county’s votes were cast on touch-screen machines with no paper trail, so there is no way to verify those results. All of the 17 counties using Diebold touch screen and optical scan voting machines in the last election used software not certified by the State of California. Without notifying the State, the machines were updated by Diebold after certification. And it wasn’t just one or two machines. It was all of them. In 2002, a machine in SLO County tallied and transferred results in the middle of the election to a Diebold server that was publicly accessible. Tallying votes before the end of an election is illegal. These are a few of the many documented problems that have no official answers. Security Concerns Voting fraud is nothing new. Ballot boxes have been stuffed and voters have been paid off. The security problem with electronic voting is that it’s possible to change the course of an election with merely a few keystrokes. And because the voting machine software is closed — meaning only the company has access to the code used to create the software — it is difficult to verify the security of the system. Voting companies claim that opening the systems to scrutiny will make them less secure. However, security through obscurity — the idea of hiding problems instead of fixing them — is always false bargain. Windows is the perfect example of closed technology that is clearly not secure. And it’s worth noting that, because touch-screen machines run on Microsoft Windows, they are subject to the same security problems experienced by home computer users. Conflicts of Interest Walden O’Dell, Diebold’s CEO, is very active in political fundraising and has promised to deliver the election to his candidate in 2004. While no intentional manipulation of votes has been charged against Diebold, should a company that has such an interest in who gets elected count the votes? What is the Solution? There are real benefits to electronic voting machines. They can make elections easier and faster and they are more accessible to handicapped and non-english speaking voters. However, the voting process needs to be both open to scrutiny and understandable by voters. And, while Diebold machines are the focus of this article, all electronic voting companies and systems need additional reform and oversight. The following changes are recommended: Electronic machines must print out a paper ballot that can be verified by the voter at the time of the vote. This ballot should take precedence over the electronic record in the event of a recount. Additional auditing of electronic counting should be mandated. Software and hardware for the machines should be open to scrutiny. Australia brought an open election system online in 6 months, so this is not an insurmountable problem. Testing procedures used to certify voting machines should be available for review. Many thanks go to San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder Julie Rodewald for deciding to not use touch-screen machines in the 2004 primary elections. Make Everyone’s Vote Count Because of the size of our voting population, the rest of the country will most likely implement the voting technology California adopts. Encouraging our County Board of Supervisors to decommission touch-screen voting machines until they are capable of generating a voter verified paper ballot and to urge our federal officials to support the "The Voter Confidence and Accessibility Act" is something we can do locally to ensure the integrity of the entire American vote. Mike Zelina is a member of the SLO Citizens for Open Voting — an ad-hoc group trying to get SLO County and the State of California to adopt Open Specifications for all voting equipment. For his real job, he designs software for a living and knows why the voting system desperately needs to be reformed (again). <back | top^ |