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Monday, Apr.
26, 2004
The Vexations Of Voting Machines
Kinks in e-voting
systems have given rise to a backlash. Are the machines reliable enough?
By VIVECA
NOVAK/WASHINGTON
Jeffrey Liss had finished making his selections on Maryland's
Democratic-primary ballot and strolled out of the polling place at Chevy Chase Elementary School on the morning of March
2, Super Tuesday. On the sidewalk, he spied a campaign poster for Senator
Barbara Mikulski, who is running for her fourth term. Funny, he thought, he
didn't remember voting in the Senate race.
Liss went back inside to talk to an election official. And another,
and another. He was told he must have overlooked the Senate race on the
electronic touch-screen voting machine. But Liss, a lawyer, finally persuaded
a technician to check the apparatus. Sure enough, it wasn't displaying the
whole ballot.
According to voter complaints collected by Mikulski, who won in the
primary, her race didn't appear on ballots in at least three Maryland counties. As
a result of snafus like that, a group of voters in the state last week sued
to bar use of the machines in November's balloting. And the people of Maryland are not the
only ones having second thoughts about electronic voting, the 21st century
technology that was supposed to guarantee an end to elections like 2000's,
with its outcome depending on subjective calls about hanging and pregnant
chads. After that messy conclusion, election officials in 34 states, from Florida to California,
purchased so many e-voting machines that some 50 million people, or more than
one-third of registered voters, are expected to use them in November. But
because of primary-season problems and a general anxiety over sending votes
down an electronic black hole, a backlash has set in. Some voter activists,
computer scientists and elected officials have joined a growing movement to
either make the systems more accountable or pull the plug entirely.
Electronic voting is "a rickety system with poor federal and state
oversight," says Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California
Voter Foundation. "It has produced an endless stream of bad news."
In the most dramatic move against the controversial systems, a state advisory
panel urged California secretary of state
Kevin Shelley to prohibit the use in this fall's election of 16,000 evoting
machines that four counties purchased from Ohio manufacturer Diebold Inc. at a cost
of $45 million. Shelley is considering a statewide ban, as is the
legislature.
Most critics of e-voting have two complaints. One is that it's not
possible to do a true recount with the systems because they produce nothing tangible
when a vote is cast; a recount means pressing a button and coming up with the
same results. Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, has filed a
federal lawsuit claiming that the sleek new systems bought by 15 counties
— including those of hanging-chad fame like Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade —
are unconstitutional because votes can't truly be retallied there, as they
can in the rest of the state.
The other concern about evoting is that some of the nation's top
computer scientists and code crackers believe the systems are too vulnerable
to tampering or simple breakdowns. "If you believe, as I do, that voting
is one of our critical infrastructures, then you have to defend it like you
do your power grid, your water supply," says former National Security
Agency code breaker Michael Wertheimer. "That's not happening
anywhere." And with a closely split electorate marching toward another
presidential showdown, shaky voter confidence in the results could lead to
another huge outcry or keep more people from going to the polls. With voter
participation at a paltry 51.3% in 2000, Americans hardly need another reason
not to vote.
There are many pluses to the ATM-like machines, most of which are
made by three manufacturers. They are easy to use, can provide ballots in
many languages and eliminate the problem of voters' choosing more than one
candidate in a race. They can also be outfitted to allow disabled people to
vote privately for the first time by, for instance, letting blind people use
headphones to work through the process. Tests have shown that the machines
count votes accurately — when nothing goes wrong.
But things do. Testing in Maryland,
which has adopted a system made by Diebold, began to raise eyebrows. The
system's potential vulnerability was first pointed out by Bev Harris, a
Seattle-based publicist with a deep interest in voting rights and a deep
skepticism about digital-age voting (her book, Black Box Voting, is the
movement's gospel). Her discovery: the programming behind Diebold's software
was available on an open Internet site, which meant that anyone with a little
expertise and access to the voting equipment could subvert it. Harris sent
the material to others. Soon computer scientists from Johns Hopkins and Rice
universities analyzed it, finding a host of security flaws like the presence
of critical passwords in the programming. Mischiefmakers who gained access to
the smart cards that voters must insert in the machines, or to the machines'
memory cards, could use the passwords to cast bogus votes or change tallies.
That prompted the state of Maryland
to commission a review by research firm SAIC. It agreed that Diebold's system
was "at high risk of compromise." Then, four months ago, a state
legislative committee hired Wertheimer, the code cracker, and his crew to
"red team" the system — assemble it in a mock polling place
and try to screw it up.
The experience, Wertheimer says, convinced him that
the souls of these new machines were far too corruptible. His team found it
possible to vote more than once, physically break into the machines by
picking their locks and alter vote totals by dialing into the Diebold server
used to relay tallies from precincts to state election officials. The
computers that were used to receive results from the precincts had not been
given basic security upgrades, leaving them vulnerable to viruses like the
notorious Blaster worm. "It's not as if they didn't think enough about
security," says Wertheimer. "It's as if they didn't think about it
at all." Before the primary, Maryland
didn't have time to do much more than alter some passwords and attach to the
machines antitamper tape that changes color if someone physically tries to
break into them. Officials have required other improvements since then.
In Ohio
the debate over evoting has become partisan. Republican secretary of state J.
Kenneth Blackwell ordered each county to pick a state-approved vendor and
begin modernizing equipment. Democrats accuse Blackwell of trying to promote
his candidacy for Governor by insisting on the changes even as a state
legislative committee was studying the machines' reliability. The panel
recommended a few weeks ago that the state void all voting-machine contracts
and require a newer technology that provides a paper trail of votes cast.
Blackwell's spokesman called the committee's move "outrageous and
foolish."
California's
bad experiences in the March primaries and in last year's gubernatorial
recall election are what led secretary of state Shelley to distrust e-voting.
In March more than a third of the precincts in San Diego County
opened late because the new machines didn't fire up properly, leading many
voters to leave in disgust. A study by Diebold of problems with its equipment
in Alameda County found that 186 of the 763
encoders used to program the smart cards had failed. As a result of those
foul-ups, thousands of voters were disenfranchised in the two counties.
Shelley's office concluded in a report released last week that Diebold, the
No. 1 provider of evoting machines to California, "jeopardized the
outcome" of the March primary.
Diebold apologized for the California
snafus, but that may not be enough. The state advisory panel last week
recommended that Shelley ask the attorney general to file both criminal and
civil charges against the firm. Diebold's chairman, Walden O'Dell, set the
company up for recrimination when he wrote in a fund-raising letter to Ohio
Republicans last year that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to the President next year." O'Dell, who has raised more
than $100,000 for President Bush, said he didn't mean that he would use his
machines to cheat in the election. But his statement helped fuel mushrooming
conspiracy theories that evoting-machine vendors might precook election
counts.
Congress's belated reaction to the nightmare of 2000 was the Help
America Vote Act, which created the Election Assistance Commission. But
because of delays naming and confirming its four members, the panel has only
just begun working to provide states with standards and guidance for
selecting new voting systems. At its first hearing, on May 5, the commission
will probably get an earful about one proposed solution to the problems with
e-voting — a voter-verified paper trail. Rebecca Mercuri, a computer
scientist and Harvard research fellow, came up with the idea of having each
machine print a small receipt, viewable through clear plastic, that reflects
a voter's choices. If it's correct, the voter hits a button, and the receipt
disappears into the machine, available for a recount. Several firms are
developing such machines. Nevada,
the only state so far to require evoting machines to include voter-verified
paper trails by November, expects to install ones made by Sequoia Voting
Systems. Missouri, Illinois
and California
are mandating printed receipts by 2006, and many states are considering
similar measures. U.S. Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, is
sponsoring legislation to require the printouts nationwide, and comparable
bills await action in the Senate.
But opposition has come from surprising quarters. Some election
officials say they are worried about printer jams and other headaches. The
toughest resistance comes from disability-rights groups. James Dickson, the
vice president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, says
electronic machines enfranchise 30 million illiterate, disabled or
foreign-language-speaking voters. Requiring a paper trail, even with some
technological bells and whistles, he says, would cut out many of those
potential voters once again. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is on
Dickson's side. So are top officials of the League of Women Voters, though
some local chapters are at odds with headquarters on this.
Meanwhile, back in Maryland, Liss is still awaiting
satisfaction. He was finally allowed to cast a provisional ballot for the
Mikulski race. Then the state refused to count it. Liss filed a petition with
the county board of elections and awaits a decision.
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