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Election '06: Rise of the vote machines
Potential tampering problems exist with current technology
By Geof Wollerman
gwollerm@mscd.edu

Graphic courtesy of Hart InterCivic The Hart InterCivic eSlate direct recording electronic voting machine is in use in Boulder County. Similar devices are used throughout Colorado. Some DRE machines come equipped with a printer to verify a voter’s choice, but many do not. Concerns have been raised about the integrity of voting-machine security.

This summer in Colorado a group of concerned citizens brought a lawsuit against the secretary of state charging that thousands of voting machines were not properly certified and were still vulnerable to fraud. According to the Denver Post, in September Denver District Judge Lawrence Manzanares ruled that the secretary of state’s office had neglected its duties and that the machines were not properly certified, but that it was too late to do anything about it. He said the best the state could do was to provide enough oversight on Election Day to ensure that no fraud took place.

“Decertifying all the machines in the state would create more problems than it would solve,” Manzanares said.

Colorado voters will now wait and see whether the state’s election will run smoothly or be plagued by malfunctioning machines and accusations of fraud.

Also, in September The New York Times reported that “about one-third of all precincts nationwide are using the electronic voting technology for the first time, raising the chance of problems at the polls as workers struggle to adjust to the new system.”

Every state in the country now utilizes some kind of electronic voting machine in at least one of its precincts. Proponents of the machines say they have increased the efficiency of voting, but others point out that the machines are too easily manipulated and subject to fraud. Whatever the virtues and pitfalls of digital election technology, one thing is certain: It is here to stay.

Since the early 1980s, several bipartisan groups have put together voluntary regulation suggestions for voting systems that would reduce concerns about election fraud. One of the latest, released this year by the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security, which is sponsored by the Brennan Center For Justice at New York University Law School, found that the three main voting systems used by states posed concerns about their security.

“All three voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections,” the report states. “The most troubling vulnerabilities of each system can be substantially remedied if proper countermeasures are implemented at the state and local level.” But, the report continues, few jurisdictions have taken these countermeasures that would make attacks on the systems more difficult to execute.

The three voting systems the report looked at are: direct recording electronic, in which votes are captured and stored electronically; direct recording electronic with a voter-verified paper trail, which provides a paper receipt of the voter’s choices before the voter casts his or her vote; and precinct count optical scan, which allows voters to physically mark a ballot that is then run through a scanner that optically records the vote.

Sequoia Voting Systems is a voting-machine company that has its voter-verified paper trail system in place in nearly every precinct of Denver County. According to Jonathan Freedman, a spokesman for Sequoia Voting Systems, their machines “meet the highest level of standard for security according to federal and state regulations.” Sequoia Voting Systems machines have been in use for over 15 years, and the tested system has “worked well and is continued to be improved upon,” Freedman said.

“All technology, no matter how advanced, is going to be vulnerable to attack to some degree,” the Brennan Center report states. “The history of attacks on voting systems teaches us how foolish it would be to assume that there will not be attacks on voting systems in the future.”

For this reason, electronic voting must have the potential for more transparency, said Robert Hazan, chair of Metro’s Political Science Department.

“It is an irreversible technological advance that may not have been very well thought out,” Hazan said. “But I think that eventually we are going to address the technological glitches and make it become perhaps more fair and more accurate. But I don’t think we are going back to ballots.”

Hazan said voters will resist the implementation of voting technology because of some of the flaws, but that the flaws will be fixed.

“There is no way out. We’ve got to fix the flaws,” he said.

That Metro votes online for its own government is a good indication of the direction electronic voting is taking, Hazan said.

“I think it’s a great idea. I mean, why not? I think it’s as good as absentee voting.”

There are, however, concerns that private companies are in charge of voting machine systems and it is one of the biggest problems the industry faces, Hazan said.

“That’s a problem. And we’re going to address that … eventually, yeah, it’s going to be regulated, it’s going to be bureaucratized.”