Did voting machines steal a Democratic victory?

The fresh debacle in Florida has brought national attention to the problems with electronic voting machines. Of course, the recount last week in Florida did not find the 18,000 missing votes that the machines had possibly lost in Sarasota, since there was nothing to check the machines' own electronic records against. The recount simply involved counting once again the same electronic record, since the machines there are not required to also provide a paper record of votes cast. In response, Rep. Rush Holt, Democrat from New Jersey, has pledged to reintroduce a bill when the newly Democratic Congress reconvenes in January that would require all electronic voting machines to produce a paper record, and compel election officials to conduct periodic audits of the machines. Voters would be able to confirm how the machines recorded their votes by cross-checking it with the paper trail. Currently, 28 states, including Connecticut, Wisconsin, Illinois, California and Washington, have laws that require electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail, or voters to cast ballots on paper ballots, which are typically counted by optical scanning machines. And 13 states mandate periodic audits of the machines.

Matt Zimmerman, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is involved in the voters' lawsuit in Florida, supports the Holt bill. "We have a situation now that appears to perhaps have disenfranchised 18,000 people, and all of the reasonable efforts that Holt is asking for would increase the odds that the problem would be spotted earlier. We're never going to have a perfect system. What we can do is put in reasonable safeguards that will increase transparency of the system."

David Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford University who founded Verified Voting, a nonprofit advocacy group, was involved in the writing of Holt's bill. While he says that if there had been such a paper trail in Florida it wouldn't necessarily have prevented the problems, it would have provided more insight into what happened. It could also have reduced the scope of the problem by cluing in more voters that something had gone wrong in time for them to recast their votes in the race. "It would have been very useful, because it prints the voters' selection every time they select someone on the screen," Dill explains. When the iVotronic voting machines' paper-trail function is enabled, as it was not in the Florida race, it provides a real-time audit log of the vote. With the paper trail, for example, both actions in a "screen bounce," the vote and the second touch canceling the vote, would have been recorded.

But some voting-rights advocates say that even the Holt bill doesn't go far enough. They'd like to see all voters cast their ballots on paper, which optical scanning machines could then count. That way, in a disputed election the paper ballots could be counted by hand, eliminating the possibility of machine error playing a role. "When votes are cast on paper, it's impossible to have the situation that Sarasota faces now," says Finley, the attorney for Voter Action. "Because you always have the paper ballot that the voter marked, you can never be left with uncertainty as to whether thousands of votes have disappeared forever because of malfunctioning of an electronic device. Florida and the nation can't afford any more elections that cast doubt on the legitimacy of our voting system."

In some electronic voting machines, like the ES&S iVotronic, when there is a paper trail, it literally spews out of the machine in a long, continuous roll of paper, like a grocery receipt coming out of a cash register. John Bonifaz, founder of the nonprofit National Voting Rights Institute, which is calling for a new election in the Florida race, has doubts whether such a paper trail would have made a difference there. "There is no guarantee that a voter-verified paper trail will provide the kind of accuracy in the vote counting process that we need in order to ensure the integrity of our elections. You have to have a hand-recorded paper ballot to do any kind of recount." Brad Friedman, an election integrity advocate and blogger, actually thinks that such a paper trail would create more problems than it would solve. "If you had the paper trail," says Friedman, "you would have people running around saying, 'Look, the paper trail shows that they didn't vote.' I think that the false sense of security that the paper trail will give you is ultimately more dangerous than not having it at all." He's also in favor of a return to paper ballots.

Florida's 13th Congressional District race was probably the only race in the country where machine glitches may have determined the outcome. But Sarasota County wasn't the only locale that had major problems with electronic voting in this election. Election watchdog hot-line numbers took scattered reports from around the nation registering complaints ranging from polls opening late because voting machines weren't booted up to machines literally casting a ballot for the wrong candidate. Common Cause, a nonprofit watchdog group, got five times as many complaints about mechanical problems with voting machines to their voter hot-line number in this election as in 2004.

The rise in reported problems is partly because more voters are using the machines, thanks to $3.8 billion in federal subsidies from the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which was supposed to help ensure the integrity of elections by upgrading voting technology. Almost 40 percent of voters in the U.S. now cast their ballots on electronic voting machines. "A handful of private voting technology companies have made millions off of selling states these touch-screen voting machines as a result," says Bonifaz of the National Voting Rights Institute. "Now, we're faced with this predicament: Millions of federal dollars have been spent on a product that appears to be seriously flawed."

Meanwhile, Sarasota County has already decided to throw out its $4.7 million touch-screen voting machine system, but not because of the problems reported in this race. This Election Day, even with their apparently flawed electronic voting system, citizens in the county were able to pass a measure that will require paper to play a role in future elections. In time for the 2008 presidential election, citizens in Sarasota County will be casting their votes on paper ballots, which will be counted by optical scanners.

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