Liberal Repercussion

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65579,00.html

06:21 PM Nov. 02, 2004 PT

The jury is still out on e-voting machines used in the election but reports collected by late Tuesday evening by election watchdogs seem to contradict assurances by voting company representatives that the election should "put to rest the unreasonable suspicion" about e-voting machines.

The National Protection Coalition, composed of several nonpartisan groups that include the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Verified Voting, reported Tuesday afternoon it had received more than 600 calls from voters complaining about problems with e-voting machines around the country.

A separate group, Common Cause, reported receiving 50,000 calls, though not all of them were related to voting technology. Both groups had established toll-free phone lines for voters to report problems.

The National Protection Coalition received 80 reports of problems in New Orleans where machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems failed to start on election morning, resulting in voters being turned away from polls because election officials didn't have a back-up plan. By late afternoon some machines still had not booted up.

Lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and EFF filed a complaint in Civil District Court for the Parish of New Orleans to force election officials to keep the parish polls open longer to accommodate voters disenfranchised by the faulty machines. Sequoia did not return a call for comment by press time.

In Florida, where George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election by only 537 votes, 10 touch-screen voting machines failed at precincts in Broward County.

Voters in Florida and Texas complained about calibration problems with touch-screen machines. Problems occurred when voters touched the screen next to one candidate's name and an "X" appeared in a box next to another candidate's name. The Election Protection Coalition also received more than 32 reports from various states that spread across all the top e-voting brands made by Diebold Election Systems, Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia.

These problems involved e-voting machines that appeared to record votes correctly when voters touched the screen, but indicated a different selection on the review screen before voters cast their ballot. In some cases voters had to redo their ballot five or six times before the correct votes took.

"If we end up with a race as close as predicted, small changes could mean the difference in who wins the presidential election," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's legal director. "We don't have any margin of error by voting machines in a close race. That's particularly troubling."

Voters in Palm Beach County, Florida, reported that when they went to vote on Sequoia machines some races on their electronic ballots were already pre-marked before they started voting. They had to ask poll workers to assist them in removing the selections from the ballot so they could start with a clean ballot. In some cases they weren't successful in doing this.

In Texas, voters casting straight-party tickets reported that machines cast ballots for candidates outside of their chosen party. For example, if a voter chose to vote straight Republican, rather than automatically marking all Republican choices on the ballot, the machine marked some Democratic choices.

And in Pennsylvania voters in at least six precincts that used an older variety of e-voting machines made by Danaher were prevented from voting because of failing machines. Election officials claimed in news reports that they had never had problems with the machines in the past. But Cohn expressed doubts about this.

"Is it true they never had problems in the past or was no one looking (at problems)?" she said. "I suspect if there had been folks looking at elections past (we would have seen problems with the machines). But election officials were able to pretend there were no problems with their machines with no one watching."

Michelle Shafer, spokeswoman for Hart InterCivic, said the problem that occurred in Texas with her company's machines were caused by voters rather than by the machines. The Hart machines are not touch-screen machines but instead use a wheel that voters turn to make their selections. Shafer said after choosing the straight-party option, many voters turned the wheel to manually go through the races and click their choices individually to emphasize them, not realizing that in doing so they de-selected their choices. Shafer said they probably then mistakenly moved the wheel to select a candidate from another party.

"It's not a machine issue," Shafer said. "It's voters not properly following the instructions."

David Beirne, spokesman for Harris County, where some of the problems occurred, said voters had made the same mistake two years ago when political parties instructed voters to go back through the ballot and emphasize their choices.

"I think that often times the voter information passed out to voters is incorrect," he said. "We encourage voters to take their time and ask questions and watch the videotape demonstration that's provided."

Representatives for other voting machine vendors couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

Doug Chapin, director of the Election Reform Information Project, a nonpartisan research group, characterized the e-voting problems reported so far as "lots of littles" that didn't add up to major complications. "We know of no major meltdowns anywhere along the lines some people were worried about," he told the Associated Press.

But David Dill, a founder of Verified Voting and Stanford computer scientist, said although the reports might not appear to be statistically significant -- given that more than 100,000 touch-screen machines are being used in 29 states this year -- they raise questions about the number of problems that are not being caught or reported.

"We're only receiving a small percentage of (reports) on the problems that are actually out there," Dill said. "Most voters wouldn't be motivated to call in and complain and may not know about the number for calling."

Cohn said most voters, if they report problems at all, tend to report them to election officials. She said election officials have been "stingy" in the past about sharing that information with lawyers and watchdog groups.

The Information Technology Association of America, which recently began representing the e-voting machine vendors, called e-voting for early voters a "success."

"Returns suggest nothing but the accurate and secure operation of electronic voting machines," ITAA President Harris Miller, said in a statement.

But Dill noted that the data that voting machine vendors and academics generally use to evaluate the integrity of e-voting machines doesn't include the kinds of problems that voters have been reporting. Generally, the number of undervotes and overvotes on a machine are used to measure their effectiveness.

Undervotes occur when a machine records no choice for a particular race -- either because the machine failed to record it or the voter chose to skip the race. Overvotes occur when voters choose more options or candidates than the race allows. E-voting machines are supposed to make it impossible for voters to overvote.

But "recording a vote for a wrong candidate is not something that shows up in the statistics," Dill said. It doesn't show up in the statistics because officials have no way to know whether a machine incorrectly recorded votes. Without a paper trail or some other way to independently verify that the votes on the machines are the votes voters intended, there's no way to truly measure the accuracy of the machines.

posted by Rei Toei @ 11:13 a.m.