From The New York Times, 1/6/08:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html?ref=politics
Can You Count on Voting Machines?
Alejandra Laviada for The New York Times
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with
voting machines.
It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours
straight.
“I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said.
The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble
again.
For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the
Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November
for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto
the county’s 5,729 touch-screen voting machines.
The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on
memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of
workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS
server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the
votes.
Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting
votes.
Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating
what to do.
A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that
makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen
and pecked at the keyboard.
No one could figure out what was wrong.
So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned
it off and on again.
Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a
second time.
Again, they rebooted.
By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn’t been solved.
Worse was yet to come.
When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so
close that they needed to be recounted.
But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote —
generated by the Diebold machines as they worked — she discovered that
so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved
in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes.
They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and
a machine would generate a replacement copy.
But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed,
what the voters had voted.
She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.
As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through
the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will
once again find itself under a microscope.
In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become
one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral
politics.
Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were
originally intended to add clarity to election results.
But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the
opposite:
they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways;
voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another
before their eyes;
machines crash or begin to count backward;
votes simply vanish.
(In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines
tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though
he’s pretty sure he voted for himself.)
Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in
Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person
“undervote” for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.
The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe —
disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the
fears have now risen to the highest levels of government.
One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting
machines.
California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting
machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half
of its touch-screen devices.
Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state,
released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that
touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.”
She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its
touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the
Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4.
Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon
Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that
would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.
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Harry
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