Computer scientists from coast to coast have warned that the machines
sometimes err in counting votes and could be easily compromised by
amateur hackers intent on disrupting elections.

In either case, they say, a manual recount would be meaningless if it
was based on corrupted electronic data.

"We were not as knowledgeable as we are now, so we made a lot of
mistakes," Greene recalled.

"We didn't ask the questions we should have asked."

Chief among them: How can we conduct a recount if we don't have any
ballots to count?

Now election officials in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade are
lobbying the state for permission to attach printers to their new
machines so votes can be tallied by hand if a malfunction is suspected
or a recount is called for.

But state officials, including Gov. Jeb Bush, say the machines are
safe, easy to use and replete with safeguards to ensure accuracy.

Last fall, Fort Lauderdale political strategist Ellyn Bogdanoff won a
state Senate seat by only 12 votes out of 10,844 cast.

Mysteriously, 137 voters cast blank electronic ballots in the
election.

Either they had taken the trouble to go to the polls and vote for no
one, officials figured, or the machines hadn't registered the votes.

State law mandated a recount in such a close election.

But since the votes were stored only in the computer's memory, that
was impossible.

So election officials just certified the race.

"The potential for problems this year dwarfs what happened in 2000,
because there's nothing to check," said U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a
Delray Beach Democrat who has lobbied for mandatory paper trails since
Florida started considering touch-screen machines.

He even sued the state over the issue and lost; the case is on appeal.

Anomalies like this have occurred with electronic voting machines
around the country:

----- In Fairfax County, Va., some voters who chose School Board
member Rita S. Thompson last November saw an "X" appear next to her
name, then the "X" disappeared. After the election, tests revealed
that about 1% of votes cast for Thompson were deleted. She lost by
1,662 votes out of more than 157,000 cast.

----- Hinds County, Miss., spent $1.6 million on touch-screen
machines. The machines overheated as soon as polls opened last
November. Polling places ran out of paper ballots, some of which were
handled improperly. The state legislature ordered a new election in
one race, which cost the county about $25,000.

----- In Bernalillo County, N.M., a software glitch in the computer
program used to tally votes ignored 12,000 of the 48,000 electronic
ballots cast in a 2003 election. Officials didn't notice for 10 days.

After touch-screen voting terminals made by Diebold Election Systems
malfunctioned in a March primary, California election officials
discovered that the machines contained uncertified software.

The state barred four counties from using some Diebold models and
approved their use in 11 other counties only after the counties agreed
to new security requirements, including making paper ballots available
as an alternative to voters.

The state sued Diebold this month for allegedly lying about the
security of some of its equipment and is seeking a refund of the $8
million it spent and an additional $11 million spent by Alameda
County.

The state's feud with Diebold prompted Solano County in Northern
California to cancel a $4.1-million contract with Diebold, return
1,200 touch-screen machines and replace them with optical scanners
that read paper and pencil ballots.

"There are some advantages" to touch-screen voting machines, said
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley.

"But they were brought into play before their time."

Election officials aren't the only ones concerned about technical
flaws in voting machines.

Nearly 2,000 engineers, academics and other techies have signed a
petition deriding computerized voting machines as "inherently subject
to programming error, equipment malfunction and malicious tampering."

At the Defcon computer security conference in July, 81% of computer
professionals polled said they had "no confidence or little
confidence" in the "security and reliability" of electronic voting
machines.

Computer scientists from Johns Hopkins University, UC San Diego and
Rice University studied the source code for Diebold machines and
reported in an academic journal that the software was poorly written
and lacked the cryptography necessary to protect key information from
hackers.

As a result, they said, a hacker could vote as many times as he wanted
or tamper with the machines to divert votes cast for one candidate to
someone else.

Diebold said the scientists had inspected an old version of the
software and defended their machines as safe from tampering or error.

Election officials can ask the machines to recount the votes, but if a
software bug or a hacker changed the results before they were counted,
the machine would spit out the same incorrect tally the second time
around.

It's like asking a bank to recalculate your monthly statement without
having evidence that all your transactions were properly recorded.

Computer scientists say the answer is simple: allow the machines to
print paper receipts that could be treated like ballots in a recount.

"We wouldn't trust the software if we wrote it ourselves," said Eugene
H. Spafford, a Purdue University professor and executive director of
the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and
Security.

"Having paper or some other kind of permanent record gives us the
ability to independently perform a check on these machines."

Nevada is the only state that has mandated printers for its
touch-screen systems by November.

California and Ohio have required them to be in place by 2006, and
lawmakers in 21 other states are considering similar action, according
to Electionline.org, a Washington group that follows election reform.

Though some people call them "receipts," they're not like the
transaction records produced by ATMs.

Voters can't take them home, or even touch them.

Here's how it works:

After the voter chooses candidates by touching the screen, a printed
record of the choices appears under clear plastic or glass so he or
she can verify that the computer recorded the selections correctly.

The machine will still tabulate the votes electronically.

But if a malfunction is later discovered, or if the vote is close
enough to warrant a recount, election officials can pull out the paper
for a hand tally.



From The Los Angeles Times, 9/24/04:

Tallying the Woes of Electronic Balloting

By Chris Gaither, Times Staff Writer


WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. --

More than 45 million people in 29 states and the District of Columbia
are set to vote using touch-screen machines Nov. 2.

But the devices once hailed as the answer to the nation's voting woes
are stirring up some serious cases of buyer's remorse here and across
the country.

California officials have accused the companies that make electronic
voting machines of delivering shoddy equipment and are suing to get
their money back.

Candidates in other states seeking to overturn questionable election
results have turned to the courts as well.

Election reform advocates rallied in 19 states this summer, demanding
that the machines be retrofitted to produce paper ballots that could
be tallied in the event of a recount.

Meanwhile, computer scientists from coast to coast have warned that
the machines sometimes err in counting votes and could be easily
compromised by amateur hackers intent on disrupting elections.

In either case, they say, a manual recount would be meaningless if it
was based on corrupted electronic data.

________________________________________________________

It's gonna be a fun election, eh?

Harry