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Electronic Voting Is Questioned
By George Merritt
The Associated Press
Monday 31 December 2007
Denver - With the presidential race in full swing, Colorado and other states
have found critical flaws in the accuracy and security of their electronic voting
machines, forcing officials to scramble to return to the paper ballots they
abandoned after the Florida debacle of 2000.
In December alone, top election officials in Ohio and Colorado declared that
widely used voting equipment is unfit for elections.
"Every system that is out there, one state or another has found that they
are no good," said John Gideon of the advocacy group Voters Unite. "Everybody
is starting to look at this now and starting to realize that there is something
wrong."
The swing states of California, Ohio and Florida have found that security on
touch-screen voting machines is inadequate. Testers have been able to disable
the systems and even change vote totals.
Florida's "hanging chads" in the disputed 2000 Al Gore-George W.
Bush election exposed the imperfection of paper ballot counting and helped lead
to a $3 billion government initiative to bring voting into the digital age.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 required that states have electronic equipment
in place by 2008.
There are no documented cases of actual election tampering involving electronic
voting machines.
But in tests, researchers in Ohio and Colorado found that electronic voting
systems could be corrupted with magnets or with Treos and other similar handheld
devices.
In Colorado, two kinds of Sequoia Voting Systems electronic voting machines
used in Denver and three other counties were decertified because of security
weaknesses, including a lack of password protection. Equipment made by Election
Systems and Software had programming errors. And optical scanning machines,
made by Hart InterCivic, had an error rate of one out of every 100 votes during
tests by the state.
"I was surprised," Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman said
Friday of the failures his office found. "It's an awful position to be
put in, but I feel strongly it's important that this equipment be secure and
accurately count a vote."
Now some states are turning back to paper - in some cases, just weeks before
primary elections.
California, Ohio and Florida have chosen to use scanning machines that count
paper ballots electronically.
In Colorado, which has spent $41 million in federal grants on electronic systems,
many of the state's nearly 3 million registered voters - and the county officials
who conduct the voting - don't know what their elections will look like in
2008.
Coffman and Colorado's clerks and recorders are in a dispute over whether to
use mail-in ballots or cast paper ballots at polling places.
All fear time is running out.
"We look at each other and go, 'We have used this equipment in three elections.
Why did it get taken to a test board and get decertified?'" said Debbie
Green, who heads the Colorado County Clerks Association and is the clerk and
recorder of rural Park County. "There are some counties having elections
in January and February and they don't have any election equipment."
Vendors of the electronic voting machines warn against a rush back to paper.
It can take two years to put a voting system in place, and overhauling a system
just weeks before some states hold presidential primaries will invite a new
round of problems, they say.
"To throw the baby out with the bath water is certainly shortsighted,"
said David Beirne, executive director of the Election Technology Council, which
represents manufacturers of 90 percent of electronic systems used in the country.
States have their own certification standards, complicating things for manufacturers.
"From an industry standpoint, trying to design a voting system when you
don't know how it's being judged is causing a lot of problems," Beirne
said.
And having a paper ballot does not guarantee security.
"If you look at the history of election fraud, you are really talking
about paper," said Merle King, executive director of the Center for Election
Systems at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
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