The Washington Post

August 3, 2003

MARYLAND RECENTLY committed more than $55 million to buy touch-screen voting machines. Now a study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University suggests that the machines may be vulnerable to fraud and other abuse. The warning deserves to be taken seriously.

MARYLAND RECENTLY committed more than $55 million to buy touch-screen voting machines. Now a study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University suggests that the machines may be vulnerable to fraud and other abuse. The warning deserves to be taken seriously.

State election officials are standing by their new system. It is intended to be efficient, accurate, consistent across jurisdictions and easy to use -- to guarantee, in other words, that Maryland does not become a Florida 2000. The Diebold Elections Systems machines already have been used in Montgomery, Prince George's, Allegany and Dorchester counties, as well as in Georgia, California and Kansas. State election officials say the system performed well in those places and during a rigorous battery of tests. They are aiming for almost all of Maryland to have the machines installed by March.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins's Information Security Institute say that the system is prone to errors and tampering. Because the machines use smart-card technology, they say, someone could program a counterfeit card to cast numerous ballots at a time. In addition, they raise concerns that voting officials could, accidentally or intentionally, program machines to count ballots cast for one candidate toward another's tally -- and voters would never know. Diebold officials say the researchers were studying a year-old, superseded version of their computer code. They also say that the kind of cheating that the researchers may have managed in a laboratory environment could not take place under real-life conditions.

Touch screens do promise important benefits, such as accessibility for disabled voters and voters who don't speak English. But the bedrock requirement of any system is its ability to deliver a correct and verifiable tally. No purely electronic system is fail-safe; most technological experts agree that an old-fashioned paper trail is the best defense against fraud and failure. Unfortunately, a paper record that a voter could remove from a voting site would open the door to vote buying or other coercive tactics.

Some parts of Maryland, such as Baltimore County, have discussed asking for an extension of the deadline to implement the system. Although some requests have already been withdrawn, the state elections office should be open to such appeals. A failure in an electronic voting system could pose a far greater threat than hanging chads.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company