Washington DC Examiner Editorial - Monday October 3, 2005

http://www.dcexaminer.com

The bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, found no evidence of extensive voter fraud throughout the country. American elections are, by and large, honest and democratic. But the 21-member commission discovered numerous local examples of voting irregularities and even downright fraud. Ex-felons, the deceased and non-citizens all cast ballots in some places and some, such as the 60,000 voters found to be registered in both North and South Carolina, may even have voted twice.

Because it is critical to maintain public confidence in the electoral process, one of the commission's 87 recommendations demands immediate action at both the federal and state level: requiring a paper trail for all electronic voting machines.

You get a paper receipt whenever you use a debit or credit card at an ATM or electronic gas pump, so why can't you get one when you vote? After the hanging chad fiasco in Florida, the federal government spent $3.9 billion to help states get new e-voting machines in place by next year's mid-term elections. But states are not required to produce an auditable paper trail. So for all practical purposes, there can be no recounts in close contests. This is ridiculous, especially since the technology is so readily available commercially.

Maryland Republicans unsuccessfully tried to oust State Board of Elections administrator Linda Lamone, a Democrat, after she spent $55 million to purchase touch-screen voting machines that experts at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere had warned were not tamper-proof. The point was hammered home when a demonstration Diebold AccuVote TS - the same machine Lamone insisted was "safe and reliable" - accidentally changed Sen. Barbara Mikulski's vote from a "no" to a "yes" at last year's Takoma Park Folk Festival.

Lamone continues to insist that no printed voting record is needed, even though her office has commissioned two University of Maryland teams to look into the matter further.

State election officials in North Carolina now admit that six e-voting machines used in a 2002 general election lost ballots because of a software glitch. Poll workers only discovered the problem when they found the total number of absentee ballots - which were each assigned a computer-generated tracking number, i.e. a paper trail - did not match the number of votes recorded on the machines. A company audit later confirmed that the glitch had disenfranchised 436 early voters.

"How can we be sure the other counties didn't lose votes that they didn't catch?" asked Stanford University computer science professor David Dill.

We can't. That's the point.

After the most extensive testing of Diebold touch-screen machines to date, California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson said they had "a failure rate of about 10 percent, and that's not good enough for the voters of California and not good enough for me." So why is it good enough for Maryland?

The software on e-voting machines is proprietary and belongs to the manufacturers, and many contracts do not allow election officials to check it for problems. Without a paper trail, there is literally no way for authorities to know whether a certain machine is working properly, whether it's been programmed correctly - or even if the election results are being electronically manipulated by somebody with Wi-Fi and password access to the system, as industry analysts say is easy enough to do.

The Carter-Baker Commission recommends that all voting machines be equipped with a voter-verifiable and auditable paper trail by 2008 - when the next presidential election is held. Even with paper receipts, they add, post-election audits should still be performed on at least 1 percent of all ballots cast to make sure machines are not programmed to record a vote for one candidate - but print out a receipt for another.

"This high-level, bipartisan panel confirmed that e-voting has introduced an unacceptable amount of uncertainty into voting, which should be the most trusted task performed by government," said Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Matt Zimmerman. Which is why 26 states have already passed paper-trail legislation, with another 14 considering it. And why Maryland voters should demand their state be among them.