[nfb-talk] Can You Count On Voting Machines

[Michael Bullis]

Well Ray, I do think that blind Americans are pretty much an afterthought to
most Americans so am not surprised that the article gives us little
attention.  As far as the American people being stupid--Well, I have to say,
after living in the world of politics that American voters really aren't
very informed and don't really take their voting responsibilities as
seriously as they should.  I agree with you that we should all vote.  
Mike 

-----Original Message-----
From: nfb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfb-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Ray Foret Jr
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2008 1:04 PM
To: NFB Talk Mailing List
Subject: Re: [nfb-talk] Can You Count On Voting Machines

This rather lengthy article seems to imply that we should just screw the 
whole damn thing and not vote at all.  After all, if no election system is 
perfect, what good is it?  "No good at all"; the article seems to imply. 
The feeling I get from this article seems to be that we should all just 
decide that since no election system is perfect, we'd all just better pack 
it in, sit home and just not bother voting at all.  My other issue with this

article is that it implies that Americans are stupid; with which I disagree.

The barely even mentions our right as blind people to a private vote.  We're

almost an after-thought in that piece.  Well, I say, hang the blasted 
article and go vote.  Look y'all, so long as humans are involved, it aint 
gonna be perfect.

Sincerely yours,
The Constantly Barefooted,
Ray
Home phone and fax:
(985)853-0139
E-mail:
rforetjratbellsouthdotnet
Skype Name:
barefootedray

God bless President George W. Bush!
God bless our troops!
and God bless America

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Bullis" <mabullis at hotmail.com>
To: "'NFB Talk Mailing List'" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2008 11:43 AM
Subject: [nfb-talk] Can You Count On Voting Machines


This rather lengthy article from this Week's Times Sunday Magazine
summarizes issues we face with regard to touch screens and accessible
voting.  Accessibility for voting machines is an issue they also deal with.

Mike Bullis

Can You Count on Voting Machines?

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

[4]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.

It's difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray.

Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at [5]Carnegie Mellon University

who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years,

estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines "fail" in

each election. "In general, those failures result in the loss of zero

or one vote," he told me. "But they're very disturbing to the public."

Indeed, in a more sanguine political environment, this level of error

might be considered acceptable. But in today's highly partisan and

divided country, elections can be decided by unusually slim margins --

and are often bitterly contested. The mistrust of touch-screen

machines is thus equal parts technological and ideological. "A tiny

number of votes can have a huge impact, so machines are part of the

era of sweaty palms," says Doug Chapin, the director of

[6]Electionline.org, a nonpartisan group that monitors voting reform.

Critics have spent years fretting over corruption and the specter of

partisan hackers throwing an election. But the real problem may simply

be inherent in the nature of computers: they can be precise but also

capricious, prone to malfunctions we simply can't anticipate.

During this year's presidential primaries, roughly one-third of all

votes will be cast on touch-screen machines. (New Hampshire voters are

not in this group; they will vote on paper ballots, some of which are

counted in optical scanners.) The same ratio is expected to hold when

Americans choose their president in the fall. It is a very large chunk

of the electorate. So what scares election observers is this: What

happens if the next presidential election is extremely close and

decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed? Will

voters accept a presidency decided by ballots that weren't backed up

on paper and existed only on a computer drive? And what if they don't?

"The issue for me is the unknown," Platten told me when we first spoke

on the phone, back in October. "There's always the unknown factor.

Something -- something -- happens every election."

NEW VOTING TECHNOLOGIES tend to emerge out of crises of confidence. We

change systems only rarely and in response to a public anxiety that

electoral results can no longer be trusted. America voted on paper in

the 19th century, until ballot-box stuffing -- and inept poll workers

who lost bags of votes -- led many to abandon that system. Some

elections officials next adopted lever machines, which record each

vote mechanically. But lever machines have problems of their own, not

least that they make meaningful recounts impossible because they do

not preserve each individual vote. Beginning in the 1960s they were

widely replaced by punch-card systems, in which voters knock holes in

ballots, and the ballots can be stored for a recount. Punch cards

worked for decades without controversy.

Until, of course, the electoral fiasco of 2000. During the Florida

recount in the Bush-Gore election, it became clear that punch cards

had a potentially tragic flaw: "hanging chads." Thousands of voters

failed to punch a hole clean through the ballot, turning the recount

into a torturous argument over "voter intent." On top of that, many

voters confused by the infamous "butterfly ballot" seem to have

mistakenly picked the wrong candidate. Given Bush's microscopic margin

of victory -- he was ahead by only a few hundred votes statewide --

the chads produced the brutal, monthlong legal brawl over how and

whether the recounts should be conducted.

The 2000 election illustrated the cardinal rule of voting systems: if

they produce ambiguous results, they are doomed to suspicion. The

election is never settled in the mind of the public. To this date,

many Gore supporters refuse to accept the legitimacy of [7]George W.

Bush's presidency; and by ultimately deciding the 2000 presidential

election, the [8]Supreme Court was pilloried for appearing overly

partisan.

Many worried that another similar trauma would do irreparable harm to

the electoral system. So in 2002, Congress passed the Help America

Vote Act (HAVA), which gave incentives to replace punch-card machines

and lever machines and authorized $3.9 billion for states to buy new

technology, among other things. At the time, the four main vendors of

voting machines -- Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and Hart -- were

aggressively marketing their new touch-screen machines. Computers

seemed like the perfect answer to the hanging chad. Touch-screen

machines would be clear and legible, unlike the nightmarishly

unreadable "butterfly ballot." The results could be tabulated very

quickly after the polls closed. And best of all, the vote totals would

be conclusive, since the votes would be stored in crisp digital

memory. (Touch-screen machines were also promoted as a way to allow

the blind or paralyzed to vote, via audio prompts and puff tubes. This

became a powerful incentive, because, at the behest of groups

representing the disabled, HAVA required each poll station to have at

least one "accessible" machine.)

HAVA offered no assistance or guidelines as to what type of machine to

buy, and local elections officials did not have many resources to

investigate the choices; indeed, theirs are some of most neglected and

understaffed offices around, because who pays attention to electoral

technology between campaigns? As touch-screen vendors lobbied

elections boards, the machines took on an air of inevitability. For

elections directors terrified of presiding over "the next Florida,"

the cool digital precision of touch-screens seemed like the perfect

antidote.

IN THE LOBBY OF JANE PLATTEN'S OFFICE in Cleveland sits an

AccuVote-TSX, made by Diebold. It is the machine that Cuyahoga County

votes on, and it works like this: Inside each machine there is a

computer roughly as powerful and flexible as a modern hand-held

organizer. It runs Windows CE as its operating system, and Diebold has

installed its own specialized voting software to run on top of

Windows. When the voters tap the screen to indicate their choices, the

computer records each choice on a flash-memory card that fits in a

slot on the machine, much as a flash card stores pictures on your

digital camera. At the end of the election night, these cards are

taken to the county's election headquarters and tallied by the GEMS

server. In case a memory card is accidentally lost or destroyed, the

computer also stores each vote on a different chip inside the machine;

election officials can open the voting machine and remove the chip in

an emergency.

But there is also a third place the vote is recorded. Next to each

machine's LCD screen, there is a printer much like one on a cash

register. Each time a voter picks a candidate on screen, the printer

types up the selections, in small, eight-point letters. Before the

voter pushes "vote," she's supposed to peer down at the ribbon of

paper -- which sits beneath a layer of see-through plastic, to prevent

tampering -- and verify that the machine has, in fact, correctly

recorded her choices. (She can't take the paper vote with her as

proof; the spool of paper remains locked inside the machine until the

end of the day.)

Under Ohio law, the paper copy is the voter's vote. The digital

version is not. That's because the voter can see the paper vote and

verify that it's correct, which she cannot do with the digital one.

The digital records are, in essence, merely handy additional copies

that allow the county to rapidly tally potentially a million votes in

a single evening, whereas counting the paper ballots would take weeks.

Theoretically speaking, the machine offers the best of all possible

worlds. By using both paper and digital copies, the AccuVote promised

Cuyahoga an election that would be speedy, reliable and relatively

inexpensive.

Little of this held true. When the machines were first used in

Cuyahoga Country during the May 2006 primaries, costs ballooned -- and

chaos reigned. The poll workers, many senior citizens who had spent

decades setting up low-tech punch-card systems, were baffled by the

new computerized system and the rather poorly written manuals from

Diebold and the county. "It was insane," one former poll worker told

me. "A lot of people over the age of 60, trying to figure out these

machines." Since the votes were ferried to the head office on small,

pocket-size memory cards, it was easy for them to be misplaced, and

dozens went missing.

On Election Day, poll workers complained that 143 machines were

broken; dozens of other machines had printer jams or mysteriously

powered down. More than 200 voter-card encoders -- which create the

cards that let voters vote -- went missing. When the machines weren't

malfunctioning, they produced errors at a stunning rate: one audit of

the election discovered that in 72.5 percent of the audited machines,

the paper trail did not match the digital tally on the memory cards.

This was hardly the first such incident involving touch-screen

machines. So it came as little surprise that Diebold, a company once

known primarily for making safes and A.T.M.'s, subsequently tried to

sell off its voting-machine business and, failing to find a buyer,

last August changed the name of the division to Premier Election

Solutions (an analyst told American Banker that the voting machines

were responsible for "5 percent of revenue and 100 percent of bad

public relations").

Nearly a year after the May 2006 electoral disaster, Ohio's new

secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, asked the entire four-person

Cuyahoga elections board to resign, and Platten -- then the interim

director of the board -- was tapped to clean up the mess. Platten had

already instituted a blizzard of tiny fixes. She added

responsibilities to the position of "Election Day technician" --

filled by young, computer-savvy volunteers who could help the

white-haired poll workers reboot touch-screens when they crashed. She

bought plastic business-card binders to hold memory cards from a

precinct, so none would be misplaced. "Robocalls" at home from a

phone-calling service reminded volunteers to show up. Her staff

rewrote the inscrutable Diebold manuals in plain English.

The results were immediate. Over the next several months, Cuyahoga's

elections ran with many fewer crashes and shorter lines of voters.

Platten's candor and hard work won her fans among even the most

fanatical anti-touch-screen activists. "It's a miracle," I was told by

Adele Eisner, a Cuyahoga County resident who has been a vocal critic

of touch-screen machines. "Jane Platten actually understands that

elections are for the people." The previous board, Eisner went on to

say, ridiculed critics who claimed the machines would be trouble and

refused to meet with them; the new replacements, in contrast,

sometimes seemed as skeptical about the voting machines as the

activists, and Eisner was invited in to wander about on election

night, videotaping the activity.

Still, the events of Election Day 2007 showed just how ingrained the

problems with the touch-screens were. The printed paper trails caused

serious headaches all day long: at one polling place, printers on most

of the machines weren't functioning the night before the polls opened.

Fortunately, one of the Election Day technicians was James Diener, a

gray-haired former computer-and-mechanical engineer who opened up the

printers, discovered that metal parts were bent out of shape and

managed to repair them. The problem, he declared cheerfully, was that

the printers were simply "cheap quality" (a complaint I heard from

many election critics). "I'm an old computer nerd," Diener said. "I

can do anything with computers. Nothing's wrong with computers. But

this is the worst way to run an election."

He also pointed out several other problems with the machines,

including the fact that the majority of voters he observed did not

check the paper trail to see whether their votes were recorded

correctly -- even though that paper record is their legal ballot. (I

noticed this myself, and many other poll workers told me the same

thing.) Possibly they're simply lazy, or the poll workers forget to

tell them to; or perhaps they're older and couldn't see the printer's

tiny type anyway. And even if voters do check the paper trail, Diener

pointed out, how do they know the machine is recording it for sure?

"The whole printing thing is a farce," he said.

What's more, the poll workers regularly made security errors. When a

touch-screen machine is turned on for the first time on Election Day,

two observers from different parties are supposed to print and view

the "zero tape" that shows there are no votes already recorded on the

machine; a hacker could fix the vote by programming the machine to

start, for example, with a negative total of votes for a candidate.

Yet when I visited one Cleveland polling station at daybreak, the two

checkers signed zero tapes without actually checking the zero totals.

And then, of course, there were the server crashes, and the recording

errors on 20 percent of the paper recount ballots.

Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Diebold, said that machine flaws were

not necessarily to blame for the problems. The paper rolls were

probably installed incorrectly by the poll workers. And in any case,

he added, the paper trail was originally designed merely to help in

auditing the accuracy of an election -- it wasn't supposed to be

robust enough to serve as a legal ballot, as Ohio chose to designate

it. But the servers were indeed an issue of the machine's design; when

his firm tested them weeks later, it found a data bottleneck that

would need to be fixed with a software update.

The Nov. 6 vote in Cuyahoga County offered a sobering lesson. Having

watched Platten's staff and the elections board in action, I could see

they were a model of professionalism. Yet they still couldn't get

their high-tech system to work as intended. For all their diligence

and hard work, they were forced, in the end, to discard much of their

paper and simply trust that the machines had recorded the votes

accurately in digital memory.

THE QUESTION, OF COURSE, is whether the machines should be trusted to

record votes accurately. Ed Felten doesn't think so. Felten is a

computer scientist at [9]Princeton University, and he has become

famous for analyzing -- and criticizing -- touch-screen machines. In

fact, the first serious critics of the machines -- beginning 10 years

ago -- were computer scientists. One might expect computer scientists

to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out

that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be

terrified that they're running elections.

This is because computer scientists understand, from hard experience,

that complex software can't function perfectly all the time. It's the

nature of the beast. Myriad things can go wrong. The software might

have bugs -- errors in the code made by tired or overworked

programmers. Or voters could do something the machines don't expect,

like touching the screen in two places at once. "Computers crash and

we don't know why," Felten told me. "That's just a routine part of

computers."

One famous example is the "sliding finger bug" on the Diebold

AccuVote-TSX, the machine used in Cuyahoga. In 2005, the state of

California complained that the machines were crashing. In tests,

Diebold determined that when voters tapped the final "cast vote"

button, the machine would crash every few hundred ballots. They

finally intuited the problem: their voting software runs on top of

Windows CE, and if a voter accidentally dragged his finger downward

while touching "cast vote" on the screen, Windows CE interpreted this

as a "drag and drop" command. The programmers hadn't anticipated that

Windows CE would do this, so they hadn't programmed a way for the

machine to cope with it. The machine just crashed.

Even extremely careful programmers can accidentally create bugs like

this. But critics also worry that touch-screen voting machines aren't

designed very carefully at all. In the infrequent situations where

computer scientists have gained access to the guts of a voting

machine, they've found alarming design flaws. In 2003, Diebold

employees accidentally posted the AccuVote's source code on the

Internet; scientists who analyzed it found that, among other things, a

hacker could program a voter card to let him cast as many votes as he

liked. Ed Felten's lab, while analyzing an anonymously donated

AccuVote-TS (a different model from the one used in Cuyahoga County)

in 2006, discovered that the machine did not "authenticate" software:

it will run any code a hacker might surreptitiously install on an

easily insertable flash-memory card. After California's secretary of

state hired computer scientists to review the state's machines last

spring, they found that on one vote-tallying server, the default

password was set to the name of the vendor -- something laughably easy

for a hacker to guess.

But the truth is that it's hard for computer scientists to figure out

just how well or poorly the machines are made, because the vendors who

make them keep the details of their manufacture tightly held. Like

most software firms, they regard their "source code" -- the computer

programs that run on their machines -- as a trade secret. The public

is not allowed to see the code, so computer experts who wish to assess

it for flaws and reliability can't get access to it. Felten and voter

rights groups argue that this "black box" culture of secrecy is the

biggest single problem with voting machines. Because the machines are

not transparent, their reliability cannot be trusted.

The touch-screen vendors disagree. They point out that a small number

of approved elections officials in each state and county are allowed

to hold a copy in escrow and to examine it (though they are required

to sign nondisclosure agreements preventing them from discussing the

software publicly). Further, vendors argue, the machines are almost

always tested by the government before they're permitted to be used.

The Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency, this year began

to fully certify four private-sector labs to stress-test machines.

They subject them to environmental pressures like heat and vibration

to ensure they won't break down on Election Day; and they run mock

elections, to verify that the machines can count correctly. In almost

all cases, if a vendor updates the software or hardware, it must be

tested all over again, which can take months. "It's an extremely

rigorous process," says Ken Fields, a spokesman for the voting-machine

company ES&S.

If the machines are tested and officials are able to examine the

source code, you might wonder why machines with so many flaws and bugs

have gotten through. It is, critics insist, because the testing is

nowhere near dilligent enough, and the federal regulators are too

sympathetic and cozy with the vendors. The 2002 federal guidelines,

the latest under which machines currently in use were qualified, were

vague about how much security testing the labs ought to do. The labs

were also not required to test any machine's underlying operating

system, like Windows, for weaknesses.

Vendors paid for the tests themselves, and the results were considered

proprietary, so the public couldn't find out how they were conducted.

The nation's largest tester of voting machines, Ciber Inc., was

temporarily suspended after federal officials found that the company

could not properly document the tests it claimed to have performed.

"The types of malfunctions we're seeing would be caught in a

first-year computer science course," says Lillie Coney, an associate

director with the Electronic Privacy Information Commission, which is

releasing a study later this month critical of the federal tests.

In any case, the federal testing is not, strictly speaking, mandatory.

The vast majority of states "certify" their machines as roadworthy.

But since testing is extremely expensive, many states, particularly

smaller ones, simply accept whatever passes through a federal lab. And

while it's true that state and local elections officials can generally

keep a copy of the source code, critics say they rarely employ

computer programmers sophisticated enough to understand it. Quite the

contrary: When a county buys touch-screen voting machines, its

elections director becomes, as Warren Parish, a voting activist in

Florida, told me, "the head of the largest I.T. department in their

entire government, in charge of hundreds or thousands of new computer

systems, without any training at all." Many elections directors I

spoke with have been in the job for years or even decades, working

mostly with paper elections or lever machines. Few seemed very

computer-literate.

The upshot is a regulatory environment in which, effectively, no one

assumes final responsibility for whether the machines function

reliably. The vendors point to the federal and state governments, the

federal agency points to the states, the states rely on the federal

testing lab and the local officials are frequently hapless.

This has created an environment, critics maintain, in which the people

who make and sell machines are now central to running elections.

Elections officials simply do not know enough about how the machines

work to maintain or fix them. When a machine crashes or behaves

erratically on Election Day, many county elections officials must rely

on the vendors -- accepting their assurances that the problem is fixed

and, crucially, that no votes were altered.

In essence, elections now face a similar outsourcing issue to that

seen in the Iraq war, where the government has ceded so many core

military responsibilities to firms like [10]Halliburton and

[11]Blackwater that Washington can no longer fire the contractor.

Vendors do not merely sell machines to elections departments. In many

cases, they are also paid to train poll workers, design ballots and

repair broken machines, for years on end.

"This is a crazy world," complained Ion Sancho, the elections

supervisor of Leon County in Florida. "The process is so under control

by the vendor. The primary source of information comes only from the

vendor, and the vendor has a conflict of interest in telling you the

truth. The vendor isn't going to tell me that his buggy software is

why I can't get the right time on my audit logs."

As more and more evidence of machine failure emerges, senior

government officials are sounding alarms as did the computer geeks of

years ago over the growing role of private companies in elections.

When I talked to Jennifer Brunner in October, she told me she wished

all of Ohio's machines were "open source" -- that is, run on computer

code that is published publicly, for anyone to see. Only then, she

says, would voters trust it; and the scrutiny of thousands of computer

scientists worldwide would ferret out any flaws and bugs.

On Nov. 6, the night of the Cuyahoga crashes, Jeff Hastings -- the

Republican head of the election board -- sat and watched the Diebold

technicians try to get the machines running. "Criminy," he said.

"You've got four different vendors. Why should their source codes be

private? You've privatized the essential building block of the

election system."

The federal government appears to have taken that criticism to heart.

New standards for testing voting machines now being implemented by the

E.A.C. are regarded as more rigorous; some results are now being

published online.

Amazingly, the Diebold spokesman, Chris Riggall, admitted to me that

the company is considering making the software open source on its next

generation of touch-screen machines, so that anyone could download,

inspect or repair the code. The pressure from states is growing, he

added, and "if the expectations of our customers change, we'll have to

respond to that reality."

IF YOU WANT TO GET a sense of the real stakes in voting-machine

politics, Christine Jennings has a map to show you. It is a sprawling,

wall-size diagram of the voting precincts that make up Florida's 13th

district, and it hangs on the wall of her campaign office in Sarasota,

where she ran for the Congressional seat in November 2006. Jennings, a

Democrat, lost the seat by 369 votes to the Republican, Vern Buchanan,

in a fierce fight to replace [12]Katherine Harris. But Jennings

quickly learned of an anomaly in the voting: some 18,000 people had

"undervoted." That is, they had voted in every other race -- a few

dozen were on the ballot, including a gubernatorial contest -- but

abstained in the Jennings-Buchanan fight. A normal undervote in any

given race is less than 3 percent. In this case, a whopping 13 percent

of voters somehow decided to not vote.

"See, look at this," Jennings said, dragging me over to the map when I

visited her in November. Her staff had written the size of the

undervote in every precinct in Sarasota, where the undervotes

occurred: 180 votes in one precinct, 338 in another. "I mean, it's

huge!" she said. "It's just unbelievable." She pointed to Precinct

150, a district on the south end of Sarasota County. Buchanan received

346 votes, Jennings received 275 and the undervote was 133. "I mean,

people would walk in and vote for everything except this race?" she

said. "Why?"

Jennings says he believes the reason is simple: Sarasota's

touch-screen machines malfunctioned -- and lost votes that could have

tipped the election in her favor. Her staff has received hundreds of

complaints from voters reporting mysterious behavior on the part of

the machines. The specific model that Sarasota used was the iVotronic,

by the company ES&S. According to the complaints, when voters tried to

touch the screen for Jennings, the iVotronic wouldn't accept it, or

would highlight Buchanan's name instead. When they got to the final

pages of the ballot, where they reviewed their picks, the complainants

said, the Jennings-Buchanan race was missing -- even though they were

sure they'd voted in it. The reports streamed in not merely from

technophobic senior citizens but also from tech-savvy younger people,

including a woman with a Ph.D. in computer science and a saleswoman

who actually works for a firm that sells touch-screen devices. (Even

Vern Buchanan's wife reported having trouble voting for her husband.)

If the election had been in Cuyahoga, the paper trail might have

settled the story. But the iVotronic, unlike Cuyahoga's machines, does

not provide a paper backup. It records votes only in digital memory:

on a removable flash-memory card and on an additional flash-memory

chip embedded inside the machine. Since the Jennings-Buchanan election

was so close, state law called for an automatic recount. But on a

paperless machine like the iVotronic, a recount is purely digital --

it consists of nothing but removing the flash memory inside the

machine and hitting "print" again. Jennings did, indeed, lose the

recount; when they reprinted, elections workers found that the

internal chips closely matched the original count (Jennings picked up

four more votes). But for Jennings this is meaningless, because she

says it was the screens that malfunctioned.

As evidence, she brandishes pieces of evidence she says are smoking

guns. One is a memo from ES&S executives, issued in August 2006,

warning that they had found a bug in the iVotronic software that

produced a delay in the screen; after a voter made her choice, it

would take a few seconds for the screen to display it. This, Jennings

noted, could cause problems, because a voter, believing that the

machine had not recorded her first touch, might push the screen again

-- accidentally deselecting her initial vote. Jennings also suspects

that the iVotronic's hardware may have malfunctioned. An August HDNet

investigation by [13]Dan Rather discovered that the company

manufacturing the touchscreens for the iVotronic had a history of

production flaws. The flaw affected the calibration of the screen:

When exposed to humidity -- much like the weather in Florida -- the

screen would gradually lose accuracy.

Elections officials in Sarasota and ES&S hotly disagree that the

machines were in error, noting that the calibration problems with the

screens were fixed before the election. Kathy Dent, Sarasota's

elections supervisor, suspects that the undervote was real -- which is

to say, voters intentionally skipped the race, to punish Jennings and

Buchanan for waging a particularly vitriolic race. "People were really

fed up," she told me. Other observers say voters were simply confused

by the ballot design and didn't see the Jennings-Buchanan race.

To try to settle the question, a government audit tried to test

whether the machines had malfunctioned. The state acquired a copy of

the iVotronic source code from ES&S and commissioned a group of

computer scientists to inspect it. Their report said they could find

no flaws in the code that would lead to such a large undervote.

Meanwhile, the state conducted a mock election, getting elections

workers to repeatedly click the screens on iVotronic machines, voting

Jennings or Buchanan. Again, no accidental undervote appeared. Early

results from a separate test by an [14]M.I.T. professor found that

when voters were presented with the Sarasota ballot, over 16 percent

accidentally skipped over the Jennings-Buchanan race -- suggesting

that poor ballot design and voter error was, indeed, part of the

problem.

These explanations have not satisfied Jennings and her supporters.

Kendall Coffey, one of Jennings's lawyers, has a different theory: the

votes were mostly lost because of a "nonrecurring software bug" -- a

quirk that, like the sliding-finger bug, only crops up some of the

time, propelled by voter actions that the audits did not replicate,

like a voter's accidentally touching the screen in two places at once.

For her part, Jennings brushes off the idea that voters were punishing

her and Buchanan. Plenty of Congressional fights are nasty, she says,

but they almost never yield 13 percent undervotes.

And on and on it goes. ES&S and Sarasota correctly point out that

Jennings has no proof that a bug exists. Jennings correctly points out

that her opponents have no proof a bug doesn't exist. This is the

ultimate political legacy of touch-screen voting machines and the

privatization of voting machinery generally. When invisible, secretive

software runs an election, it allows for endless mistrust and muttered

accusations of conspiracy. The inscrutability of the software --

combined with touch-screen machines' well-documented history of weird

behavior -- allows critics to level almost any accusation against the

machines and have it sound plausible. "It's just like the Kennedy

assassination," Shamos, the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist,

laments. "There's no matter of evidence that will stop people from

spinning yarns."

Part of the problem stems from the fact that voting requires a level

of precision we demand from virtually no other technology. We demand

that the systems behind A.T.M.'s and credit cards be accurate, of

course. But if they're not, we can quickly detect something is wrong:

we notice that our balance is off and call the bank, or the bank

notices someone in China bought $10,000 worth of clothes and calls us

to make sure it's legitimate. But in an election, the voter must

remain anonymous to the government. If a machine crashes and the

county worries it has lost some ballots, it cannot go back and ask

voters how they voted -- because it doesn't know who they are. It is

the need for anonymity that fuels the quest for perfection in voting

machines.

Perfection isn't possible, of course; every voting system has flaws.

So historically, the public -- and candidates for public office --

have grudgingly accepted that their voting systems will produce some

errors here and there. The deep, ongoing consternation over

touch-screen machines stems from something new: the unpredictability

of computers. Computers do not merely produce errors; they produce

errors of unforeseeable magnitude. Will people trust a system when

they never know how big or small its next failure will be?

ON THE FRIDAY BEFORE the November elections in Pennsylvania, I

wandered into a church in a suburb of Pittsburgh. The church was going

to serve as a poll location, and I was wondering: Had the voting

machines been dropped off? Were they lying around unguarded -- and

could anyone gain access to them?

When I approached the side door of the church at 6 p.m., two women

were unloading food into the basement kitchen. (They were visitors

from another church who had a key to get in, but they told me they'd

found the door unlocked.) I held the door for them, chatted politely,

then strolled into the otherwise completely empty building. Neither

woman asked why I was there.

I looked over in the corner and there they were: six iVotronic voting

machines, stacked up neatly. While the women busied themselves in

their car, I was left completely alone with the machines. The

iVotronics had been sealed shut with numbered tamper seals to prevent

anyone from opening a machine illicitly, but cutting and resealing

them looked pretty easy. In essence, I could have tampered with the

machines in any way I wanted, with very little chance of being

detected or caught.

Is it possible that someone could hack voting machines and rig an

election? Elections officials insist that they are extremely careful

to train poll workers to recognize signs of machines that had been

tampered with. They also claim, frequently, that the machines are

carefully watched. Neither is entirely true. Machines often sit for

days before elections in churches, and while churches may be

wonderfully convenient polling locations, they're about as insecure a

location as you could imagine: strangers are supposed to wander into

churches. And while most poll workers do carefully check to ensure

that the tamper seals on the machines are unbroken, I heard reports

from poll workers who saw much more lax behavior in their colleagues.

Yet here's the curious thing: Almost no credible scientific critics of

touch-screen voting say they believe any machines have ever been

successfully hacked. Last year, Ed Felten, the computer scientist from

Princeton, wrote a report exhaustively documenting the many ways a

Diebold AccuVote-TSX could be hacked -- including a technique for

introducing a vote-rigging virus that would spread from machine to

machine in a precinct. But Felten says the chance this has really

happened is remote. He argues that the more likely danger of

touch-screen machines is not in malice but in errors. Michael Shamos

agrees. "If there are guys who are trying to tamper with elections

through manipulation of software, we would have seen evidence of it,"

he told me. "Nobody ever commits the perfect crime the first time. We

would have seen a succession of failed attempts leading up to possibly

a successful attempt. We've never seen it."

This is a great oddity in the debate over electronic voting. When

state officials in California and Ohio explain why they're moving away

from touch-screen voting, they inevitably cite hacking as a chief

concern. And the original, left-wing opposition to the machines in the

2004 election focused obsessively on Diebold's C.E.O. proclaiming that

he would help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes" for Bush. Those fears

still dominate the headlines, but in the real world of those who

conduct and observe voting machines, the realistic threat isn't

conspiracy. It's unreliability, incompetence and sheer error.

IF YOU WANTED to know where the next great eruption of voting-machine

scandal is likely to emerge, you'd have to drive deep into the middle

of Pennsylvania. Tucked amid rolling, forested hills is tiny

Bellefonte. It is where the elections board of Centre County has its

office, and in the week preceding the November election, the elections

director, Joyce McKinley, conducted a public demonstration of the

county's touch-screen voting machines. She would allow anyone from the

public to test six machines to ensure they worked as intended.

"Remember, we're here to observe the machines, not debate them," she

said dryly. The small group that had turned out included a handful of

anti-touch-screen activists, including Mary Vollero, an art teacher

who wore pins saying "No War in Iraq" and "Books Not Bombs." As we

gathered around, I could understand why the county board had approved

the purchase of the machines two years ago. For a town with a

substantial elderly population, the electronic screens were large,

crisp and far easier to read than small-print paper ballots. "The

voters around here love 'em," McKinley shrugged.

But what's notable about Centre County is that it uses the iVotronic

-- the very same star-crossed machine from Sarasota. Given the

concerns about the lack of a paper trail on the iVotronics, why didn't

Centre County instead buy a machine that produces a paper record?

Because Pennsylvania state law will not permit any machine that would

theoretically make it possible to figure out how someone voted. And if

a Diebold AccuVote-TSX, for instance, were used in a precinct where

only, say, a dozen people voted -- a not-uncommon occurrence in small

towns -- then an election worker could conceivably watch who votes, in

what order, and unspool the tape to figure out how they voted. (And

there are no alternatives; all touch-screen machines with paper trails

use spools.) As a result, nearly 40 percent of Pennsylvania's counties

bought iVotronics.

Though it has gone Democratic in the last few presidential elections,

Pennsylvania is considered a swing state. As the political consultant

[15]James Carville joked, it's a mix of red and blue: you've got

Pittsburgh and Philadelphia at either end and Alabama in the middle.

It also has 21 electoral-college votes, a relatively large number that

could decide a tight presidential race. Among election-machine

observers, this provokes a shudder of anticipation. If the

presidential vote is close, it could well come down to a recount in

Pennsylvania. And a recount could uncover thousands of votes recorded

on machines that displayed aberrant behavior -- with no paper trail.

Would the public accept it? Would the candidates? As Candice Hoke, the

head of Ohio's Center for Election Integrity, puts it: "If it was

Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, everyone is saying it's going to be

Pennsylvania in 2008."

The prospect of being thrust into the national spotlight has already

prompted many counties to spar over ditching their iVotronics. The

machines were an election issue in Centre County in November, with

several candidates for county commissioner running on a pledge to get

rid of the devices. (Two won and are trying to figure out if they can

afford it.) And the opposition to touch-screens isn't just coming from

Democrats. When the Pennsylvania Republican [16]Rick Santorum lost his

Senate seat in 2006, some Santorum voters complained that the

iVotronics "flipped" their votes before their eyes. In Pittsburgh, the

chief opponent of the machines is David Fawcett, the lone Republican

on the county board of elections. "It's not a partisan issue," he

says. "And even if it was, Republicans, at least in this state, would

have a much greater interest in accuracy. The capacity for error is

big, and the error itself could be so much greater than it could be on

prior systems."

GIVEN THAT THERE IS NO perfect voting system, is there at least an

optimal one? Critics of touch-screen machines say that the best choice

is "optical scan" technology. With this system, the voter pencils in

her vote on a paper ballot, filling in bubbles to indicate which

candidates she prefers. The vote is immediately tangible to the

voters; they see it with their own eyes, because they personally

record it. The tallying is done rapidly, because the ballots are fed

into a computerized scanner. And if there's a recount, the elections

officials can simply take out the paper ballots and do it by hand.

Optical scanning is used in what many elections experts regard as the

"perfect elections" of Leon County in Florida, where Ion Sancho is the

supervisor of elections. In the late '80s, when the county was

replacing its lever machines, Sancho investigated touch-screens. But

he didn't think they were user-friendly, didn't believe they would

provide a reliable recount and didn't want to be beholden to a

private-sector vendor. So he bought the optical-scanning devices from

[17]Unisys and trained his staff to be able to repair problems when

the machines broke or malfunctioned. His error rate -- how often his

system miscounts a ballot -- is three-quarters of a percent at its

highest, and has dipped as low as three-thousandths of a percent.

More important, his paper trail prevents endless fighting over the

results of tight elections. In one recent contest, a candidate claimed

that his name had not appeared on the ballot in one precinct. So

Sancho went into the Leon County storage, broke the security seals on

the records, and pulled out the ballots. The name was there; the

candidate was wrong. "He apologized to me," Sancho recalls. "And

that's what you can't do with touch-screen technology. You never could

have proven to that person's satisfaction that the screen didn't show

his name. I like that certainty. The paper ends the discussion."

Sancho has never had a legal fight over a disputed election result.

"The losers have admitted they lost, which is what you want," he adds.

"You have to be able to convince the loser they lost."

That, in a nutshell, is what people crave in the highly partisan arena

of modern American politics: an election that can be extremely close

and yet regarded by all as fair. Not only must the losing candidate

believe in the loss; the public has to believe in it, too.

This is why Florida's governor, Charlie Crist, stung by the debacle in

Sarasota, persuaded the state to abandon its iVotronic machines before

the 2008 presidential elections and adopt optical scanning; and why,

in Ohio, Cuyahoga County is planning to spend up to $12 million to

switch to optical scanning in the next year (after the county paid $21

million for its touch-screens just a few years ago).

Still, optical scanning is hardly a flawless system. If someone

doesn't mark a ballot clearly, a recount can wind up back in the

morass of arguing over "voter intent." The machines also need to be

carefully calibrated so they don't miscount ballots. Blind people may

need an extra device installed to help them vote. Poorly trained poll

workers could simply lose ballots. And the machines do, in fact, run

software that can be hacked: Sancho himself has used computer

scientists to hack his machines. It's also possible that any complex

software isn't well suited for running elections. Most software firms

deal with the inevitable bugs in their product by patching them;

[18]Microsoft still patches its seven-year-old Windows XP several

times a month. But vendors of electronic voting machines do not have

this luxury, because any update must be federally tested for months.

There are also serious logistical problems for the states that are

switching to optical scan machines this election cycle. Experts

estimate that it takes at least two years to retrain poll workers and

employees on a new system; Cuyahoga County is planning to do it only

three months. Even the local activists who fought to bring in optical

scanning say this shift is recklessly fast -- and likely to cause

problems worse than the touch-screen machines would. Indeed, this

whipsawing from one voting system to the next is another danger in our

modern electoral wars. Public crises of confidence in voting machines

used to come along rarely, every few decades. But now every single

election cycle seems to provoke a crisis, a thirst for a new

technological fix. The troubles of voting machines may subside as

optical scanning comes in, but they're unlikely to ever go away.

Clive Thompson, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes

frequently about technology.




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