| The fix isn't in at polls After chad chaos, no easy answers 04/08/2001 By Doug Bedell / The Dallas Morning News
McKINNEY – For many Americans, the Florida punch-card fiasco during the 2000 presidential election was an embarrassment for a nation that prides itself on its technological innovation. For Larry Ensminger, it vindicated all the years he and his compadres at Global Election Systems have spent trekking from state to state, warning election administrators that a breakdown was imminent. "We used to have a saying around here: Nobody's ever gotten up, looked outside and said, 'It's a great-looking day; I think I'll go out and buy a voting system,'" said Mr. Ensminger, a vice president at Global Election. "It's always been hard to get people to listen." The nation's "ain't-broke-don't-fix-it" mind-set apparently dissolved Nov. 7 when hanging chads held the presidential election hostage for 36 days. After that, phone inquiries started streaming into Global Election and other purveyors of electronic voting mechanisms. Election officials from across the country inundated voting system innovators with questions about modernizing decrepit systems. Since January, the push for quick fixes has settled into a more measured assessment, looking at costs, databases, bureaucratic hurdles and the inherent problems with e-voting. Some conclusions have emerged: • The Internet is not the immediate answer. So said the National Science Foundation-funded Internet Policy Institute in a March 6 report. • Before presidential vote-counting can be overhauled, states must wrestle with the crazy-quilt of voting methods used in their counties, experts agree. • Any conversion will be expensive. At a recent seminar on voting system problems sponsored by Harvard University, some election administrators estimated that a nationwide conversion to electronic voting would cost about $6 billion. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who became the symbol for a dysfunctional election, estimated it would cost $20 million just for Florida to rent and deploy Global Election's precinct-based optical scanners for 2002. In Texas, legislative estimates show it would cost at least $25 million to eliminate punch-card systems in the 14 counties that still use them. But doing nothing is not an option, politicians say. Ahead lie gut-wrenching decisions for both developers of technology and government leaders. "I do think people now see the importance of it all, and I think we'll move quite rapidly," said Janet Caldow, director of IBM's Center for Electronic Communities and Institute for Electronic Government (www.ieg.ibm.com). "But when something only happens every two or four years, it's difficult to become a high priority in any budgeting process." No standards Covering one wall of Global Election Systems headquarters just off State Highway 75 is a U.S. map that reveals the breadth of the problem. Color-coding for each of the 3,140 counties shows the current voting method – levered machine, punch card, optical scanner or some form of electronic voting. It looks like a piece of abstract art. Splotches of color run everywhere with few discernable patterns. Illinois and New York are solid green, indicating that they solely use the lever vote. Mr. Ensminger explains that those states are strongly union, and labor leaders guard the jobs surrounding election equipment. Some states use three or four methods. Others, such as Arizona and Alaska, have experimented with Internet voting methods for state primaries or straw votes. Any nationwide standardization would require massive training for workers in each of the country's 192,419 election precincts. Voter registration rolls would have to be synchronized. And some universally acceptable form of identification would have to be developed. To get started selling software or hardware, Global Election and other manufacturers would have to submit their concepts to state governments for testing and approval. Because the process is so onerous, the election equipment market is essentially dominated by three companies – Global, SequoiaPacific and Election Systems & Software. But buoyed by new attention to a nationwide technology problem, some huge corporations are competing for the business. IBM's broad e-government initiative has been trying to sell states on converting from paper to electronic information storage since 1995. Only a week after last year's presidential election, Cisco Systems and Compaq Computer were among those that pumped $10 million into VoteHere.net, a Bellevue, Wash., maker of secure online voting systems. And in January, Unisys, a maker of mainframe computers, announced that it would team with Microsoft and Dell Computer to create an entirely new solution. Unisys said it would coordinate a system using Dell computers, touch-screen monitors and keyboards, while Microsoft would create the software. "Certainly, they have a lot of resources they can throw at this very quickly," said Mr. Ensminger. But, he said, it's doubtful that any new players can develop systems and obtain the necessary state certifications to compete with the existing industry leaders.
Tedious process Constant software and hardware tweaking are needed to meet the various state demands, Mr. Ensminger said. As a result, it has taken 10 years for Global Election to obtain the rights to market AccuVote, its optical scanning concept, in 37 states. AccuVote requires voters to color in circles next to candidate names. The cards are then slipped into a counter, which tabulates the votes and sends data via modem to a tabulation center. AccuVote, one of five voting technologies used in Florida, recorded the lowest number of blank and spoiled ballots at 0.55 percent of the 1.4 million ballots it handled, a state report says. Global Election and others are also marketing more elaborate mechanisms. Several, such as the AccuVote-TS, use biometric identifiers – the scanning of a voter's iris or fingerprint to verify his identity. Fingerprints or iris scans first match a voter to his records and precinct voting options. Then a plastic card is produced on the spot, encoded with the template for only the races in the voter's precinct. When the card is loaded into voting booth terminals, a customized ballot immediately appears on a large touch-screen. Such machines are known for their flexibility. Voters can cast ballots away from their precincts. Dallas County has used a touch-screen system for early voting since 1998, part of a $4.5 million effort to replace punch cards. Touch-screens have other benefits. Blind voters can use voice commands to select options that are read to them by the computer-equipped terminals. Beyond that, software features can be set to reject attempts to vote twice in the same race. Reminders can be issued that voters didn't mark a vote in a particular race. A recent nationwide survey by the Gartner Group showed half of the 1,005 registered voters would be willing to use such systems if they functioned much like automated teller machines. Twelve percent of the respondents said they didn't want to use such technology. "I think a lot of voters want to see advanced technology used in elections, but they want to see a paper trail, too," said Kim Alexander, founder of the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advances new technologies to promote easier voting. Many voters and experts worry that a move away from paper ballots could strip anonymity from the process. "ATMs can address similar risks with an audit trail that makes it possible to verify every transaction," writes Edward Tenner, author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, in a recent New York Times op-ed piece. "Such records in electronic voting devices would obviously violate the secrecy of the ballot." The Net and beyond Despite lingering concerns, several companies are trotting out Net-only election systems. In October, Contra Costa County, Calif., held a mock election using a system called Safevote, which costs $1,500 per machine. With Safevote, a voter identifies himself at a polling place. An election official uses a separate, off-line computer to obtain a six-character password for the voter. That password disguises and certifies the voter. The voter then goes to another computer at the polling place and enters his password and date of birth. The machine makes sure they match, and an electronic ballot appears on the screen. The voter touches the names of his chosen candidates. The votes are sent to six Internet servers to ensure that breakdowns do not disable all the records. Later at home, the voter can log on to the Internet and enter his six-digit password to make sure his vote was recorded – although the screen won't reveal for whom votes were cast. In Arizona, voters in the Democratic primary in March 2000 were given four days to cast primary ballots on the Net using a system developed by Election.com. But fewer than half of the 85,970 votes were cast via Internet access – about the same as the number using the U.S. Postal Service to mail in primary ballots. In Alaska, the Republican Party allowed three remote congressional districts to vote via an Internet system developed by VoteHere.net. Only 35 of 3,100 people eligible to vote by Internet in that race chose to cast ballots via the Web. And not all of those people were in Alaska; members of the state's congressional delegation voted via the Web from Washington. Security needed The Internet Policy Institute, which began investigating Internet voting options at the behest of the White House in 1999, recently issued a candid report that downplayed the feasibility of any immediate Net applications.
"E-voting requires a much greater level of security than e-commerce – it's not like buying a book over the Internet," said University of Maryland president C.D. Mote Jr., who led the group. "Remote Internet voting technology will not be able to meet this standard for years to come." Instead, Dr. Mote said, election officials should gradually augment current systems with computerization at the polling place to help in vote tallying. Later, kiosk voting terminals could be set up in untraditional public sites such as shopping malls. Not until "substantial technical and social science issues are addressed" should officials consider allowing ballots to be filed from home computers and other remote sites. In fact, Dr. Tenner, a visiting professor at Princeton University, said a hybrid system that largely ignores the technological advancements of recent years may become the ultimate answer to the nation's voting concerns. "Paradoxically, it is the paper ballot," he wrote. "Not the folded sheet stuffed in a box, but a laser-printed ballot that would let each voter review all choices before exiting the polls." Because the machine would mark ballots uniformly and wouldn't accept common errors, voters could be confident that their choices would register, Dr. Tenner said. Such paper ballots could be machine-counted with high accuracy and would remain available for auditing. "This hybrid system would not be cheap. It would not be flashy," Dr. Tenner said. "But it would work." Knight-Ridder and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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