How Safe Is Your E-Vote?

It's either the best thing ever to happen to elections, or the stupidest blunder our elected officials have ever made; the savior of our democracy, or a conspiracy to steal it; an idea whose time has come, or a hapless symbol of society's naive faith in technology.

Electronic voting hasn't completely boiled over into the nation's greater consciousness ... yet. But it's on a high simmer. It has staunch defenders, passionate detractors, and one way or another, it will make a huge impact on the 2004 elections.

The push for computerized voting gained momentum after the 2000 presidential election, also known as the biggest electoral fiasco in U.S. history. An appalled nation learned what an imperfect science elections are -- hanging chads, allegations of fraud, and butterfly ballots making Jews vote for Pat Buchanan. Surely, we were told, in our modern computer age, we could do better than this.

In some eyes, computers seemed the obvious answer. No chads. No stray marks. No spoiled ballots (in fact, no paper). No need for human judgment about "voter intent" at all. The result was the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act -- which does not specifically require electronic voting, but does provide funding to help states replace punch-card and lever voting systems. Many jurisdictions all over the nation are choosing "direct recording electronic" systems.

But while election administrators are generally enthralled with the new technology -- and a number of companies are rushing to meet the demand -- others are not embracing DRE voting. And the critics are not just the usual conspiracy theorists. The strongest condemnation is coming from the people who best know the limitations of computerization: computer scientists.

What will electronic voting mean for Travis Co. (and the rest of Texas) and how might our experience compare to the rest of the nation?

Electronic Shadows

Perhaps the best way to understand electronic voting in Travis Co. is to understand what it is not.

It is not Diebold. And it is not ES&S, nor Sequoia. Those three firms are the market leaders in the electronic voting system business, and thus quite naturally have become lightning rods -- especially Diebold -- for the nationwide movement against electronic voting.

Diebold and ES&S (Election Systems & Software) have some conspicuous Republican connections that automatically make yellow dogs go on point. Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell is a Bush "Pioneer" -- collecting at least $100,000 in Bush campaign contributions -- and in a now notorious 2003 quote, he said he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," a statement widely denounced as proof positive that Diebold's machines will be rigged to favor Republicans. In context, O'Dell was clearly referring to fundraising, not vote stealing. But quicker than you can say "conspiracy," the credibility of his company was damaged. As for ES&S, one of its board members (and former CEO) is Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, raising an obvious question of conflict of interest between campaigning for votes and producing the machines that will tally them.

But one good reason to doubt the Republican electronic coup theory of e-voting is that in fact, many of the election officials aggressively pushing for e-voting -- including Travis Co. Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir -- are longtime Democrats.

Many computer experts express much more concrete concerns that the available equipment doesn't offer the security an election requires. Three key studies have focused on these doubts: A group of scientists at Rice and Johns Hopkins universities snagged a copy of a Diebold source code that was inadvertently posted on the Internet and examined it; and the secretaries of state of both Ohio and Maryland commissioned studies that were highly critical of Diebold. All three studies charged that the machines were highly vulnerable to tampering. (Diebold responded that the Rice/Johns Hopkins scientists examined an outdated source code; as for the Maryland study, the company actually claimed that it praised the Diebold AccuVote machines -- a spin that dismayed the study's authors).