Inside the Black Box

By Julia Goldberg, Santa Fe Reporter. Posted July 13, 2004.

This story began in November 2000 when the unthinkable happened. An election for the president of the United States occurred and the results were inconclusive. American vernacular suddenly included butterfly ballots and hanging chads, and the entire electoral process came under fire.

The terrorist events in New York on 9.11 soon overshadowed the election events in Florida. But in October 2002, after much partisan dispute, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The law authorized nearly $4 billion in spending to help states comply with new election standards for poll-worker training, statewide voter rolls and, most importantly, the replacement of fallible punch-cards and old voting machines.

President George W Bush then signed the law. He didn't mention the 2000 election that resulted in his presidency when he did it, but he did say: "Every registered voter deserves to have confidence that the system is fair and elections are honest, that every vote is recorded and that the rules are consistently applied."

But now, with the November 2004 elections just a little more than six months away, HAVA has created a host of new and growing anxieties. Critics contend the technology employed by some electronic voting machines is not secure and that there are not enough fail-safes to ensure votes are accurately tabulated. These concerns have prompted national media attention, federal legislation and some litigation.

Ostensibly, electronic voting is an election-reform issue in which activists' concerns reflect the general belief that voting is sacrosanct and should be protected at all cost. But supporters of electronic voting maintain just as vehemently that electronic voting will create uniformity and greater access to the process for the disabled. Both sides maintain their cause champions American democracy.

At first glance, New Mexico would seem to have little to worry about. Our elections have been electronic for nearly 20 years. And while over the years there have been numerous and notorious glitches at the county level (Bernalillo, 2000, for example), our state elections officials are nationally recognized for their knowledge and expertise in this field. But in fact, New Mexico is under intense scrutiny from the leading voices of this cause.

Bev Harris is a Washington state resident and author of Black Box Voting. Black Box Voting is the term used to describe any voting system in which the mechanism recording the vote is hidden and there is no concrete record of the vote cast. Her book details the security chasms she found in several systems, as well as the potential political profiteering of the major companies responsible for creating this new technology.

Profiled in this month's Vanity Fair magazine and numerous other publications and interviewed on national shows such as Good Morning America, Harris has been called the Erin Brockovich of elections. In a recent telephone interview with SFR, Harris discussed the mobilization under way to ensure the 2004 elections receive an unprecedented level of citizen oversight. There are a handful of states considered particularly important in the clean-voting issue. New Mexico, she says, "is considered a battleground."

If New Mexico is a battleground, the organization leading the charge is Verified Voting NM. VVNM member Charlie Strauss is a Los Alamos National Laboratory computer scientist. At the lab, he's working on protein structure predictions. In life, he's become what he calls an "accidental activist" on the subject of electronic voting.

Computer scientists have helped define and lend credibility to this issue. Stanford University Professor David Dill was one of the first national computer experts to take up this cause; he served on a California task force that helped convince that state's Secretary of State to rethink the way in which California will employ e-voting.

You don't need to be a computer scientist to understand the numerous ways in which people believe technology can fail voters. You do need a perfunctory understanding of the different types of voting machines.

The ones under fire are called Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines. If you've voted in New Mexico, you've seen them. There's a variety of different types of DRE machines, but the basic idea is that people vote by physically touching the screen. There are no paper ballots.

Critics' concerns over these machines are numerous. Let's take four to start.

Julia Goldberg is the editor of The Santa Fe Reporter, the weekly alternative in Santa Fe, NM. She also is the co-founder of The Hip Hop Voter Project, a voter registration and education effort in Santa Fe.

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