Touch-screen voting

I was one of the first reporters in the mainstream media to raise questions about the accuracy of touch-screen voting machines and I returned to the subject frequently. Here's a column about a hero who spoke out despite political heat:





VOTE MACHINES CAN'T GO WRONG, GO WRONG, GO WRONG
Date: Sunday, March 26, 2006
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

TALLAHASSEE - It's simple. In close elections, we need to be able to recount the votes.

That's most obvious in Palm Beach County, where voters booted out the long-serving supervisor of elections, Theresa LePore, in 2004 -- partly because she didn't think the new touch-screen technology, brought in to replace those disastrous punch cards, needs paper backups.

Unfortunately, the paper trail has gone cold under LePore's successor. Instead of leading the charge for change, Arthur Anderson is taking it slow.

But Anderson's complacency isn't the only roadblock to a paper trail.

Here's a potentially bigger hurdle: Florida has rewritten its elections law to eliminate almost all manual recounts in touch-screen voting.

The reasoning is that the computerized touch-screens are incapable of error. After all, the machine won't let you overvote or undervote -- that is, vote for too many candidates or unintentionally leave blanks, the major problems in past election challenges.

Just one problem.

The machines can be wrong.

Ion Sancho, Leon County elections head since 1988, is a self-described maverick and a stickler for making every vote count. In the shambles of 2000, voting here went virtually error-free.

Last year, Sancho discovered the supposedly impossible -- that Diebold Election Systems touch screens and optical-scanning machines had serious security flaws.

And now he's paying for his audacity. Possibly with his job.

Sancho challenged hackers to break into his voting machines four times. They always succeeded.

In December, for example, a Finnish security whiz named Harri Hursti manipulated a memory card that records votes in an optical scanning machine that uses a technology similar to a touch-screen machine's.

Sancho tested the results with a little in-house referendum. The question was: "Can the votes on this Diebold system be hacked using a memory card?"

Most of the eight participants filled out their paper ballots: "No."

But guess what? The machine that read the votes gave the victory to "Yes."

Sancho raised alarms. Florida Secretary of State Sue Cobb, a Jeb Bush appointee, ignored him.

And then took away a $564,000 federal grant for disabled-accessible voting machinery.

But in California, where Diebold machines are in wide use, top elections officials heard about Hursti's experiment and commissioned a study. Researchers in Berkeley confirmed: Someone could easily gain access to the system, change votes and leave no trace.

"The only way to detect and correct the problem," they reported last month, "would be by recount of the original paper ballots."

Assuming there are paper ballots.

Diebold now refuses to deal with Leon County. So do the other two manufacturers authorized by Florida, Election Systems and Software and Sequoia Voting System (which makes Palm Beach County's equipment). Both cite business reasons.

Sancho says he's been "blackballed." A Miami election-reform group agrees and wants Attorney General Charlie Crist to investigate.

If this weren't trouble enough, Cobb has threatened Sancho with legal action for missing a deadline to obtain accessible voting machines. Worst case, the state Senate could remove him from office.

"Excuse me?" Sancho argues. "You set up a monopoly by telling me I can only buy three machines? And now I'm derelict because the manufacturers won't sell to me because I've exposed security flaws?

"There's something wrong with this picture."

Sure is.

And how's this for irony? After California verified Sancho's findings, Florida's elections supervisor issued a "technical advisory" on March 3 urging a tightening of security procedures for "all voting systems deployed in Florida."

Not one word acknowledging Sancho or Leon County's role in flushing this problem out.

Sancho is rare among Florida's 67 elections supervisors in challenging the industry's claims of inerrancy. "All of these systems are very complex," he notes. "One switch gets improperly pushed and you have what they call a `glitch,' or a `snafu' or a `hiccup.'

"Actually, you have a problem that's depriving a citizen of his vote."

By raising the right questions about the new voting technology, this official in a distant county has performed a crucial public service for all of us.

Sancho should be hailed as a hero. Instead, he is an object lesson in the perils of blowing the whistle.