Editorial: E-voting needs a paper trail

Examiner Staff Writer 9/3/08

Eight years after the “hanging chads” fiasco in Florida, and two months before one of the most important presidential elections in U.S. history, Congress still refuses to listen to the nation’s top computer scientists and require a secure, auditable paper trail for all federal elections. This despite the latest revelation of a serious problem with the electronic voting machines used in 34 states — including Virginia and Maryland — in addition to their well-publicized vulnerability to hacking.

In March, Ohio officials found a programming error that dropped votes when the data on memory cards from multiple electronic machines are electronically transferred to a central tabulator, as they would be on Election Day. Dozens of lawyers are ready to file legal challenges everywhere e-voting machines are used, even those declared “qualified” by the National Association of State Election Directors. Such litigation could tie up final election results far longer than it would take to count paper ballots.

State and local government officials have spent $1.5 billion on e-voting machines in recent years, most of it federal funds under the 2002 Help America Vote Act. But instead of ensuring a fast, secure way to count millions of votes, they got a technological nightmare. Studies in Ohio and California confirmed that e-voting machines currently in use can allow individuals to cast multiple votes, load viruses that crash the system, produce fake tallies and even change previously cast votes.

As recently as May, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) blamed the Ohio glitch on state-installed anti-virus software, but eventually admitted to a decade-old “logic error” programmed on all 19 of its touch screen and optical scan models. Computer experts say every e-voting machine now in use has serious security vulnerabilities. Even a piece of white tape on a scanner can block votes from being recorded.

“We don’t know how to make secure paperless voting,” says Stanford computer science professor David Dill, founder of the Verified Voting Foundation and author of Attackdog, a computer model that simulates more than 9,000 ways to attack e-voting systems. Dr. Dill and others like him have warned again and again that an auditable paper trail is the only way to guarantee a secure election, the very bedrock of democracy. Congress has less than two months to pass emergency legislation requiring state election officials to add verifiable paper trails to all voting in the November election. There is no more time to lose.

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