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Baltimore Sun
How safe is your vote?
Doubts will persist until
secure, accurate elections become a national
priority
By Steven Hill and Rob Richie
January 7, 2004
This commentary also appeared in additional
publications such as the Miami Herald.
After the 2000 presidential race,
many Americans saw new voting technology as the obvious means to
avoid the millions of votes lost due to voter error around the
nation. Following that botched election, Georgia and Maryland were
the first states to commit to a statewide touch-screen voting
system.
After being the center of the 2000 controversy,
Florida counties spent millions to have new touch screens, yet had
major problems with their debut in the 2002 gubernatorial elections.
In the hotly contested Democratic primary, Dade County's
touch-screen equipment produced a higher rate of non-votes that
disproportionately hurt minority voters than the old punch-card
equipment. It was déjà vu all over again.
Now a burgeoning
national movement questions the security of such equipment and calls
for paper trails that would provide a voter-verifiable audit trail.
Counties and states such as Maryland that committed to touch screens
are scrambling to explore how to add a paper trail to their
system.
When made fully secure and publicly accountable,
touch-screen voting offers important advantages. Take Brazil's
experience. A country of 180 million people, with great diversity
and vast stretches of rural territory - much like the United States
- Brazil has a national touch-screen system. When voters select a
candidate, they see the name, party and photo of the candidate in
order to verify their vote. No over-votes, no under-votes, no
confusing butterfly ballots. No disfranchisement of language
minorities and voters with disabilities or low rates of
literacy.
There's a simple reason the United States is
playing catch-up to Brazil - and most other nations - when it comes
to modernizing election administration. Under our decentralized
election administration regime, we have a shockingly weak national
commitment to fair and secure elections. In fact, the main players
in running elections are the more than 3,000 county election
administrators scattered across the country.
With the 2002
Help America Vote Act, the federal government for the first time
established a few national election standards and provided some
money to states. But standards are weak, and funds available for
only three years. There's little training for election
administrators, and too often county election chiefs are selected
based more on whom they know than training and experience. There's
limited guidance to assist counties when they bargain with the
equipment vendors.
The vendors themselves spark questions.
Three companies dominate the field: Election Systems and Software,
Sequoia Voting Systems and Diebold Election Systems. They are
relatively small, profit-making corporations, stretched beyond their
capacities, strained by the myriad of state bodies certifying
equipment. Their equipment isn't nearly as good as it could or
should be.
Vendors make up for these deficits through
political connections. They typically hire former election
regulators as their sales representatives. Besides the
government-to-industry revolving door, they have been known to give
big campaign contributions. In fact, there is no firewall between
the corporations who run elections and partisan
politics.
Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold - the company
that has Maryland's contract - attended strategy powwows with
wealthy benefactors of President Bush and wrote in a fund-raising
letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president" - even as his company seeks to win Ohio's
new equipment.
The manufacture and selling of voting
equipment shouldn't be just another business. There is something
special about our electoral infrastructure that cries out for a
federal system with national standards and regulations. After Sept.
11, 2001, we moved to have federal workers monitoring airport
security. But after Election 2000, we did nothing comparable for our
elections.
Imagine an alternative reality, in which the
federal government used its immense resources to invest in
developing voting technologies that were truly cutting-edge and
secure, with open-source software, voter-verified paper trails,
national standards and the public interest incorporated without
resistance. Imagine national voter registration that better ensured
clean lists and a big increase in the barely two-thirds of American
adults now registered to vote.
But no. Instead we are stuck
with the shadowy vendors and decentralized hodgepodge that lately
have made U.S. democracy a laughingstock around the world. Call it
democracy on the cheap. The debate over voter-verified paper trails
is a window into a far bigger problem of decentralized elections
that inevitably will lead to future debacles until corrected. We can
no longer passively accept an election administration regime gone
deeply awry.
Steven Hill is senior analyst for the Center for
Voting and Democracy in San Francisco. Rob Richie is executive
director of the center in Takoma Park. |
