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The San Jose Mercury News Posted on Mon, Feb. 24, 2003 Santa Clara County faces key decision on electronic ballots By Katherine Corcoran Mercury News The future of electronic voting may be rewritten this week in Santa Clara County, where county leaders are weighing warnings that the touch-screen voting machines they want to buy are more prone to error and fraud than the systems they would replace. National experts on computer security have raised alarming questions elsewhere about the validity of elections run on touch-screen machines, which currently don't produce a paper record a voter can use to check that the machine has recorded decisions accurately. But scientists didn't get far until they spoke up late last month in the heart of Silicon Valley, where the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors delayed buying 5,000 ATM-like machines for 730,000 registered voters after hearing their concerns. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley followed up on the decision by convening a statewide task force on the security of touch-screen voting. And now, three voting machine vendors vying for Santa Clara County's $20 million contract are saying they will install a paper audit system at no extra cost if the county becomes the first jurisdiction nationally to require it. What the supervisors decide Tuesday, when they're scheduled to adopt a new voting system, will ripple through other California counties and is likely to affect the overall move toward electronic voting, the most popular antidote to the hanging chad debacle of the 2000 presidential election. ``You're at the beginning of what's becoming the modern argument in voting systems,'' said Kimball Brace, president of Washington, D.C.-based Election Data Services political consulting firm and an expert witness in former Vice President Al Gore's court case to get a Florida recount in 2000. ``What we have out in your jurisdiction is the first cut of people saying, `Wait a minute, shouldn't you have a physical ballot in case there is a recount?' It hasn't come up elsewhere because a lot of people haven't thought about it, or comprehended the need for it.'' Skepticism voiced But in Silicon Valley, where about 42 percent of households have someone working in the technology industry, people are more aware of the fallibility of computers. In fact, some of the best brains in the cyber world, who happen to reside locally, are also the loudest voices demanding that electronic ballots should also be printed on paper that voters can inspect. The county registrar would also keep a copy of the paper record to check the computer in case of irregularities or recounts. Otherwise, they say, voters have no way to verify that the votes they punch on the screen are the same as those recorded by the computer, and officials would never know if an election had been stolen. Trusting the machine to self-audit, critics say, is akin to an IRS audit on someone who created his own receipts. ``It goes to the heart of our democracy,'' computer scientist Barbara Simons told supervisors last month. ``If we care about democracy, there's no more important issue before this board.'' Santa Clara County, like many other counties, is under court order to replace its punch-card voting system -- the same system that created so much havoc in Florida -- by the presidential primary in March 2004. After a nine-month process, the county staff recommended in January that supervisors negotiate a $20 million contract with Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, maker of electronic voting systems across the country, including in Riverside County in California. Sequoia's systems don't produce paper ballots that voters can verify, and supervisors didn't ask for such a device in their bid proposal. Vendors and election officials say paper ballots aren't needed because the machines have internal safeguards, are certified by federal and state governments and tested repeatedly before and after elections. ``We still believe they're secure,'' Assistant County Executive Peter Kutras said Friday. ``There are not any issues that should cause concern in terms of voter confidence.'' Last-minute appeal But just as supervisors were about to award the contract, they were stopped dead by an 11th-hour appeal from Stanford University computer scientist David Dill, who has collected 300-plus signatures from top scientists and technologists nationwide on a petition urging that the machines have a voter-verifiable paper backup. They say it would be easy for a computer programmer to alter the way the machine counted votes during an election and keep the change from showing up on a test. They also say voting software, like any other kind, is not immune to bugs. ``The election could be running smooth as silk,'' Dill said, ``only the wrong person is elected and no one can tell. No one can prove it.'' After the Florida debacle in the 2000 presidential election, state after state began moving to electronic voting machines. The number of registered voters casting their ballots electronically has more than doubled to 32 million people nationwide since the last presidential election. Last year, Californians approved $200 million in bond money to upgrade voting systems, just as a federal court, in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, outlawed punch cards such as the one used in Santa Clara County. None of 510 counties nationwide using electronic voting machines last November required paper ballots be produced for voters to inspect at the time of voting. Though electronic voting ran smoothly in Riverside and Alameda counties, there were numerous problems in other states, from poll workers not knowing how to turn on the machines to votes registering for the wrong candidates. Rice University computer scientist Dan Wallach tried to raise the paper-audit issue in Houston after the county there adopted electronic voting machines, to no avail. ``There was a certain combination of voter apathy and the naive Utopian view that it's new, therefore it must be better,'' said Wallach, a computer security expert who made headlines as a Princeton graduate student when he found security flaws in Sun Microsystems' Java software, after the company claimed it was impenetrable. ``David Dill had the unique advantage of being in an environment where people get it.'' Vendors and election officials say problems occur with touch-screen machines not because of fraud, but because counties didn't spend enough time training poll workers and introducing voters to the new technology. Santa Clara County officials fear that's what will happen here if the supervisors take any more time on security problems. Even if supervisors order a paper audit installed, they can't purchase equipment until the machines are certified by the secretary of state, which could take months. Meanwhile, county officials want to have enough time to get the new voting system working by the November municipal and school district elections, as a trial run for March 2004. ``We strongly recommend the board vote on Tuesday,'' Kutras said. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
