Casting the E-Ballot
According to Washington, D.C.-based Election Data Services, an independent political consulting firm, 10 million people in roughly half of the states cast electronic ballots in this year's primaries. Come November, it is projected that 50 million people, or some 29 percent of all registered voters, will use touch-screens. This is up from 15 percent in the 2000 elections. All told, Election Data Services' 2004 Voting Equipment Study found that 669 counties and New England towns, or roughly 21.5 percent of all voting jurisdictions across the country, will have voters casting their ballots electronically. On the flip side, the old punched cards will be utilized by just 9.86 percent of jurisdictions.
Help America Vote Act
Following the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida, modernizing our antiquated voting systems became a high priority. The 107th Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which authorized $3.86 billion over three years for voting equipment and polling-facility access improvements. States can use this money to replace antiquated voting machines, improve technology, test new voting equipment, increase polling-place access for disabled voters and provide state-advocacy systems for the disabled. Most states, having accepted payments under this act, must have all punched-card voting machines replaced by Nov. 2, 2004.
Four main vendors supply the majority of e-voting stations in the United States: Diebold, North Canton, Ohio; Election Systems and Software, Omaha, Neb.; Hart InterCivic, Austin, Texas; and Sequoia Voting Systems, Oakland, Calif. Their systems, however, have touched off a major controversy because of their lack of verifiable paper trails.
Still, there are numerous benefits to e-voting. The 2000 elections highlighted the flaws with the punched-card ballot technique; voter intent was not always obvious. Undervoting (unintentionally skipping a race), overvoting (marking more than the allocated number of candidates in a race) and the now infamous "hanging chads" resulted in large numbers of voters' ballots being disputed or disqualified. E-voting solves such problems.
For example, during the 2000 presidential election, the state of Georgia experienced a 3.5 percent undervote. In 2002, after the Diebold touch-screen voting stations were installed, the percentage of undervotes decreased to less than 1 percent during the November gubernatorial election, and overvoting has been completely eliminated, as reported by the Office of Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox in a January 2003 study.
Other benefits include:
- Preprogrammed choices, which deliver flexibility in meeting language needs. It's convenient and results in cost savings, says Dave Bear, a Diebold company spokesman. "Ballots are printed based on 100 percent turnout for registered voters, and typically only 20 percent to 30 percent actually vote. That's a whole lot of waste in a place like Los Angeles, where ballots are printed in 11 different languages."
- The removal of voting barriers, enabling the disabled to vote. For example, blind voters can utilize an audio-ballot option and for the first time can vote unassisted.
- Rapid vote tabulations. With manual balloting, actual election results are not final for weeks (the totals we get one minute after polls close are preliminary and unofficial); e-voting greatly speeds that process.
The Glitches And Threats
Numerous issues with performance, trust and verification have been well-publicized. Most, however, have not been directly attributed to the technology itself, but rather to operational and procedural breakdowns:
- Procedural problems in Georgia's Effingham County caused voters to start out using paper ballots. Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Cox, says county officials apparently forgot to program the encoders--devices that tell ballot-access cards which ballot to display.
- Although it made the headlines as an electronic-voting snafu, the March primary election day mishap in Orange County, Calif., was due to an operational change. For the first time in 20 years, multiple precincts were assigned per polling place; mistakenly, only one access code was initially assigned by poll workers, causing wrong ballots to be displayed.
- Serious instances with e-voting security and reliability have also occurred that threaten the very sanctity of the voting process. Some examples include:
- Release of "live" voter data before polls are closed.
- Voter-registration name and address files have been left unprotected and accessible.
- More than 6,000 ballots were uncounted in one primary election.
Botched vote-counting and tabulations, privacy violations and the possibility of election-rigging are real dangers. While these same hazards existed with manual voting processes, the perceived vulnerability of e-voting systems (with their lack of verifiable paper trails) has brought them to the forefront.
E-voting critics say the federal-certification processes and standards are weak, addressing only the functionality of voting systems--not their security. As a result, legislators in a number of states want to decertify e-voting systems until after the November elections.
Six states, led by California, have demanded that all electronic-voting machines be able to print a voter-verified paper trail by 2006. Some also want programming code opened for inspection.
Addressing the Issues
That's why the big four e-voting companies, with the help of software vendors and solution providers, are tackling these issues.
One such vendor is VoteHere, a Bellevue, Wash.-based software firm that ensures the voting station isn't cheating or making mistakes, and provides for a meaningful recount--even when faced with hackers, corrupt insiders and software bugs. Its VHTi software detects election problems, addressing the trust and security issues that have dominated the debate over e-voting.
VoteHere currently is working with Sequoia to ensure that voters using their machines can verify that their vote was counted and that voting results can be verified. "We're offering the licensing of our technology to all voting-system manufacturers to maintain the transparency and confidence in our elections," says Jim Adler, VoteHere's CEO and founder.
There are, and will be, many opportunities for VARs to participate in e-voting solutions. For example, election.com in Garden City, N.Y., a global-election software and services vendor, provides complete election-management solutions, including voter-registration and database management, advanced security solutions, accurate tabulation and custom demographic reporting. VARs who forge alliances with e-voting manufacturers to supply total solutions like that will be able to reap the rewards of the growing e-voting arena.
The Outcome
Some election jurisdictions have moved from punched cards to optical-scan systems as a safer choice than e-voting, given the controversy over whether printers should be used with the electronic systems. Most electronic systems currently in use do not provide paper receipts, which voters could rely on to verify and election administrators could use to finalize a contested race. Optical-scan systems use paper ballots that are scanned and tallied electronically, but can be hand-counted in the event of a recount.
It is too soon to tell how many jurisdictions will move to e-voting when--and if--a paper trail is incorporated into the electronic systems. For the most part, e-voting worked faultlessly across the nation in this year's March 9 primary elections. For example, in four Texas counties, 3.5 million registered voters cast their ballots problem-free.
"I am very pleased with how the eSlate System performed for us in Harris County. We had a very smooth election and everything went off as expected," says Beverly Kaufman, Harris County clerk.
One thing is for sure: The trend toward e-voting will accelerate during the next 12 months as the security and operational issues are addressed, additional HAVA dollars are released to the states, and the November elections field-prove the technology. Solution providers would be wise to throw their hats in the ring now.
Ron Levine ([email protected]) is a freelance writer based in Carpinteria, Calif.