E-voting: Room for Improvement

Major Changes Needed?

Brian Chess, chief scientist at software security vendor Fortify Software Inc., disagreed, saying the U.S. still needs to make major changes. The U.S. needs "fully tested voting machines that reliably perform their functions, backup plans and well-trained poll workers," he said. "We are already hearing about unreliable machines, both DRE and optical scan, failing and causing long lines."

Chess called on Congress to pass "strict national standards on security" for e-voting machines. "We need to test ways the machines could fail and the reliability of the machines in a true election environment," he said. "We also need to write the standards to make the vendors responsible for the behavior of their machines, including the off-the-shelf components ... and when procedures break down."

Those standards need to be binding, he added. "No voting machine that fails to meet them should be used to cast a vote for our president."

The real question is whether fixing voting systems will be a top priority, even with "quite a few" reports of voting problems Tuesday, said longtime e-voting critic Eugene Spafford, chairman of the U.S. Public Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery. "The question comes down to, how much are we willing to spend, and how confident do we want to be in the results?" said Spafford, a computer science professor at Purdue University.

In some cases Tuesday, problems with optical-scan machines seemed to be connected to rain. Voters brought moisture into the polling places and the optical-scan machines jammed because of damp paper, he said. In other places, voters raised questions because their ballots were put in boxes waiting to be scanned instead of scanned immediately, he said.

Those problems may have been predictable, but a lot of the problems center around training of poll workers, many of whom aren't familiar with the technology, Spafford said. More extensive training will cost money.

In other cases, any problems with voting machinery were compounded by record voter turnouts. Several states have moved to allow early voting, and other states may want to consider it, Spafford said.

In the rush to adopt new voting technology following problems with paper ballots in the 2000 elections, many states adopted unproven technology, he added. While most states that purchased touch-screen voting machines have since moved to include printouts with those machines, other states have switched to optical-scan machines.

Three states -- Maryland, Tennessee and Colorado -- will move to some kind of paper backup in coming elections. But that still leaves 15 states where touch-screen machines would be used without paper backups, and replacing or reconfiguring those machines would cost millions of dollars.

The U.S. government is facing major challenges in coming years, even if Democrats generally sympathetic to voting reform issues add to their majorities in Congress, Spafford said. "We have so many other pressing national concerns that are going to require attention first," he said. "We have so many issues, I wonder whether this will bubble up high enough to get addressed soon. It needs addressing."