In our last issue, we investigated the controversy surrounding DREs.  This month we examine the cozy relationship between local election officials and voting vendors, voting standard problems due to federal oversight, and possible solutions to safeguard the 2004 vote.

PART II

Running your average local election sometimes requires nothing short of Herculean efforts - especially with the November 2004 race, in which the majority of voters will be electing candidates on the federal, state, and local level.  Steven Ansolabehere, a political science professor and former Director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Project, pointed out that for a general election, the registrar in Los Angeles County has to format about 5,000 ballots.

Such elections require time, labor, and money, the latter in very short supply.  Decisions to purchase voting systems have to be done wisely, taking into consideration not only the cost of the system itself, but also maintenance and training election officials, poll workers, and even voters how to use it.

When an official purchases a voting system, it's often with the intention that the system will be used for a very long time.  "You're stuck with your voting system for about 10 years," Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor said.  "That's a lot of money.  You don't want to spend a lot of money to get it wrong."  Ansolabehere also said that during the Congressional hearings to develop Help America Vote Act in 2002, many local election officials didn't want to purchase new systems and "fought tooth and nail" to keep their punch card or lever systems.  "Counties are used to buying equipment and using it for 20 years," he said, adding that the oldest lever machine he found was in Tennessee, dating back to 1923.  Punch cards date back to the early 1960s.  He said the real problem with DREs is that they'll be antiquated in five years - something totally unheard of in the election world.

In many cases, the relationship between voter vendor and county election official is so strong that the local election official is seen as part of the voting industry.  "In the industry, you should think of both the suppliers and the demanders," Ansolabehere said.  "The local election officials are the demanders and they work pretty closely with their suppliers."

If there is friction, it's generally between the state and the local election officials.  When Georgia and Maryland decided to centralize their election system, the local officials had to yield their purchasing autonomy to the state - some with a great deal of resistance.  "It's been challenging," Donna Duncan, Director of Election Management for the State of Maryland Board of Elections, said with a chuckle.  Ansolabehere agreed that there is a lot of resistance from the local officials because they don't want to cede their authority to the state.  In many circumstances, neither do the voting venders.  "A lot of firms have invested pretty heavily already in their sales relationship with the reps and the county," Ansolabehere said.

The reason is clear: money.  "We know that the salesmen for the voting companies get a significant commission on sales.  Their commission is large enough that if they only make a sale to a state once every few years, it's a good living," said  Doug Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa, who has sat for the past 10 years as test chair for the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems.

GRAFT AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
As a result, if graft occurs it usually happens on the local level.  "The voting industry does have a bad reputation for bribery problems," Ansolabehere said.  "But those are bribes to make contracts happen at the local level."  Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist who has been tracking electronic voting for the past decade, agreed.  "It's always been my belief that it's not a Democrat or Republican issue.  It's a 'who's in power issue,'" she said.  "And [the voting vendors are] going to sell them to anyone who's going to buy them."

One such scandal involved Sequoia Voting Systems in Louisiana.  In 1999, the US Justice Department indicted 22 Sequoia employees, alleging that they were involved with handing out $8 million in bribes to election officials.  Even though he was under federal indictment, the St. Petersburg Times reported that one executive, Phil Foster, still inked deals in Florida in 2001.  Pinellas County officials found out the day before signing a $15.5 million contract with Sequoia.  Palm County officials, who already signed a contract with Foster, weren't told of his indictment.  The paper quoted Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore saying she "didn't think it was relevant.  I signed the contract, not the commissioners.  They trust me to do the right decision."

LACK OF VOTING SYSTEM STANDARDS
Money: the local elections officials don't have it, the voting vendors want it, and the federal government refuses to spend it.  The development of Federal Elections Commission/National Association of State Election Directors standards - the method which tests voting systems - is a classic example of the lack of federal oversight.

Roy Saltman's work on voting systems for the National Bureau of Standards in the late 1970s caught the attention of Congress.  In 1980, with the help of the NBS, Congress commissioned the FEC to begin a study on developing a set of voluntary standards for voting systems.  Saltman said there was one problem, which was that Congress never appropriated the funding.  With no money, the NBS had limited involvement.  The FEC did have enough dollars to pay for a single consultant.  His conclusion was that voting standards were desperately needed.

According to the FEC Web site, in 1984, Congress approved a small portion of the FEC budget to develop the standards.  Establishing voting standards or overseeing elections wasn't the primary function of the FEC; it was created to monitor campaign finance reform.  Yet, it did sponsor meetings which were attended by local and state election officials, voting vendors, Congressional staff, and computer security advocates.

According to Ansolabehere, in 1990 Congress ceased all funding for standards development.  By this time, state election officials saw the need for voting standards and convinced the National Association of State Election Directors to pick up the project.  Through grants and funds - some rumored to have come from the voting industry itself - NASED completed the voting standards.  Saltman explained that Congress never promulgated the standards - thus it has nothing to do with them.  In 1990, the FEC published them alone.

The roles played in the FEC/NASED standards are rather interesting.  The FEC published about 500 pages of requirements that the voting systems are tested against and must pass for qualification.  The Independent Testing Authorities (ITAs) - who perform the actual hardware and software tests of the systems against the FEC rules - are selected by NASED.  The vendor pays for the qualification.  If the system passes this qualification process, it goes to the states which then certify them by applying additional testing.  Basically, each state makes sure the voting system complies with state election laws.

IS ANYONE FOLLOWING THE STANDARDS?
The standards have several problems.  First, they are voluntary: state legislatures "sign on" to them or not.  Last count stood at 42 states, including Maryland, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and California.  Florida and New Jersey do not subscribe to the standards and have their own way of certifying voting equipment.  Second, the standards don't handle software security issues well.  Security problems continued when the FEC/NASED standards were updated in 2002.  Third, some doubt the ability of the ITAs to catch software errors.  The reason - surprise - is money.

According to Ansolabehere, the standards testing business isn't a profitable one.  "The companies that do it keep running out of money and go under," he said.  To limit costs, only one to two programmers read the voting systems software code, which averages over 200,000 lines.  Also, when the systems go to the state level, state certifiers never see the actual programming code - it's proprietary - nor are they allowed to question the ITAs or the people who tested the machine.

"The way the testing process is set up right now, it's closed, so you can't really ask who was actually examining the systems."  Why is the testing process closed?  "Good question," said Doug Jones of the University of Iowa.  "NASED set it up as closed.  It shouldn't be closed.  These testers are testing on behalf of the public.  And, the vendor should have to show cause, why any particular piece of that test should be proprietary."

SPINNING THE "TRUTH" AND TRADE
SECRET AGREEMENTS
After the state certifies the machine, the vendor is then allowed to sell within that state and begins knocking on doors, county by county.  "You do everything you can to satisfy that county that your machine is the best.  And if you're a good salesman, you always spin the truth," Jones said.  "If you're a dishonest salesman, you bend the truth.  You're in the bidding and if you're lucky, you'll win the bid."

This type of "truth bending" presented problems for the election officials, especially those with close ties to the vendors.  "[The voting systems] were sold in a proprietary trade secret manner," Mercuri said.  "You couldn't get to the insides of them because they were restricting people from examining them, other than the federal examiners.  And they had to sign trade secret agreements."

Ansolabehere explained the connection between trade secrets and the voting industry business model.  "It's a business based on selling a box and you have to sell county by county," he said.  "The equipment is all based on trade secrets.  So your edge is to say 'My equipment is better than x, y, and z,' and that's what the sales reps go around and tell the counties."  Because the industry is based on trade secrets, information sharing among counties and states is practically nonexistent.  If Georgia needs a programming patch for a bug, the vendor is under no obligation to notify other jurisdictions using the same software.

Despite problems with the standards, Jones said it's better to have something than nothing.  Ansolabehere commended NASED members.  "They should be proud of themselves, because without them, there would be no standards at all," he said.  During the HAVA hearings, he heard vendors criticizing the standards before Congress because they took so long and could be costly.  "The people who most vocally supported the standards were the local election officials," Ansolabehere said.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS
Yet even with the standards in place, the strong bond between vendor and county election officials sometimes borders on breaking state law.  Jones gave one example.  A local election official would purchase a piece of software which produced ballots in three languages and later found out they needed five.  Normally, this is a software patch which would go all the way back to the ITAs for certification.  "Some states are adamant about this," he said.  In cases of emergency, other states may give temporary approval of the patch, with the understanding that it will be approved when the software goes back to the ITA because of an upgrade - which happens regularly.  "Counties would simply say, 'We want this.'  And the vendor says, 'Well, it's not really certified if we give you this software, but we can give you this software,'" Jones said.  His voice dropped to a sneaky whisper, imitating the official, "Ah, just put it in."

"[Diebold] had a perfect track record to put uncertified software into every one of their counties," Communications Director Carol Dahmen said.  She works for the Secretary of State office in California - an FEC/NASED signatory and one of the most rigorous states when it comes to enforcing the standards.  After an audit last fall of the Californian counties using Diebold systems, her office discovered that every one of them contained uncertified software.  This prompted Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to issue a directive that by June 2006, every DRE must have a verified paper component.  California's problems didn't end there.  In the March 2004 primaries, Dahmen said 50 percent of San Diego County's precincts didn't open on time because of problems on their Diebold AccuVote-TSx systems.  Shelley then de-certified all the Diebold DRE machines, barring their use in the November 2004 elections.  The counties which used them had to find alternate election systems.

Shelley went even further.  He de-certified all counties using a DRE system from any vendor, subjecting them to re-certification based upon a distinct set of criteria.  "We learned that there is a rush of this technology that is not ready for primetime," Dahmen said.  Several counties using Diebold's AccuVote-TS systems have been re-certified.  However, Dahmen said that the Secretary has contacted the State Attorney General's office for possible litigation against Diebold.  San Diego County will be using optical scan installed by - guess who - Diebold.  Californian voters also have the option of voting via paper or absentee ballot.

Under HAVA, the FEC/NASED standards will be replaced by those set up by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) with the guidance of the National Institute for Standards and Technology.  Yet the problems with DREs will be with us for some time to come.  States will have the option of accepting them or not.  Ansolabehere said that most likely the new standards will have the current ones as a foundation, but the development process averages five years.

OPTICAL SCANNERS SEEN AS THE BEST SOLUTION - FOR NOW
In the meantime, Ansolabehere, Dan Wallach - a computer science professor at Rice University and an author of "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System" (AKA "The Hopkins Report," as reported in the 9/04 issue of Chronogram) - Jones, and Mercuri suggested that if states hadn't purchased their machines already, then precinct optical scanners would be the most logical and affordable solution.  Optical scanners work with a paper ballot that is scanned through the machine.  Even though DREs had a low residual rate in the 2000 elections, optical scanners and paper ballots produced even better results.  Ansolabehere said that a state could save further dollars by looking into leasing as an option to purchasing.  All four expressed strong support that no matter what voting system is used, accommodations must be made for voters with disabilities.

"We were lucky in a couple of respects, given what happened in Florida, and I think people realized, my goodness, we're actually ahead of the curve," Director of Communications of The Secretary of State Office for Rhode Island Peter Kerwin said, laughing.

Rhode Island has leased optical scanners since 1996.  Before that they had the "old mammoth two-ton Shoup lever machines."  Kerwin finds it funny that with all the talk of an audit paper trail, the lever machines would malfunction "like crazy."  Levers would stick constantly.  Kerwin described the optical scanners as being "very successful" among the voters.  "We actually got the voting ballot itself which we didn't have with the Shoup lever machines," he said.  "If you have a recount, those ballots could be fed back into the machine for a count."

Yet Rhode Island has another feather in its cap: the state came up with a solution to help blind voters cast a secret ballot, thanks to the efforts of former Secretary of State - now US Representative - James Langevin.  At age 16, Langevin became a quadriplegic after a shooting accident as a cadet in the Boy Scout Explorer program working with the Warwick Police Department.  When he was elected Rhode Island's youngest Secretary of State in 1994, making voting accessible to those with disabilities was a primary goal.  "That was the priority with him," said Kerwin.  "There was a significant process that brought in a lot of people from the disabilities communities to go through these issues and come up with a solution to work with the system we had in place."  What was devised was the Braille tactile ballot.  Basically, a normal optical scan ballot is placed into a sleeve that serves as a template, enabling voters to feel where their candidates are.  Instructions are given through audio tape.  The system was used for the first time in the 2002 election.  The result?  "People found it pretty easy to use," said Kerwin.

In their 2003 state voting plan, which served as an application for HAVA funding, Rhode Island agreed to have at least one DRE in each voting place - yet there are discussions of converting entirely.  "We're looking," said Kerwin.  "It's going to be difficult to move from the system that we have now with an audit paper trail to one that's not."

A PAPER TRAIL OF YOUR VOTE
But what if the state has a DRE?  For the past 12 years, Mercuri advocated the use of paper trails with all electronic voting systems.  "[The voting vendors] didn't provide an independent way of auditing the votes because it's proprietary.  The cartridges they're storing [the votes] on are all proprietary," she said, and explained how she hounded the vendors.  "You've got to give us something.  So just print out these paper ballots.  This way the voters can see how they voted, drop it in the box, and you use it for a recount."  Wallach agreed that a paper trail is a possible solution, but that time has run out.  "Between now and November there isn't time to get such a thing working and certified and deployed and tested," he said.

In May 2003 US Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) introduced in the House H.R. 2239 the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act.  This act would amend HAVA to mandate a voter-verified paper trail on all DREs nationwide and in US territories.  US Senator Robert Graham (D-FL) sponsored the companion bill in the Senate.  In response, in March 2004 HAVA's authors - Representatives Robert Ney (R-OH) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Christopher Dodd (D-CT) sent a "Dear Colleague" letter to Congress.  It asked members to constrain themselves from amending HAVA before the EAC had a chance to develop guidelines and standards.  The problem is that the EAC wasn't fully operational until January 2004, and as of June was still staffing positions.  As of the writing of this article, Holt's bill is still in committee.

HAVA does require that voting systems produce a paper audit record, and in the event of a recount, this record will be used.  However, HAVA left the exact definition of a paper audit record and how to do a recount up to state legislatures.  Approximately 20 states have approved a paper trail by 2006.  Nevada will be the only state using it for the November election.

SAFEGUARDING FUTURE ELECTIONS
To safeguard the 2004 election, The Leadership Conference for Civil Rights asked the Brennan Center for Justice to undertake an independent study regarding DREs and to recommend a course of action for jurisdictions using DREs.  Those with whom the Center consulted for the report included members of the RABA Technologies "red team," Jones and Avi Rubin, a Computer Science professor at John Hopkins University.  In June 2004, the Center released its "Recommendation for Improving Reliability of Direct Recording Electronic Voting Systems."

The report recommended state election officials hire qualified independent security teams to examine DREs for software and hardware vulnerabilities.  State and local election officials shouldn't rely solely on voting vendors or in-house expertise.  Also, these security teams must be free of any business relationships with the vendors or designers and must possess computer security experience.

What is surprising is that the Brennan Report called for full cooperation from voting vendors: if Georgia needed a software patch, then the vendor would have to inform other jurisdictions using the system.  They also encourage state election officials to inform the public and other states of the vendor cooperation through "publicly visible" Web sites.  Such multi-state cooperation is crucial "in the absence of federally sponsored in-depth security assessments of specific voting systems."  In early August 2004, the EAC also incorporates these key findings into their own best practices.

Since the RABA report, Donna Duncan and Pam Woodward of the Maryland State Board of Election said the state would have the necessary security changes in place by November.  They received two software upgrades from Diebold that were certified through the ITA and that have been checked by two independent testers.  The Board posted their response and action to the RABA report on their Web site at www.elections.state.md.us.

Even though the Brennan report received positive feedback, Jeremy Creelan, Associate Council for the Brennan Center for Justice, questioned whether states will follow it.  "We're concerned that the jurisdictions will not be able to implement the steps needed to ensure security by November," he said.  "They've been pushing for the jurisdictions to take them on the best that they can but the problem is money."

JET FIGHTERS VS. VOTING SYSTEMS
Maryland paid the costs for hiring the independent testers, but smaller or poorer jurisdictions may not have the funds.  "Problems will continue well after November - this is not a closed issue," Creelan said.  "Local jurisdictions have to have better funding and a commitment for security."  Ansolabehere said that in the long run, the federal government needs to ante-up the money.  "If we put as much into this as, let's say, one jet fighter program, we'd have better equipment.  Total election administration - everything.  Pay for offices, everything top to bottom.  You'd see firms developing a better voting system."  The total cost?  He figured about $1 billion for the entire country, including all the counties and the equipment testing.

In the end, Wallach stressed that citizens have to push their state legislators and local election boards for better policies and procedures.  "Radically improving how these machines are installed, deployed, and handled, and how the votes at the end of the day are tabulated," he said.  "Who is monitoring it, how it's tracked, all that sort of thing."

Wallach pointed out that his state, Texas, has something called early voting where a person can go to the polls two weeks before the actual election.  In his county of Harris, every night the poll captain takes the machines home with him and brings them back in the morning.  "When I heard this, my jaw hit the floor.  You've got to be kidding me," he said, sarcastically.  "If that person wanted to manipulate the machines, he's got the privacy and comfort of his home.  In my opinion, you should never have a voting machine in the custody of fewer than two people."

Ansolabehere agreed and went one step further.  "The solution, if you're really concerned about this stuff, is to be a poll worker," he said.  Poll workers go through training in the local election process and provide the necessary security for the machines at the polling place, plus oversee the entire election process there, including vote tabulation.

Jones was passionate about concerned citizens volunteering.  "I strongly recommend that everyone who is really interested consider volunteering to be an official poll worker, and if those slots are filled, become a partisan poll worker," Jones said, emphatically.  He stated that the average age of poll workers is 75 to 80.  "We need to bring a new generation into this," Jones said, comparing it to other civic responsibilities such as jury.  "It's an obligation of democracy."

Ohio State Senator Fedor summed up the importance of voter participation in the electorate process.  "Our last stand is the voting booth," she said.  "The big story, in my opinion?  The voting booth is the last stand where citizens have a voice and a right to be heard.  If you question the election and the voting system, what's left?"