Today's general election in the US will be a test for
electronic voting machines as well as the presidential
candidates.
With most national polls showing a statistical dead heat between
George Bush and John Kerry, problems with voting technology could
play a major role in the election. Both the Democratic and
Republican parties have thousands of lawyers ready to descend on
areas of voting controversy.
Around 30% of the voting population will use electronic voting
machines. Seven of the critical swing states - the big three of
Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, plus Iowa, Colorado, Nevada and New
Mexico - are among the 27 using e-voting machines.
Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting
Foundation, said it could take days for the US to sort out the
winning presidential candidate because of potential problems with
e-voting machines.
The foundation and other groups critical of e-voting machines
say election officials have no way to recheck votes cast on the
machines. The machines don't give voters any indication of what's
going on inside them, and with paper trails unavailable in most
states, voting officials have no way to conduct independent
recounts.
"Election officials are not able to show us the work," said Andy
Stephenson, associate director of BlackBoxVoting.
Stephenson said that while ballot stuffing was nothing new in US
elections, e-voting technology could allow large-scale cheating
simply through changing a few lines of code. "It's the scale of the
stuffing," he added. "It'd be a hell of a lot harder to do with a
million paper votes. It's the economy of scale."
Although voting doesn't open up in all 50 states until today,
early voting has been available in several states, and problems
with e-voting technology have already been reported, according to
the Election Incident Reporting System, operated by the Verified
Voting Foundation and Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility.
The 96 separate incidents include 44 in Florida and 20 in Texas.
No other state had more than five e-voting problems reported. Among
the alleged incidents in Florida so far are voting machines
crashing and causing long queues, and voters saying they'd voted
for Kerry but the machine showed they voted for Bush during the
review process, which allows voters to correct mistakes.
Doherty said that more than 300 volunteers would monitor
elections for e-voting problems for the Verified Voting
Foundation.
But the Information Technology Association of America, whose
members include suppliers of e-voting machines, claimed early
e-voting was a "success".
"Returns suggest nothing but the accurate and secure operation
of electronic voting machines," said association president Harris
Miller. "In fact, what we have seen is that the early voting
phenomenon, supported by electronic voting systems, continues to
grow. People like it, and they have the opportunity to do it
because this innovative technology provides election officials with
the ability to support numerous ballot types at precincts set up at
shopping malls, government offices and other high traffic
areas."
Bob Cohen, the association's senior vice-president, added that
most problems with early voting had not been caused by the
machines. "The issues have more to do with voter registration and
people showing up and not being on the voter logs. Our contention
is that e-voting machines are very accurate."
Although there were some reports of computers holding lists of
voter registrations crashing in the first days of early voting,
that wasn't an issue with e-voting machines, added Cohen. "That's
not a voting machine. Certainly, computers crash."
Doherty said that one remedy for voting controversy was a
landslide turnout, and some pollsters and political scientists are
indeed predicting a record turnout for a presidential election.
"If there's overwhelming turnout for one candidate, the problems
with the machines are lessened," said Doherty. "The more people who
vote, the less likely there will be problems."
Grant Gross writes for IDG News Service