Worries Mount About Touch-Screen Voting

Celebrated movie actor Arnold Schwarzeneggar may have won yesterday’s wild and woolly recall election in California, but a verdict is still pending on the security and reliability of the ATM-like touch-screen voting machines used in four California counties. Some computer scientists and other observers fear the machines are susceptible to hacking and manipulation. Without a paper ballot, any such interference with a voter’s choices could go undetected, they say, and any subsequent recount would be meaningless. A Stanford University computer-science professor advised voters in the four counties to use absentee ballots to bypass the problem. Similar concern is building elsewhere, as well. “There’s no audit trail on the machines,” says John C. Elliott, an electronic transactions consultant based in Florida, where a handful of counties are now using touch-screen machines in the wake of the 2000 presidential-election recount debacle. “The software could be altered to say there were more or less votes cast than actually were. The only record is in the machine itself.” Election officials in the California counties counter such concerns are exaggerated. Indeed, Diebold Election Systems, which services 50,000 touch-screen voting machines nationwide, says none of the election officials in charge of those machines has reported electronic miscues resulting in false counts or fraud. In Florida, however, officials in Broward County, which has spent more than $17 million on touch-screen machines from Election Systems & Software, are sufficiently concerned to be debating whether to replace the technology with optical scanners, which scan paper ballots in much the same way machines score standardized tests. Another option they’re studying: adding printers to the touch-screen machines. Both options would cost county taxpayers millions._x000D_