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E-voting reality

The Village Voice: Features: The Rise Of The Machines by Kareem Fahim

"Anything in a computer can be changed," said Hommel, who has worked with computers for over 30 years. She's devoted the past year solely to the voting issue. She talks about voter-verified paper audits of the new machines—a primary demand of many advocates—with an enthusiasm that borders on zeal. "The [electronic machines] are being sold as a panacea, on the basis that you can trust them," she said. "The people selling them are lying."

There are a number of reasons why the new machines, Direct Recording Electronic Voting Systems (known as DREs), are viewed so suspiciously, by so many. There is the legacy of the contested Florida results during the 2000 presidential election, and the comments of Wally O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold Inc., a manufacturer of DREs. In a fundraising letter he sent to Ohio Republicans last August, O'Dell wrote that he was committed "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

But as concern with the security of the upcoming election grows, the window in which changes can be made is slamming shut. Aides to several members of Congress admitted that legislation that would require the electronic machines to produce a paper audit trail will probably go nowhere during the current session. This means that a security regimen will be a voluntary, unfunded project, undertaken by state election officials rather than mandated by the federal government.

Three weeks ago, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, working with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, released a set of recommendations they hope federal election watchdogs will implement before November. The measures include the use of independent security experts, training programs for election officials, and public monitoring of the voting process. But the recommendations do not call for a paper audit trail.

"You have to remember what the recommendations were intended for," said Aviel Rubin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a co-author of a now famous study that is critical of some of the DRE technology. "They're for those precincts that ignore the advice [to require paper audits] and use the machines anyway." Rubin has endorsed the Brennan Center's recommendations, but remains skeptical of the DREs, saying, "The Diebold system is not like any commercial system I've ever seen. It's much worse."
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After her presentation downtown, Teresa Hommel sat for tea at a nearby bakery, and said that she holds the election machines to the standard of banking systems or computers involved in stock trades. In those applications, she said, multiple audits are the rule.