Will Your Vote Count in November? One Expert Says He's Not So Sure

Candace Braun

How reliable are the new voting machines that will be used in Mercer County in the November election? Not very, according to Edward Felton, professor of computer science at Princeton University.

Mr. Felton spoke at the Princeton Public Library on Saturday, September 11, as part of the New Jersey Libraries September Project, which engages state libraries in an election-related day of conversation and democracy.

The author of more than 60 books and articles on computer security, technology law and policy, and Internet software, Mr. Felton is an expert on the problems involved in relying on technology for important data collection. The director of the Secure Internet Programming Laboratory, he has expressed his thoughts and ideas about technology and its flaws on his website, which has been in existence since 2002 (www.freedom totinker.com).

On Saturday, he explained how using the newly-purchased voting machines could bring about more problems than the Florida recount in the 2000 election. According to Mr. Felton, that was when most experts began to explore the dangers of relying on any type of machine to correctly tally votes.

"That was the first time [America] really noticed," he said, citing the inconsistent forms and procedures for vote counts that experts discovered in Florida that year.

Instead of searching for a solution that would eliminate the unreliability of the process, however, state legislatures opted for using higher technology rather than a simpler one. Mr. Felton said this was a mistake.

After federal money was distributed to the states to purchase higher technology, the decision on which voting machines to buy was left up to county officials.

"There are some serious pressures put on the people making these decisions," said Mr. Felton, adding that the decisions made were not necessarily informed ones.

In Mercer County, the machines that were used for the primary elections in June, and that will once again be used in November, were purchased from Sequoia Voting Systems.

A large touch screen with blinders on either side, the "brain" of the machine, called the AVC Advantage, is found in a locked box behind the viewing mechanism. This box, Mr. Felton discovered, is not open to public examination.

"My students would love to examine the Mercer County machines, but we're not allowed to," he said. "There aren't many opportunities to study this technology."

Not allowing experts the chance to examine the machines and their reliability leaves a lot of unanswered questions for interested parties all over the country, he said: "Most people who have studied this seem to think we should be quite worried ... It's much harder than one might think to make software do what you want it to do."

Some problems he mentioned as occurring in other states include machines that erase a vote for a particular candidate after the vote has already been selected; votes not counting at all or being counted twice for one person; and miscalculated votes due to voters who notice a problem with their ballot but neglect to mention it to anyone before leaving the polls.

Voting Machines Vs. ATMs

Mr. Felton compared the voting machine process to removing money from a bank-operated ATM. He said that while there are several ways to verify if an ATM is running properly, those methods cannot be implemented with a voting machine because of a citizen's right to privacy.

An ATM machine keeps logs of each transaction passing through its system. A record of these transactions is mailed to each customer in a monthly statement. The receipt that customers are given when using the ATM can confirm the accuracy or inaccuracy of the statement.

However, these methods of assuring accuracy cannot be used by the county, said Mr. Felton, because the voting system requires that voters not be identified.

Mr. Felton suggested a number of solutions that each county can use to verify the accuracy of voting machines, including opening the voting systems up for public inspection; having random recounts of votes to verify that they are logged correctly; or generating a voter-verified paper trail.

Many concerned voters have asked that a paper trail be used to insure the voting process. One way to do this would be to have the machines print an anonymous receipt for each voter. After voters confirm that the information on the sheet is correct, they would drop the paper in a ballot box on the way out the door. This would ensure a back-up paper trail if there was a problem with a machine.

One of the defects of this method would be that not every voter would drop the paper in the box on the way out, leading to obvious inaccuracies between the number of votes logged on the machine and the number of votes in the box.

"My main concerns are that we won't know whether errors were made, or that we will know that errors were made but will be unable to fix them," said Mr. Felton.

In any case, the best way to handle the risks of using a computer to tally votes is to ask county and state leaders to institute some sort of change, said Mr. Felton: "We have to put pressure on our public officials to do something about this."

He suggested logging onto www.verifiedvoting.org, where a number of American citizens have put together information on how to push for a change in the voting system.

"The best we can do in the short time remaining before the upcoming election is to see that alternative voting technologies are available. A decision to do this could be taken at the state or county level," he said.