Black Box Notes

• Register to vote in your State;
• Report a change of name to your voter registration office;
• Report a change of address to your voter registration office; or
• Register with a political party.

This on-line registration service is provided by the Democratic National Committee, though you need not register as a Democrat to avail yourself of it. I've used it myself (to alter my party affiliation), and it's quite easy.

Now, both parties seem to dislike the ruling, so that probably means it's good for the electorate, but I can't see how it gets implemented. First of all, there is the question of value; would this be a flat amount or is a President worth more than a Senator? Second, wouldn't the value depend on the number of appearances of the ad (and possibly market size and share)? And finally, will these "contributions" apply against campaign contribution limits, and if so, how? Would an existing ad have to be pulled once the "contribution" hit that limit? And how on earth are these various campaigns going to figure all of this out? Even with the best of intentions, this ruling seems to beg for accidental violations.

So keep this ruling in mind if you hear of a rash financing violations in the upcoming elections. They may be real, but they may also be accidental.

In a highly unusual pairing, the Republican and Democratic party organizations for citizens living abroad have banded together against the Pentagon's Internet voting program for the presidential election.

Concerns about the security of the online ballots could cast the entire election under a cloud of suspicion, they said in a joint letter urging a halt in the program. The letter released yesterday is being sent to several congressional committees.

"We do not want to undermine confidence in our system of voting by discovering some real or imagined fraud in the November balloting," wrote the leaders of Republicans Abroad and Democrats Abroad.

• There are numerous vulnerabilities through which these systems could be hacked.

• Some of these can be addressed prior to the March primaries.

• Some additional vulnerabilities can be address prior to the November general election.

• Ultimately, Diebold election software has to be rewritten to meet industry security standards.

"We were genuinely surprised at the basic level of the exploits" that allowed tampering, said Michael Wertheimer, the Red Team leader and a former security expert for the National Security Agency. Referring to the inconsistent application of security, he added, "It's like washing your face and drying it with a dirty towel."

William A. Arbaugh, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and a member of the Red Team exercise, said, "I can say with confidence that nobody looked at the system with an eye to security who understands security." He added, "It seemed everywhere we scratched, there was something that's pretty troubling."

[Additional coverage from the Washington Post. ~ Permanent link to the NY Times article.]

Well, Bev has just published a fuller explanation of this, and now it's quite easy to see her point. Yes, the paper trails provide an audit capability, but only for the DRE voting terminals themselves. What Bev is talking about is an audit of the entire voting/vote counting process, and she offers an interesting proposal for developing one.

Sounds like prime material for your next book, Bev.

[Note: This links only to BlackBoxVoting.org. The actual post is dated Thursday Jan. 29, 2004.]

No matter how much U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler stomps and screams about the need for paper election ballot receipts, it’s not going to happen this year, said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore.

“There’s nothing I can do to put the printers on the machines,” she said. “The state legislature prescribes that procedure.” Wexler, a vocal proponent of paper receipts to ensure vote count accuracy and personal accountability, is suing LePore and Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, accusing them of “failing to ensure that Floridians will have their votes recorded accurately” by not providing receipts.

And this is just the problem. Techno-tightening? What the hell is that? Look, you can secure both ends of an Internet transaction fairly well; it's all the rest of it (the network part) that is wide open. Not only is it wide open, but it has to be wide open. That is fundamental to the architecture of the Internet.

And as far as people are getting used to using the Internet for secure transactions, fine, but there is a big difference. People do their banking, and they get a statement. People do their taxes, and they get a refund. People purchase something, and they get a package in the mail. For each and every one of these transactions, there is a proof positive confirmation that is an essential component of the transaction. There is no such proof positive component available in the voting process (not even in paper ballots). It is a fundamentally different type of transaction. And not one that is going to be solved by any techno-tightening that can be applied to the internet.

• DRE voting systems have been widely criticized elsewhere for various deficiencies and security vulnerabilities: that their software is totally closed and proprietary; that the software undergoes insufficient scrutiny during qualification and certification; that they are especially vulnerable to various forms of insider (programmer) attacks; and that DREs have no voter-verified audit trails (paper or otherwise) that could largely circumvent these problems and improve voter confidence. All of these criticisms, which we endorse, apply directly to SERVE as well.

"Thomas Jefferson advised that "elective government" is "the best permanent corrective of the errors or abuses of those entrusted with power." His faith in democracy was well placed, but for elective government to play this critical role, the elections must be inclusive and fair, and they must use machinery that works."

A Defense Department spokesman said the Pentagon was confident the system is secure. "We knew from the start that security would be the utmost concern," he said. "We've had things put in place that counteract the things they talked about."

The four experts [who disagreed] are among 10 the Pentagon asked to study the SERVE system and look for vulnerabilities. The other security experts decided not to issue a report, he said.

As Cook equally points out, the current system of candidate selection is hardly the only one we have ever used, and indeed, earlier systems clearly had better voter turnouts. Neither Cook nor I feel that returning to some earlier system is some panacea for low voter turnout rates, but there is an idea here worth considering: The party that develops the candidate selection system most effective in activating their membership will likely fare far better on election day.

But the Pentagon is standing by the system, which could get its first test Feb. 3 in South Carolina. ...

So far, seven states have signed on to the experimental system: Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Washington.

Internet voting has been viewed as a possible cure for some of the ills that afflict the mechanics of American democracy. Recently, the technology has seemed to move ahead of any serious consideration of whether it is actually a good idea to allow home computer owners to choose a president in the same way they order bath towels online or send e-mail to their relatives. But now there are grave questions about whether even the technology makes sense.

Four computer scientists brought in by the Pentagon to analyze a plan for Internet voting by the military issued a blistering report this week, concluding that the program should be halted. These four are the only members of a 10-member advisory committee to issue a report on the program. Their findings make it clear that the potential for hackers to steal votes or otherwise subvert elections electronically is too high. Congress should suspend the program.

The intentions behind the Pentagon's plan, the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, are laudable. Military personnel overseas, and other Americans abroad, face obstacles to registering and voting. The new program would ease the way by allowing them to use any computer hooked up to the Internet. This year, it would be limited to voters abroad who are from one of 50 counties in seven states, but it could eventually be used by all of the estimated six million American voters overseas.

But the advantages of the Pentagon's Internet voting system would be far outweighed by the dangers it would pose. The report makes it clear that the possibilities for compromising the secrecy of the ballot, voting multiple times and carrying out vote theft on a large scale would be limited only by the imagination and skill of would-be saboteurs. Viruses could be written that would lodge on voters' computers and change their votes. Internet service providers, or even foreign governments that control network access, could interfere with votes before they reached their destination.

This week's report — which was written by respected scientists, including Aviel Rubin, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University — is not the first to call Internet voting into question. A March 2001 study conducted by the Internet Policy Institute and financed by the National Science Foundation found that Internet systems like the Pentagon's "pose significant risk to the integrity of the voting process."

There is every reason to believe that if federal elections can be tampered with, they will be, particularly when a single hacker, working alone, might be able to use an online voting system to steal a presidential election. The authors of this week's report concede that there is no way of knowing how likely it is that the Pentagon's voting system would be compromised. What is clear, however, is that until the vulnerabilities they identified are eliminated, the risks are too great.

Now imagine this: in November the candidate trailing in the polls wins an upset victory — but all of the districts where he does much better than expected use touch-screen voting machines. Meanwhile, leaked internal e-mail from the companies that make these machines suggests widespread error, and possibly fraud. What would this do to the nation?

Unfortunately, this story is completely plausible.

The truth is that even if a moderately liberal person were elected President, he or she would face exactly what the Clintons faced for eight years, a hideous and relentless assault with opportunity for few meaningful accomplishments. The American Congress is so conservative, and has demonstrated itself so lacking in courage or imagination or largeness of view, that only the most modest changes can be expected under any president.

I know that we are all hot on e-vote issues, and indeed, it is critical to correctly count the vote. But a proper vote count is not enough if the voters' intent is removed via gerrymandering.

[Note: All candidates were Republicans. The candidate that had been endorsed by the local party however came in second.]

Obviously, I think that this is an absolutely terrible idea. As small a step as this particular system might be, it is a step nonetheless towards a military dictatorship. For any who might doubt this, I would invite you to point to a single military dictatorship where the head of the military did not have control over the counting of votes.

A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to members of a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program.

Let's look at some potential and actual problems:

• Technical:
  • Viruses can easily corrupt voting computers and servers, possibly rendering them inoperable. If this were not detected and corrected in advance, voters may be denied the opportunity to vote. Even if these could be detected in advance, there is no guarantee that skilled personnel will be available to correct the problem.
  • Viruses can easily corrupt the voting computers and servers in a manner that misrecords or deliberately alters the votes cast. These viruses can also be programmed to delete themselves once voting was completed.
  • Even viruses that do not attack the voting computers and servers themselves can cause the communications lines that carry their messages to become overloaded, thereby denying voters the opportunity to vote.
  • Soldiers stationed in areas subject to power failures could be denied the opportunity to vote by such a failure.
  • Systems such as Carnivour could easily intercept and even change internet votes

• Practical:
  • It is the responsibility of each voting supervisor to verify the eligibility of every person casting a vote to actually be eligible to cast a vote in their district. Military write-in voting offers at least a cursory opportunity for the voting supervisor to just that. The system being implemented by the military will simply forward vote totals to the various districts. Voting supervisors will thus be placed in the position of accepting a mere vote count without any possibility of verifying that individuals are eligible.
  • Voting supervisors will be unable to inspect the voting computers being used to insure that they meet local standards.
  • Paper trails and systems audits will be impossible for voting supervisors.

• Political:
  • Most troublesome is the fact that this system essentially militarizes a portion of our voting system, bring it under direct control of the military. Inspection by elected officials and/or their appointees will be impossible. The military simply should not be a part of our voting process beyond their current role of providing all soldiers the opportunity to vote.
  • This system is being suggested as a "pilot test" of a future national voting system. This would have the potential of bringing the majority of our voting system under military control. Since the military is effectively under the control of the Executive, the Executive could literally order the military to tamper with the vote.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Faced with the possibility of another close election, U.S. political campaigns and advocacy groups are drawing up detailed profiles of the voters who will determine their success at the polls next fall.

Political groups are finding out what kind of car their prospective supporters drive, how much they earn, what sort of neighborhood they live in and what magazines they read.

They may not know how individuals voted in the last election, but they do know who showed up at the polls and whether they are registered with a particular party -- strong indicators of how they are likely to vote in the November election, experts say.

WASHINGTON - A House committee recommended legislation Wednesday that would provide for fast special elections if a terrorist attack killed or incapacitated many House members.

The measure would require expedited elections under "extraordinary circumstances" when the speaker of the House announces that vacancies in the 435-member chamber exceed 100.

The bill stipulates that parties choose candidates within 10 days of that announcement and that state elections be held within 45 days.

The legislation has also been approved by the House Administration Committee and now goes to the full House for consideration.

Scott Ritchie, a 19-year-old political science and math student at the University of California at Davis, is launching the nonprofit Open Vote Foundation, which plans to modify the Australian code to meet California election standards and offer it free to any voting vendors that want to implement it in their systems. Rithie is also planning to modify the software to accomodate California's new paper trail requirement.

The Australian system, called Electronic Voting and Counting System, or eVACS, was used in an election in the Australian Capital Territory in 2001. It will be used there again this year.

What is "open source"?

Open source is, as the name implies, computer ("source") code that is fully open for inspection. It is provided under what is called a general public license (GPL), which allows anyone to view, use, modify, and even redistribute the modified software. The only restriction with GPL is that, even if modified, the source code must remain both open and free. In other words, it can never be copyrighted, and thus it can never be hidden. So why would anyone write open source code if there were no means to profit from it?

A lot of open source software is collaboratively developed by programming affricionados simply looking for better programs. (Check out SourceForge, a collaberative development platform for a lot of great open source programs.) But "for profit" developers can also benefit from it. Hardware developers can offer their products at a far lesser cost by using open source, and software developers can write supporting programs to the open source software and make there money there. Futhermore, if anyone finds a way to improve an open source product already being used, all users of that code can simply download the new version at no additional cost. Especially for larger users, the cost saving over time can be substantial.

Why is "open source" superior for e-voting?

Many in our current e-vote firms might argue that open source is open also to hackers, and while this is true, closing the code is a false (and even dangerous) economy. Hackers will find it sooner or later anyways, and they will find it when it is far less tested than an open source version would have been. In fact, not only is that larger group of testers more liable to find a vulnerability before a hacker, they are also more liable to find a better fix for it than the code's deveveloper might. It is simply a matter of using more brains to solve problems, and open source allows that.

Scott Ritchie understands this, and his efforts are right on track. If we are going to e-vote, open source is the only real way to do it.

As the article's by-line implies, Slate has a problem with the lack of vote totals produced in this. But as I have said before, I have no similar problem. This is a primary run by what is a "private" political party. If Iowan Democrats feel that this is how they want to assign delegates, that's fine with me.

If you are not familiar with TalkLeft, it's an excellent blog written by a lawyer covering most liberal legal issues, and the "Comments" section is often quite interesting. Voting issues are covered frequently, especially those regarding disenfranchisement. And that is after all what the black box issue is all about.

Voting activists from across California converged on the secretary of state's office to see what action, if any, the government would take against Diebold for violating voting-system certification laws and to see whether the state would certify the company's latest touch-screen voting machines. [More]

• The touch-screen machines had no way to report to election headquarters electronically, meaning that cartridges had to be hand-delivered.
• A vendor operating the machines turned off a function that counted blank or improper votes. (Why are they letting vendors operate these machines?)

That said, we must remember the "chads" and Florida, 2000. Paper is hardly infallible, and it's fallibility is hardly restricted to hanging chads. I side with those who Lynn has mentioned who want machine produced paper ballots that then become the actual vote itself. This would remove entirely the need for an audit of any voting machines that were actually used by voters. If an error occurred on that paper ballot, it could simply be torn up, and the voter could vote again. If a similar problem occurred on that same voting machine, local offficials would be immediately aware of it, and could simply disable that machine. All of this would be fully observable by poll watches from any party that chose to have one present.

But on to my objections.

Let's start with billionaire George Soros, the Democrats anointed billionaire savior. They should get to know him better. According to voting rights activists, Soros is a proponent of Internet voting, the most insecure voting technology on face of the planet. He's also a disciple for Direct Democracy (i.e., the initiative process). Think about that. For anyone who wants to control a government, the combination of the Internet voting and Direct Democracy is a fascist's dream-team. Through control of vote-counting technology, not only could "someone" pick our legislators, they could also pass their own legislation. They could be a true Wizard of Oz.

In this speech, Soros skewers the Bush administration for its decision to invade Iraq, and indeed, it may be almost solely for this action that he wishes to see Bush defeated in the coming election:

Underlying the Bush doctrine is the belief that international relations are relations of power not law, and that international law merely serves to ratify what the use of power has wrought.

This dogma can be very appealing especially when you are powerful, but it contradicts the values that have made America great. And the rest of the world cannot possibly accept it.

andThe invasion of Iraq was the first practical application of the Bush doctrine and the rest of the world had an allergic reaction to it. Nobody had a good word to say about Saddam Hussein yet the overwhelming majority of the people and governments of the world opposed the invasion because we did it unilaterally, indulging in pre-emptive military action.andIf we reelect Bush in 2004 we endorse the Bush doctrine and we will have to live with the consequences. We shall be regarded with widespread hostility and terrorists will be able to count on many sympathizers around the world. We are liable to be trapped in a vicious circle of violence, ... 2004 is not an ordinary election; it is a referendum on the Bush doctrine. The future of the world hangs in the balance.

Perhaps I am more sensitive to the dangers than most Americans because of my background. I was born in Hungary and I am Jewish. The Nazis occupied Hungary and the Jews were deported. I would have perished if my father had not had the foresight to procure false identities for his family. Then Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Union and my life could have been wasted if I had not emigrated. So I learnt at a very early age how important it is what kind of social system prevails. I chose freedom, first in England and then in America.

As a student I was greatly influenced by Karl Popper, the philosopher. He showed that there was something common to both the Nazis and the Communists. They believed they had the final answers. But the ultimate truth is not within our reach. So the final answers can be imposed only by force or repression. He advocated a different approach: A social system based on the recognition that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth and might is not necessarily right.

Few outside of those who have studied philosophy have heard of Karl Popper, but that is also true of most philosophers. Great philosophical works are hardly bedtime reading. One must "eat" these works with intensity, much as one approaches a Thanksgiving feast. Popper has written two such works, both direct descendents of Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781), in which Kant demonstrated that for human beings, captive to their own limited senses, absolute knowledge is impossible.

If this was so, thought Popper, what to make of science? Could it be that science does not prove anything, and if this is the case, what good is science? Popper's answer comes in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" (1935), in which he argued that it is not the role of science to prove anything, but rather to establish theories in such a manner that they can be proven false ("falsifiablity"). When a scientific theory is established in this manner (and all real scientific theories are; "creation science" is a theory, but it is not a scientific theory because it is not stated in a falsifiable manner), they are either proven false or become accepted as "the current state of science". This acceptance is not proof that the theory is correct; merely that no one has yet proven it false. But it remains as "science" until someone can.

In fact, argued Popper, this explains exactly how scientific discoveries gradually replace each other, earlier ones being approximations, and later ones being simply refinements of those approximations. Just as Newtonian physics was "the answer" for hundreds of years until being superceded by the physics of Einstein, so also with all of science. Of course, this was not the work of Popper's to which Soros was referring, but it important to understand, as it is at the core of what becomes Popper's later masterpiece (and the one to which Soros referred), "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945).

At the time "The Open Society" was written, many were arguing that democracy was "inefficient"; that the overhead of educating voters created a drag on changes to government (i.e., law) that might be necessary. The American system was successful merely because of the great natural resources they possessed, but, all other things being equal, an aristocratic form of government could certainly implement needed reforms far more quickly and therefore more efficiently. (This coincides with the Platonic philosphy (embraced by Strauss and his heirs, the Neocons) that a "gifted elite" was the best form of government.)

No, argued Popper, in perhaps the most brilliant re-write of a philosophical work ever. Whatever the current form of government, that is merely today's approximation of the best government. But since human beings can never have absolute knowledge of anything, that government must also be falsifiable. It must be open to examination to anyone who can prove it to be "wrong". And the only system of governing that Popper saw that allowed for this is democracy. Popper had simply looked at the "efficiency" of "scientific discovery", and he applied it to governments. The "open society" of science, in which anyone can prove a theory to be wrong, was identical to governments. They are merely a "best approximation" of what a government should be, and only democracy allowed for the successive refinements needed to advance it in the exact same manner in which scientific discovery advances.

And this is what George Soros believes. It is also why Lynn Landes is way of base in this criticism. One cannot be merely "influenced" by Popper. One either "gets it", or one does not. George Soros gets it.

• Whose Voting Machines?: About ES&S, Diebold, and SAIC, the web of ties between them and the politicos, with even a nod towards Howard Ahmanson's money. (See "From Genesis To Dominion". Excellent.)

• Young, Righteous - and Voting: Not about BBV issues at all, but still important. Most of us are not strangers to voting, many of us are familiar with activism, but few of us are familiar with turning activism into real electoral politics. One woman's story of turning that corner.

• Getting Out the Vote: A list of "get out the vote" activist organizations, most of them progressive.

• Clean Elections - Making a Difference: Maine started. Full public funding for candidates who refuse other funding. It worked there, and now it is spreading.

• Every Neighborhood Counts: A Green knocks an incumbent Democrat off and the reprisals.

• fighting for the soul of the democratic party: Back in 1964:

  So long as klansmen and the police could attack black people with impunity, it would be impossible for activists to organize local communities. After Allen’s murder, “We were just defenseless,” SNCC leader Bob Moses recalled. “There was no way of bringing national attention. And it seemed to me that we were just sitting ducks. People were just going to be wiped out.”

• Visualize a Fair Election in 2004: By Greg Palast. Need I say more? About "Voting While Black" and his alliance with Martin Luther King, III to prevent another Florida-style scrubbing of black voter rolls.

• Build from the Grassroots: You don't need to go outside of your party. You only need to build your movement with it.

• Stand Together:

  “During the next year, I will be there at least five times for someone else’s fight, as well as my own. If enough of us are there, we’ll all start winning.”

• Update Voting Rules: We are a two party system and will stay that way until we adopt new ways of counting votes. Some ideas.

• how to change the world in three easy clicks: A brief history of MoveOn.org from grassroots to major political mover.

• 2004 Survival Guide: How you can get involved in transforming U.S. politics: The title says it all. Check it out and get involved. Somewhere!

But I thought I'd mention it. It's my intention to keep Black Box Notes as non-partisan as possible. Clean elections should be everyone's desire, and black box voting is simply not a partisan issue.

That said, I myself am highly partisan, and I do write in that fashion over at my other blog, Benedict@Large. As we approach the 2004 elections, I'll be looking increasingly for "out of the way" stories about voting issues beyond the "black box" and campaign strategies not relating to the issues, but rather towrds manuvering blocs of voters, and I will be cross-linking to them from here. My feeling is that most people "into" the black box issue are so because they are also politically-motivated and interested especially in "dirty tricks" (voter abuse) campaigning.

My first cross-post is to Election Strategies, an article that links to two others.

The first is about Katherine Harris' possible run for the US Senate. It looks quite likely that she will, but there is a lot going on in the background here. The White House is saying "no", while the President's brother is saying, "Bug off." Here's why.

The second article addresses an announced GOP strategy to gain 25% of the black vote. It's by The BLACK CoMMentator, who claims this to be a manipulative fiction. If you've ever read them before, you'll know that they back up their claims with a lot of solid research.

So drop by if this stuff meets your tastes.

I usually like to write commentaries on the articles I post, but I have a great many stacked up that I never got to, so allow me to just list them out for you. Some of these are no doubt a bit dated, but I have not posted them before. I am merely dumping my collected archives of previously unposted articles. Some will be of interest to anyone concerned about e-voting, a few are simply multiple citations of the same story, and others may concern only those with a special focus. The newest articles are first:

January, 2004

• Doubts will Persist until Secure, Accurate Elections Become a National Priority, From the Baltimore Sun, January 7, 2004.
• Group plans to protest Diebold, From the Daily Republic, January 6, 2004
• Many States Face Mess at Polls, From the Orlando Sentinel, January 5, 2004
• Oliphant Turns to Florida Attorney General To Argue Against Her Suspension, From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, January 3, 2004

• Electronic Voting Firm Site Hack, From Wired News, December 29, 2003
• VoteHere reports computer break-in, From MSNBC, December 29, 2003
• Electronic Voting Security Firm Hacked, From YahooNews, December 29, 2003
• Voting machine maker dinged, From YahooNews, December 17, 2003
• E-Voting Undermined by Sloppiness, From Wired News, December 17, 2003
• Con Job at Diebold Subsidiary, From Wired News, December 17, 2003
• Critics: Convicted felons worked for electronic voting companies, From San Jose Mercury, December 17, 2003
• Group Seeks E-Voting Standards, From Wired News, December 16, 2003
• Criticism of Electronic Voting Machines' Security is Mounting, From IDG News Service, December 12, 2003
• Follow the Money: Why the Best Voting Technology May Be No Technology at All, From Robert X. Cringely, December 11, 2003 (This was preceded by my previously posted article, "No Confidence Vote: Why the Current Touch Screen Voting Fiasco Was Pretty Much Inevitable")
• For Sale: The American Voter, From Wired News, December 11, 2003
• Bill to Give Receipts for E-Voting, From Associated Press, December 11, 2003
• Voting Machines Gone Wild!, From InTheseTimes, December 11, 2003
• For Sale: The American Voter, From Wired News, December 11, 2003
• Editorial: An electronic democracy . From the San Francisco Chronicle, December 11, 2003
• Statewide electronic voting delayed, From the Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 3, 2003

• Why Florida Senate race could turn into a comedy drama, From the Independent/UK, November 27, 2003
• G.O.P. worries face from past will haunt Florida senate race, From the New York Times, November 26, 2003
• Lock the Vote: The general presidential election is decreasingly relevant, From Seattle Weekly, November 26, 2003
• Diebold E-Voting Case Page, From Stamford Law School, November 24, 2003
• Terrorist Logic: Disrupt the 2004 Election, From the Washington Post, November 23, 2003
• Democratic panel to decide fate of Web voting plan in Michigan, From USA Today, November 22, 2003
• State Tells Counties to Establish Paper Trail on Electronic Voting, From the LA Times, November 21, 2003
• Suspect Code Used in State Votes, From Wired News, November 6, 2003
• California voting machine called into question, From CNET News, Novenber 4, 2003
• A better ballot?, From the Christian Science Monitor, November 03, 2003

• Diebold vote replacement made Al Gore concede, From Mark Crispin Miller, October 26, 2003
• Black Box Voting Blues, From MSNBC/Newsweek, October 25, 2003
• Commerce's NIST Launches Voting Standards Initiative at December Symposium, From NIST, October 24, 2003
• Did E-Vote Firm Patch Election?, From Wired News, October 13, 2003

• Ehrlich Seeks Probe Over Ballot Machines, From the Washington Post, September 28, 2003
• Mixed views on new voting machines, From the San Diego Union-Tribune, September 26, 2003
• Md. to buy controversial Diebolds, From Federal Computer Week, September 25, 2003
• Diebold Election Systems Moves Forward With Maryland Voting Machine Installation, From Diebold Election Systems (press release), September 24, 2003
• How anger over Florida recount still roils politics, From Smirking Chimp, September 19, 2003
• E-Voting Audit Ready for Public, From Wired News, September 18, 2003

But we are getting noticed.

National election experts said the cloudy contest in Broward County likely would fuel criticism of new touch-screen machines and add to slowdowns in implementing national reforms prompted by Florida's 2000 election debacle.

They also predicted the mystery will prompt more calls to require a paper-record trail for electronic-vote systems. Broward's system has no such safeguard.

"I think we're in a great stage of uncertainty," especially on touch-screen machines, said Kimball W. Brace, president of Election Data Services, a veteran Washington-based voting-system consultant.

"The move to new equipment is grinding to a halt," Brace said.

In the wake of Florida's election mess almost four years ago, the Fort Lauderdale area led a host of major cities in buying costly new touch-screen machines. Fifteen Florida counties, including large metropolitan areas such as Hillsborough, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, have purchased such systems.

The hope was to avoid controversies caused by dangling chads on punch cards or certain paper systems prone to allow mismarked ballots to be cast.

But this week, Broward County voters proved once more that no system is perfect.

Tuesday's special election was held to replace Connie Mack IV, who resigned to run for Congress. The state House District 91 seat he left runs along the coast between southeast Boca Raton to north Dania Beach, east of Interstate 95.

Before the recount, Ellyn Bogdanoff had 2,816 votes, or 26.3 percent, and fellow Republican Oliver Parker had 2,804 votes, or 26.2 percent, according to unofficial results out of a total of the 10,844 ballots cast.

The rest of votes, a sliver of which were cast in nearby Palm Beach County, were split among five other candidates.

State officials said Thursday that a manual recount of a small number of paper ballots -- provisional and absentee ballots -- would be ordered, to be completed by 5 p.m. Tuesday.

During the recount Thursday, Broward elections officials found 134 cases in which no vote was registered. That same number of "undervotes" was found after Tuesday's election, County Attorney Ed Dion said.

"The machines are doing what the machines are supposed to do. But you never know why people do what they do," said Brenda Snipes, Broward elections supervisor.

Experts said it's not clear why so many voters would boycott the only race on the ballot. Brace said investigation would be needed to find out where those undervotes occurred. If they were concentrated in a small number of precincts, that could signal a problem, he said.

Broward election officials could not be reached for further comment Thursday.

Election Systems & Software, the Omaha, Neb., maker of Broward's voting machines, said in a statement that it was reviewing precinct data to determine the cause of the undervotes.

"We absolutely don't believe this is a case of voters intending to cast a ballot that was not counted," the company said.

But the questions about the computerized-voting systems are delaying voting reforms across the country and perhaps eroding voter confidence in close elections, said R. Michael Alvarez, who helps lead the California Institute of Technology's joint vote-reform group with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alvarez said that disputed elections like Broward's will ignite more calls for paper records to accompany electronic voting and add to a "political polarization" that signals less confidence in close results.

"There's distrust," Alvarez said, "especially among Democrats."

Washington is largely to blame for the national reform slowdown because of funding delays, Brace said. Of the $3.86 billion Congress and President Bush promised for voting reform in 2002, only $650 million arrived to states so far.

Computer experts are also causing local election officials to pause before buying new electronic machines, saying the systems are vulnerable to hackers. Touch-screen-machine makers dispute those claims.

Still, Congress is considering laws to require paper receipts for touch-screen users.

"Clearly you wouldn't have the problem you're having with a paper record," said Freddy Oakley, the Yolo County clerk/recorder in California and a leading reform advocate.

Oakley is waiting to replace her punch-card system but distrusts an electronic system with no paper trail.

"This is the exact nightmare I'm trying to avoid in my county," Oakley said.