After the 2000 presidential election debacle, when hanging chads in Florida threw the results in doubt for five weeks, federal and state officials vowed never again. They quickly drafted plans to replace punch cards and other outdated voting systems, and pledged to spend the money needed to ensure every vote is counted properly.Yet, as the 2004 presidential primary season spreads across the nation, voting systems remain unreliable throughout much of the USA. Many states still are using Florida-style ballots, including Missouri, the largest of seven states that held contests Tuesday. And states that switched to high-tech ballots are finding their computerized systems vulnerable to hackers.
The failure to follow through on election-reform pledges leaves millions of voters vulnerable to more ballot-counting fiascos. And each replay would feed public perceptions of a political system increasingly unresponsive to the needs of voters.
But a small number of vocal critics, conveniently forgetting the crisis instigated by the older voting technology, claim electronic voting is a curse, not a cure. They argue that software-dependent systems have gaping security holes and cannot verify results.This is a real head-in-the-sand assessment. Per the recent Maryland "experiment", DRE security can hardly be considered "strong". If fact, one of the participants in that effort said that it looked like Diebold hadn't even bothered to consider security in their design, and this was consistent with the results of that effort.Such views, based on conjecture rather than fact, argue against fixing the problem altogether. DRE security is already strong. Measures to prevent tampering make the technology far superior to anything before, and improvements continue. Local election officials operating in the real, not academic, world know that the rewards of moving to DREs far outweigh the manageable risks.
But even more than that is the idea that local election officials will somehow simply fall into managing the risks in operating a computer system, many of whom have had little or even no prior experience in doing this. While e-voting systems are not the most complex of systems, any computer system is a mystery to one who has no experience with it, and it simply cannot be left to chance that every local election official will be up to the task.
Poll workers in Alameda County noticed something strange on election night in October. As a computer counted absentee ballots in the recall race, workers were stunned to see a big surge in support for a fringe candidate named John Burton.The Mercury News takes a look at California black box voting problems and problems elsewhere in this extensive article.Concerned that their new $12.7 million Diebold electronic voting system had developed a glitch, election officials turned to a company representative who happened to be on hand.
Lucky he was there. For an unknown reason, the computerized tally program had begun to award votes for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to Burton, a socialist from Southern California.
Similar mishaps have occurred across the country since election officials embraced electronic voting in the wake of the Florida vote-counting debacle of 2000.
Other articles from the Mercury News:
One of the biggest reasons politicians continue to trample on issues of crucial importance to low-income Americans — issues like jobs, education and access to health care — is the traditionally poor voting habits of that segment of the population. The percentage of people who vote (and the level of attention they get from politicians) rises steadily as you scale the income ladder.Bob Herbert takes a look at a voter registration drive in South Carolina, a region hard hit by factory closing.