Clips December 19, 2003

[Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>]

Clips December 19,
2003

ARTICLES

Critics of new voting machines want system to create paper trail
State Officials Knew of Voting Systems' Drawbacks
Forest Service shifts e-mail plan

*******************************
Baltimore Sun
Critics of new voting machines want system to create paper trail
Means to detect fraud by hackers recommended 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Stephanie Desmon
Sun Staff
Originally published December 17, 2003

The future of voting in Maryland is stored in warehouses across the
state, including one in Glen Burnie, formerly Anne Arundel County's
animal shelter, where new touch-screen machines inside small hardtop
suitcases are stacked in bays where dogs and cats used to live.

Even before the machines have been turned on, though, they are at the
center of a growing chorus of criticism about whether the results they
will provide in the March presidential primary, and beyond, can be
trusted.

While election officials say they are happy with the new system, critics
worry that hackers might be able to rig the machines to record votes
differently from how they were cast, and that there is no mechanism to
detect that.

"The voter will touch the screen and think everything is fine but
will have no way of knowing," said Rep. Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey
Democrat who has criticized the system.

But since Maryland has already spent $55 million for the automated
teller-like machines, a vocal group of computer scientists are pushing
for a fix they consider fairly simple: adding what they call a
voter-verified paper trail, printing out each ballot cast for the voter
to review before leaving the polling place on Election Day. Those ballots
could be counted by hand should a recount be required.

Maryland purchased more than 11,000 AccuVote-TS machines in July from
Diebold Election Systems despite swirling questions on whether U.S.
elections can safely be conducted via computer.

Despite the questions, manufacturers such as Diebold, based in North
Canton, Ohio, haven't yet made the paper trail feature available. But
California recently announced it will require an auditable paper trail on
its machines by 2006. New York and several other states are considering
the same. And Holt introduced a bill in Congress in May that would
require every state to require a paper trail in 2004 - all of which would
force vendors to perfect a technique for producing these
records.

Maryland election officials say they have no intention of requiring the
parallel paper trail - and say they aren't convinced it is
necessary.

"We're not going to stop the presses or anything like that,"
said Gilles W. Burger, a systems engineer who is chairman of the state's
Board of Elections. "I feel very comfortable and confident with the
accuracy of these machines. We're listening to what people are saying out
there, but there isn't just one viewpoint out there."

Senators want study 

Meanwhile, a Maryland Senate committee has requested a review of the
security of the Diebold system and an analysis of the system's lack of
printed receipts. Several legislators have said they would support
upgrading the new machines, even if at extra cost.

"Actually having a paper trail gives you the confidence that actual
votes cast will be counted," said Sen. Philip C. Jimeno, an Anne
Arundel County Democrat. "I just think for public confidence we're
going to have to find the funds, the means, to have a
recount."

Maryland is among the first states to roll out electronic voting machines
statewide, its response to the error-ridden 2000 presidential election
voting that played out in Florida with punch cards, butterfly ballots and
hanging chads.

During the 2002 gubernatorial election, four counties were the first to
use the machines in Maryland. Most voters in a small survey done by a
pair of University of Maryland researchers said they found the machines
easy to use and trusted the results. But the report came with a caveat:
"Individuals who use computers frequently reported having less trust
in the new voting systems than did others."

Many of the most outspoken critics know computers best, including Aviel
D. Rubin of the Johns Hopkins University, who helped kick off the
national discussion with a report in July that questioned whether the
Diebold software could open elections to manipulation.

Rebecca T. Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy
School of Government who has studied electronic voting machines for a
decade, cites recent elections in Florida and Virginia where questions
were asked about irregularities in voting - but there was no way to go
back and answer them. In Fairfax County, Va., she said, a glitch in
machines seemed to erase votes for one of the candidates for school board
once every 100 votes.

"If there had been a paper ballot that each person saw, you would at
least have had a paper record of the election and you wouldn't have a
gigantic question mark at the end of the day," she said. "I
don't understand why Maryland is just rushing ahead with this. It's OK to
go ahead with it - just require paper ballots."

Exactly how the paper record would work is still up in the air. It could
be a receipt-type piece of paper, printed with the ballot cast, that
voters would then put into a locked box of some sort. Another, more
popular concept would have the paper appear behind a glass shield where
the voter could see it, approve it and then watch it drop into a secure
receptacle.

But adding paper records raises many questions, too. It could void some
of the advantages of electronic voting, such as the ability to easily
accommodate non-English speakers and to allow blind people to use the
equipment through the use of headphones and a keypad. It leads to extra
security questions about storage and counting of the pieces of paper. It
would erase one of the features elections officials like best - the
elimination of paper from the process.

"There are a lot of questions that come into play," said David
K. Bear, a Diebold spokesman.

Diebold hasn't come up with a voter-verified system, Bear said, but
that's because officials have yet to ask for one. If Maryland determined
what it wanted, Diebold would be happy to comply, he said.

The company and the state are planning an aggressive marketing campaign -
television and radio ads, billboards and mock elections - to teach voters
how to use the machines and instill confidence that they will work as
designed. Up to now, said Christopher Hood, another Diebold spokesman,
the only thing most voters have heard about his company's machines has
been the criticisms printed in the newspaper.

Elections officials, those who seemingly know elections best, are among
the biggest proponents of touch-screen voting.

"I haven't had anyone come to me and say, 'We need a paper
ballot,'" said Catherine "Kitty" Davis, administrator of
elections in Allegany County. "To me, it's just another incidence
for error, and my focus is to eliminate those."

Initial success 

Allegany, along with Montgomery, Prince George's and Dorchester counties,
has used the machines. Davis even got to oversee a recount, when House
Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr. lost in a very close race.

In doing the recount, the vote totals came out the same as during the
first count.

In neighboring Washington County, which used optical scan machines in the
Taylor race, a few extra votes were found for Taylor's opponent, said
that county's election director, Dorothy Kaetzel.

Davis said she and her staff send the machines through a rigorous series
of tests to assure that whomever the voter intends to choose receives the
vote cast.

"The machine does its thing - just as we've trusted the others
[voting systems] to do," she said. "There is no perfect science
out there. We came from [lever machines], and this is so much
better."
*******************************
Capital News Service
State Officials Knew of Voting Systems' Drawbacks
By MICHAEL DUCK
Wednesday, December 10, 2003

ANNAPOLIS - Maryland officials knew computerized voting systems wouldn't
produce paper audit trails months before they began spending a total $54
million on a controversial statewide touch-screen voting system in
December 2001.

"The assurance of machine correctness is very difficult to prove, as
there is no paper audit trail," stated a February 2001 report by a
state committee. To solve the problem, Maryland's voting system should
"be capable of creating a paper record of all votes cast," the
report said.

But it wasn't until another independent study -- a July 2003 Johns
Hopkins University report -- that a firestorm of criticism of the
machines erupted. The Hopkins study found major security flaws in voting
machine software and suggested the paper-trail solution.

Despite the drawbacks, former Secretary of State John T. Willis' 2001
committee report said computerized voting systems count votes better than
any other systems, guiding the state's decision to adopt a touch-screen
voting system statewide.

The machines, made by Diebold Election Systems, will be used in all
Maryland counties in the March primary. The state bought the first batch
of machines for just a few counties in December 2001, with the second
wave coming in July 2003. Baltimore City will join the
statewide system by 2006. 

But critics are pressuring the government to fix or scrap the machines,
arguing each unit should print a hard copy of every ballot cast, letting
all voters confirm the machines recorded their votes accurately and
improving recounts. Otherwise, they claim, the touch-screen system's
dependence on secret software and computer memories could lead to
election fraud and
votes going uncounted.

But machine proponents variously suggest that the state study's audit
trail recommendation has already been met, couldn't be met in the first
place, or is being misinterpreted by voting machine critics. 

"It wasn't the intention to produce a paper ballot every time
somebody touched a screen," said Willis. 

Former Gov. Parris N. Glendening created the committee in Dec. 2000,
following Florida's voting machine meltdown during the presidential
election.

"In the face of all the evidence now, anyone who's not supportive of
a voter-verified paper audit trail now is indeed derelict in their
responsibilities to the voters of Maryland," declared Linda Schade
of the Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland.

Schade said she was "surprised" that the Willis Committee's
report from 2001 had raised similar concerns. Her group had only recently
found the report on the Internet.

But the system already can create a paper audit trail, said Pamela
Woodside, the state elections board's technology director.

Rather than printing hard copies of ballots for voters to see, the
computer memories are loaded into a central computer to print hard
copies, which can be counted by hand. Allegany County used this recount
process in 2002.

That doesn't satisfy Schade's group. That isn't a "recount,"
they said, but merely a "reprint" of
potentially bad data.
 
Computer voting systems are still the best choice, Willis said. They do a
better job of counting votes and making sure voters don't invalidate
their ballots by, for example, voting twice in one race. In contrast,
paper ballots are more expensive over time, are harder to use in
multilingual elections, don't allow the blind to vote privately and are
simply less accurate, Willis said.

"We use this kind of electronic technology in our everyday
lives" at ATMs and gasoline pumps, Willis said, adding, "I have
never had my submarine sandwich misprepared at Wawa" because of
tampering with similar touch-screen technology.

Although Diebold will not make its current software available to the
public, state election officials say they test the machines extensively
before and after every election. The machines also record votes on three
separate computer memory devices, allowing the
machines to be audited.

Also, state election officials couldn't find any quality voting machines
that provided the kind of
paper trail Schade's group calls for, said Gilles Burger, chairman of the
state elections board.

"There was actually only one vendor we had that offered that
capability, and it was just an awful machine," Burger 
said.

Paper trails at the polling places also cause other problems, Burger
said, because they open up new potential for election fraud and offer
less protection for blind voters.

But Linda H. Lamone, state elections board administrator, has said
election officials could
install printers on all state machines in time for the Nov. 2004 general
election, but only if Gov. Robert Ehrlich or the General Assembly directs
them to do so.


To that end, Delegate Karen Montgomery, D-Montgomery, plans to introduce
a bill requiring voter-verifiable paper trails.

Copyright © 2001, 2002, and 2003 University of
Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism
-----------------------------

The Willis Report from 2001 can be found at:

http://www.sos.state.md.us/sos/admin/pdf/reportall1.pdf
*******************************
Associated Press
Forest Service shifts e-mail plan
Thu Dec 18,11:30 AM ET  
By Paul Rogers , Mercury News 

In a victory for groups that use the Internet to lobby the government,
the U.S. Forest Service has decided to drop a proposal to ignore mass
e-mails from people commenting on its pending rules and regulations.

   

The Mercury News first reported in April that the agency (news - web
sites), which manages 190 million acres of public land nationwide, was
considering blocking bulk e-mails and pre-printed postcards from the
public on the grounds that they provided little meaningful comment on
decisions about logging, grazing, forest fires and other issues.


But organizations from the American Cancer Society (news - web sites) to
the National Wildlife Federation protested, saying the government would
be shutting the public out of decision-making. 


Wednesday, the Forest Service said it got the message. 


"We didn't have any intention of cutting the public out. We want to
have responsible government," said Heidi Valetkevitch, a
communications specialist with the Forest Service in Washington, D.C.
(news - web sites) "And we didn't want people to think we don't care
what they say." 


The decision not to ignore form e-mails and postcards means that other
federal agencies that had been considering similar actions are now less
likely to do so. 


High-tech civil liberties groups, along with liberal and conservative
organizations, hailed the news. 


"What they are calling `form letters' is the best and easiest way
for people who have busy lives and cannot afford their own personal
lawyers and lobbyists to still have their voices heard," said Cindy
Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital
civil liberties group in San Francisco. 


Since the 1990s, hundreds of groups, including the Sierra Club (news -
web sites), the National Rifle Association and the AARP, have used
bundled e-mail and their Web sites to lobby Congress and federal
agencies. 


In most cases, interested people simply go to a group's Web site, type
their names on a form letter and hit a button to send an electronic
letter to Washington, D.C. 


The Forest Service tried to stem the flow a year ago. 


It crafted a proposal to ban "substantially similar" comments
from portions of its rule-making process. 


The issue received little notice at first because it was tucked into a
48-page item in the Dec. 6, 2002, Federal Register -- part of a wider
proposal by the Bush administration to eliminate rules dating to the
1970s that require the government to write regular environmental-impact
studies on national forests. 


Environmentalists mounted an unprecedented e-mail campaign three years
ago when the Clinton administration proposed rules to ban new logging
roads on 58 million acres of national forests. 


Now, as they try to keep the Bush administration from rolling back those
rules, environmentalists regularly note that the Forest Service received
2.5 million comments on the policy, with more than 95 percent in support.
They don't advertise that the vast majority were their identical e-mails
and preprinted postcards. 

Any show of interest by the public in the government is a good thing,
they argue. 

"The Forest Service finds it difficult to get masses of Americans to
e-mail their support for creating stump fields out of national
forests," said Niel Lawrence, a senior attorney with the Natural
Resources Defense Council, in Olympia, Wash. "So they have a natural
bias against e-mail comments."

Conservative groups said the issue isn't about ideology. 

"When they say we are getting bombarded and the response on a
particular issue is overwhelming, that is a reflection of real passion
from a lot of people," said Ian Walters, communications director for
the American Conservative Union, which sends out 120,000 e-mail messages
a year to Congress and federal agencies advocating lower taxes and fewer
gun laws.
*******************************