Jeremy Epstein was a poll worker in Fairfax County during last Tuesday’s cliffhanger between incumbent Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly and Republican challenger Keith Fimian, so he had a front-row seat watching an electronic touch-screen voting machine behave badly during the critical midterm election.
Epstein happens to be a senior computer scientist at SRI International in Arlington and a co-founder of the Verified Voting Coalition of Virginia, which helped write a state law that makes it illegal for jurisdictions in the commonwealth to purchase any new touch-screen machines — such as the WINvote machines manufactured by now-defunct Advance Voting Solutions that were used in every precinct on Nov. 2.
“In Precinct 121, Villa, we had three electronic machines and one optical scanner,” Epstein told The Washington Examiner. “I was there from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., and one of the touch screen machines was crashing all day. We had to reboot it a few times. We also had problems getting it to print the results. If I had a laptop that crashed three or four times in one day, I’d get a new one.”
Voting machines in two other precincts failed to boot up at all at the end of the day and were taken to the county’s Government Center without a vote total recorded, he added.
Despite a poor track record — including decertification in Pennsylvania — more than 1,000 AVS machines are still in use in Fairfax County, where they failed to register votes from more than 800 ballots (including 106 in the Sideburn precinct, which Fimian won 58 percent to 40 percent), Fairfax County Republican Committee Chairman Anthony Bedell complained.
“In several precincts, there were actually more votes than voters,” Bedell said.
In one of the closest congressional races in the nation, with Connolly just 981 votes ahead — or just 0.4 percent of more than 225,000 ballots cast, according to the Virginia State Board of Elections — this is a major problem.
Because of the razor-thin margin, Fimian had the right to a court-supervised recount, which he declined. But as Epstein points out, recounts are essentially meaningless exercises without a voter-verified paper trail to compare to the electronic machine’s digital tally.
“Election officials will tell you that they can do a recount from the machine’s memory, but it’s not really a recount,” Epstein explained. “All it tells you is what you had before the failure.”
Fairfax elections officials have been aware of the problems with AVS machines for at least six years. “Operation Ballot Integrity,” a postelection report by FCRC following the machines’ debut in the 2003 election, noted that 10 were removed from their precincts and sent to the Government Center for repairs — which is not permitted under state and federal election certification rules.
The system log of one machine was cleared by an elections administrator and the digital memory of another was wiped clean — with no witnesses present. Even more troubling was the “mysterious subtraction” of every 100th vote from just one of the candidates.
In 2008, Fairfax County purchased AccuVote optical scanners to comply with the updated state law, but continues to use AVS machines it knows are unreliable and which do not produce a voter-verified paper trail — the same machines that have been outlawed in 31 states as of January.
A paper record is essential to conduct recounts in down-to-the-wire elections. And since recounts are an essential element of fair elections, it’s way past time that Virginia — and Fairfax County — do likewise.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
