More than two years ago, The Washington Examiner warned readers about critical flaws in electronic touch-screen voting machines, based on research done by some of the nation’s top computer scientists at premier institutions like Stanford, the University of California, Princeton and Johns Hopkins.
All the machines tested were found to be vulnerable to vote tampering. But unless Congress intervenes, thousands of these flawed machines will be used as voters choose America’s next president.
As so often happens, some of the states are well ahead of the District. Less than a year before the 2008 presidential election, a growing list of states are moving to correct the well-documented danger of relying solely on e-voting machines.
Most recently, election officials in Ohio and Colorado joined California and Florida in declaring that e-voting machines simply cannot be trusted.
The problem is the machines are anything but tamperproof, and they must be supplemented with an alternative paper trail process should there need to be a recount.
On Jan. 2, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, ordered all counties to provide an optical-scan paper ballot to any voter requesting one. She also ordered that all paper ballots be counted as part of the officialcanvass before unofficial election results are released.
Brunner’s directive came after an independent study reported that all three vendors in the state had failed to follow “even the most basic set of information security guidelines” widely used in other industries.
In December, Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman, a Republican, followed California’s lead and decertified three of four manufacturers after researchers found that the state’s $41 million worth of e-voting equipment could be corrupted by simple magnets or hand-held electronic devices such as a Treo or Palm Pilot that prevented the recording of votes for specific candidates.
In fact, reputable researchers have discovered more than 120 security problems in various brands of e-voting machines over the past decade, including the ability to “flip” votes or not record them at all, infect an entire election system with a virus with one tainted flash-memory card, and even hack into the voting system from the outside and leave no evidence of the intrusion.
To prevent tampering and allow recounts of contested elections, computer experts at the nation’s top universities have long recommended random audits of individual voter-verified paper records.
But a bill to do that got nowhere in Congress last year. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., is introducing emergency legislation that reimburses states $500 million for offering paper ballots and $100 million for auditing election results — critical updates that can and should be completed by November if congressional leaders don’t block the measure again.
