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States Face Pressures Over E-Voting Systems
by Michael Martinez
State officials are under mounting pressure to prepare new voting systems for upcoming federal, state and local elections.
Federal legislation passed after the controversial 2000 presidential election marred by voting debacles requires states to make sweeping changes to their voting systems by 2006. Several deadlines for the Help America Vote Act already have passed, and many states are scrambling to put the finishing touches on new electronic voting systems and databases mandated by the statute.
But for some states, complying with federal law has been the easy part. Elections officials in Louisiana worked around the clock last fall to repair and replace voting equipment damaged during Hurricane Katrina. Now that they are ready for elections, Louisiana officials are focused on making sure displaced residents have access to the polls.
The Dilemma Of Deadlines And Databases
The Help America Vote Act required states to comply with several major provisions by Jan. 1, 2006. According to a survey released by the National Association of Secretaries of State, roughly half of the states were fully compliant with federally mandated deadlines at the beginning of the year.
Nearly a dozen states missed the Jan. 1 deadline to create statewide electronic voter databases, a task that has proven to be one of the costliest and thorniest requirements mandated by federal legislation. According to an 85-page report issued this month by Electionline.org, several states have blamed their lateness on companies they contracted to build their databases.
After terminating its contract with Accenture in March 2005, Kansas hired ES&S, which completed its database on time. Colorado cancelled a $10 million contract with Accenture last December, and subsequently missed the Jan. 1, 2006 deadline. Nevada, which contracted Michigan-based Convansys for its database, also was late.
The Justice Department in January threatened to sue New York for failing to meet a host of federal requirements, including a deadline to create a voter database. In a letter to state elections officials, New York Assistant Attorney General Wan Kim said the state is "further behind" in preparing for elections than any other in the country, and that elections officials might be forced to return portions of the $220 million in federal funds it received to modernize the state's voting system.
Elections officials in Leon County, Fla., on Feb. 2 were ordered to forfeit a $564,000 federal grant because of their inability to purchase approved voting equipment for the disabled community by a January deadline. Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho said he plans to reapply for the grant. Sancho generated national attention in December when he orchestrated an experiment to prove Diebold voting machines could be manipulated by hackers.
The Great Paper Debate
Anxiety about antiquated punch card and lever machines prompted scores of state governments to adopt new direct recording electronic voting systems. Many of them already have integrated voter-verified paper audit trails to satisfy swelling concern about the security and accuracy of their new electronic voting machines.
According to Electionline.org, 25 states have voting laws that require paper trails or paper-based ballots. Several states are mulling over legislation to audit their non-paper voting systems with paper receipts.
Maryland is at the front line of the debate. In a letter to the state board of elections chairman, Gov. Robert Ehrlich last week called for the installment of paper audit devices on the state's existing electronic voting system. Ehrlich declared that he no longer had confidence in the state's ability to hold fair and accurate elections this year.
Lawmakers in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Florida also are considering legislation that would require electronic voting machines to produce paper receipts for audit purposes.
In a Senate hearing on Friday, Maryland Elections Administrator Linda Lamone defended the state's electronic voting machines. Maryland has paid more than $45 million on the system since 2002. Lamone said that money would be thrown away by making unnecessary changes to the system.
Lamone, a Democrat who has held her position since 1997, has clashed frequently with Ehrlich and his Republican colleagues. A Republican-controlled board of elections tried to remove her in 2004. But a judge reinstated her by issuing a restraining order soon after her suspension to avoid potential "chaos" during federal elections that fall.
University of Maryland at Baltimore County professor Donald Norris, who was commissioned by the state last year to test several paper audit devices, said he did not think it would be possible for the state to install them this year. He also questioned the necessity of the paper receipts, citing data collected by the university that found a 95 percent level of confidence in the existing system among registered voters.
Roy Saltman, an industry expert who authored two frequently cited reports on voting technology for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said the paper audit debate is more about public confidence than it is about the security of the electronic voting systems themselves.
"The non-paper systems in Maryland and Georgia appear to be perfectly satisfactory from a technical standpoint," Saltman said. "But they will never satisfy activists who have a conspiratorial bent of mind. The problem is that some of these people are sufficiently mainstream, and it becomes a question of public confidence as to whether we should really keep such systems at all."
Weathering The Storm
From a technological standpoint, Louisiana is ready to hold state and local elections this year, despite the damage inflicted on its voting system by Hurricane Katrina last summer.
Elections officials decided not to wait for federal aid and repaired voting machines damaged during the storm with money out of their own budget last fall. They also tested and recertified every machine that was exposed to the weather themselves.
In January, the state requested $2.4 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse the money it spent on repairing its voting system. According to First Assistant Secretary of State Renee Free, the state is still waiting to see a majority of that sum.
FEMA has authorized $733,000 for replacements and repairs made in St. Bernard Parish, but Free said the state has yet to receive a check for the project.
"We knew we had elections coming, and we didn't feel comfortable waiting for money from FEMA," she said. "So we decided to expend the money ourselves whether we had it in our budget or not. It appears our gut instinct was accurate because we're still waiting on them."
Louisiana lawmakers are now focused on making sure that displaced state residents have access to the polls. The legislature last week approved a bill, H.B. 12 that would change absentee voting rules and allow residents to cast ballots at satellite voting centers throughout the state.
Even though state officials are making progress preparing for elections on their own, Free said the lack of federal activity is taking its toll.
"You get beat down after a while," Free said. "And it's very discouraging."
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