Saket Vora

I’m hear to trumpet, once again, the sounds of alarm. I find it interesting how my student newspaper column on electronic voting, ran a week before all this other e-voting debacles hit the news.

As some of you know may know, the primary elections in Maryland that occurred over the past weeks have stunningly revealed the difficulties of implementing electronic voting to a public who has trouble with adopting new technology. The election administrators, officials, and poll workers didn’t grow up with GameBoys or computers or the Internets. Needed equipment was never delivered, some volunteers didn’t know how to setup or troubleshoot the machines when they broke, the Diebold personnel on hand had less than a day of training and didn’t know how to fix most of the errors. Machines failed to count votes in some cases, counted votes more than once in others, showed incorrect registration information, froze, restart, and did everything but blow up.

Flummoxed poll workers ran out of provisional ballots or backup paper ballots for people to use, at least, those who actually knew what the protocol called for in the case of an electronic malfunction. The delays at the polls caused long wait times.

And guess what. 40% of Americans will be using electronic voting machines this fall. Only 11 states make it mandatory for voter verifiable paper trails to be used.

We, the American People, sure got what we asked for when the federal government paid $3 billion to upgrade voting equipment after the ‘butterfly ballot’ debacle in Florida. And yet despite all this, there are no consistencies when it comes to voting. As a journalist noted, there isn’t just one election for president. There are 1300 differnet elections, because the policies/protocals/implementations for voting change on local and state levels.

Furthermore, just two weeks ago Princeton University revealed a hilariously pathetic vulnerability on a Diebold AccuVote TS machine. The door panel that prevents access to the machine’s memory card slot? Its lock is one of those simple industrial locks used in a wide array of devices, including hotel minibars. The professor tried one of his and voila it worked. It can also be picked in less than 10 seconds. Diebold says that this wouldn’t happen in a real election day setting. Oh really? These professors showed how one could open the door, put in one’s own memory card, and install malicious code into the machine’s software in under a minute. Oh, and is Diebold forgetting that a commonly used procedure by voting officials is to send home the machines a couple days to even a week before the election day to make election day easier. These machines are just in people’s homes, with little oversight or standard security.

It’s also wonder how Diebold refuses to let outside people (professors, research groups, think tanks, anyone) rigorously test their machines to check for vulnerabilities. One election clerk in California was worried about the Diebold machines so he called in a third-party voting rights group to check the machines. Diebold was furious and charged the county tens of thousands of dollars to fly down ’specialists’ to ‘fix the machines’.

And while I know people will instantly deride me for adding this comment, I can’t help it. In 2004, the CEO of Diebold say in a fundraising effort that he was committed to helping deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to the President. Outstanding!

Does anyone else find it crazy that across the country, the election policies/protocols of the states are often under the responsibility of a partison official, either Democrat or Republican? Election Commissions should be an independent, third-party, non-partisan group, not headed by a Democrat or a Republican member of the existing administration!

Maryland was the wake-up call. And this country is going to reap what it has sowed this November.