[Voterescue] Scanners are not the Solution

[Karen Renick]

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<http://www.miamiherald.com/418/v-print/story/397192.html#>
Posted on Tue, Jan. 29, 2008


    Vote machine transparency elusive as ever

BY FRED GRIMM
*T*he outsiders won.

After Tuesday's election, our notorious, expensive, untrustworthy, 
touch-screen voting gadgetry will be tossed onto the trash heap of 
capricious technology.

Ridding Florida of these machines was a triumph of political mavericks 
and computer geeks and incessant bloggers and disgruntled voters, 
worried that paperless votes, by the thousands, had simply vanished.

The revolutionaries took on the election industry and corporate 
lobbyists and a political establishment that sure as hell didn't want to 
hear that they had forced local election supervisors to invest tens of 
millions of dollars in high-tech rubbish. But votes kept disappearing.

* STATE HOUSE RACE*

Doubts hung over a Broward and Palm Beach state house race in 2004, 
after these nifty machines indicated 134 voters apparently went to the 
trouble of showing up at the polls but failed to cast a vote -- although 
the house race was the only item on the ballot. The winning margin was 
12 votes.

In a congressional election in Sarasota in 2006, 8,380 votes disappeared.

Results of a mayor's election in little Waldenburg, Ark. -- using the 
same brand of touch-screen voting machines that we'll be using today in 
Broward and Miami-Dade counties -- indicated that no one, including the 
candidate and his wife Roxanne, had bothered to vote for Randy Whooten. 
The revolutionaries saw the mess in Waldenburg as a microcosm of 
elections all over.

Recounts in any of these controversial touch-screen elections only 
regurgitated the same bizarre total. Over and over.

* FLAWS IN THE SYSTEMS*

Computer experts in Maryland, California, Florida, New York and Texas 
discovered security flaws in the computer operating systems. California 
got rid of most of its touch-screen systems. And when Gov. Charlie 
Crist, took office last year, he saw to it that Florida followed suit. 
By the November election, all Floridians will be marking paper ballots.

But it might be worth remembering, as we say goodbye to those infernal 
touch-screen machines, a troubling little detail. Ion Sancho, the Leon 
County elections supervisor, and an indefatigable maverick, started 
Florida's revolt in 2005 when he invited a computer security expert to 
try hacking his system. Sancho found that a marauder could alter 
election results and then wipe out any sign of tampering.

He was threatened by state election officials, blackballed by machine 
vendors. There was talk in Leon County of removing him from office. 
Until a few weeks later, when state computer experts in California 
replicated Sancho's results and declared him a hero. Oops. That marked 
the beginning of the end for touch screens in Florida.

* SCANNED BY COMPUTERS*

Except . . . Leon County didn't use touch screens. The expert had hacked 
into an opti-scan system. Not unlike the opti-scan systems Miami-Dade 
and Broward will be using in November.

Paper ballots will still be scanned by computers run on proprietary 
operating codes, considered trade secrets by the manufacturers. They're 
still inaccessible to the tough, independent computer scientists who 
could test their security. And federal and state testing labs have 
already demonstrated shameful, subservient deference to the manufacturers.

So there's still no transparency when it comes to the basic mechanism of 
democracy.

The outsiders who think they won might need to think again.

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