A committee of National Research Council experts, which included prominent computer scientists and two former governors, began last year researching “the right questions” about [tag]electronic voting[/tag]. This week, the panel is presenting its results to the public.
“Some jurisdictions — and possibly many — may not be well prepared for the arrival of the November 2006 elections with respect to the deployment and use of electronic voting equipment and related technology, and anxiety about this state of affairs among election officials is evident in a number of jurisdictions.”
More than a third of all of the nation’s 8,000 voting jurisdictions will use new voting technology for the first time this year, according to Election Data Services.
“This is a moment of truth for electronic voting,” said panel co-chairman Richard L. [tag]Thornburgh[/tag], a former Republican governor of Pennsylvania and U.S. attorney general. “You’ve got a lot of people who are working for the first time with the new technology. It should impart a greater note of caution than what you might normally attend to a regular election.”
Thornburgh added the council’s report does not call for electronic voting to stop altogether, but does make clear that the conclusions are “not a clean bill of health” for the technology.
“Moment of truth” certainly sounds right. As Salon’s Tim Grieve noted, there are key concerns about elections that are just 104 days away, including complying with Help America Vote Act deadlines, and areas that are using machines for the first time without testing, training, or adequate staff.
Of course, that’s just with the general election in mind. When we look at primaries, problems have already surfaced.
So far, in this year’s primaries, the problems have been related to the [tag]machines[/tag] breaking down or being used incorrectly by election officials. For example, optical-scan machines used in a May primary in Cuyahoga County in Ohio could not read the ballots because the black lines separating sections were thicker than on ballots elsewhere in the state, and the fill-in ovals were in a different place, a review recently found. The result was a long delay in ballot counting.
Numerous other localities have experienced problems, most notably the delay in results of a March primary in Cook County, Ill.
And in May, as Grieve noted, Oakland County (Mich.) clerk Ruth Johnson found voting machines had a 15% failure rate.
“Johnson says the machines break down so often that poll workers should come up with a plan for reassuring voters that they’re simply clearing paper jams — and not discarding votes — when they have to open the machines and remove ballots from them.”
As a rule, that’s not a good sign.