Politicians, activists, and people with disabilities debate the security of electronic voting.

If there’s one thing that really riles Oakland resident Michelle Gabriel, it’s the thought that her vote might not count.

Gabriel was director of operations for Kodiak Networks in San Ramon when she quit her job two years ago to spend more time with her four-year-old and to find meaningful work she could do at home. She soon threw herself into nearly full-time volunteer work as a member of the Alameda County Security Subcommittee and the Voter Rights Task Force of the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club. “All aspects of the voting system, from end to end, need to be transparent,” she says.

At issue for Gabriel and other advocates is the lack of security in electronic voting systems, or “e-voting systems.” With razor-close presidential elections over the past decade and shocking reports of gaping security holes in e-voting systems, more people are paying attention to how their votes are cast and counted. Vendors have not yet delivered on their promise of accurate and secure voting systems that allow voters with any form of disability to vote in private and without assistance.

The tug-of-war over voting machines has election integrity advocates at one end of the rope and election officials, vendors, and voters with disabilities at the other. And it’s come to a head in California, with the race for secretary of state next month that pits current Secretary Bruce McPherson against the leading contender, California State Senator Debra Bowen.

Since replacing Kevin Shelley last year, McPherson has certified four e-voting systems, which are available for counties statewide to purchase and use. Senator Debra Bowen says she would make very different choices for California voters.

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Key players in the electronic voting controversy are people with disabilities and their advocates. When the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) became effective in 2002, it required states to have at least one accessible voting system at each polling place by the 2006 primary elections. At that time, e-voting systems were the only kind that qualified as accessible to people with disabilities.

To reduce the price of the required systems, HAVA provided grant money to states that met the requirements. The grants have been essential, as e-voting systems are costly. The AVC Edge by Sequoia Voting Systems, which the Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted to buy in June, will cost about $13 million. Federal and state grants—available to counties only through next June—will cover more than half of Alameda County’s costs.

Finding money for new e-voting systems can be tricky, but not as tricky as ensuring that they count votes accurately. Security problems have been popping up since 1996, and are still being discovered. In the 2006 primary in Florida, Sequoia AVC Edge machines in several precincts switched votes on the screen—one candidate even watched his vote switch to his opponent. In Washington State last year, some of the machines rejected voters’ initial selections.

Local press reported that a month after a 2004 election in Nevada, officials discovered 271 uncounted electronic votes stuck in AVC memory cartridges. A Florida voter in 2004 reported that the AVC Edge machine registered the wrong presidential candidate eight or nine times until it finally showed the candidate she had picked. In Washington State in 2004, unexplained problems caused 65 of the AVC Edge machines to crash and smart cards to jam. Machines in at least four of those precincts repeatedly registered the opposing candidate after voters made their choices.

Gabriel and other election integrity advocates made sure the Alameda County Board of Supervisors heard about the problems with the Sequoia AVC Edge before it voted to buy the system in June. Although supervisors voted to adopt the system, they appeased advocates by also voting to require that an independent security expert test the system before the county paid for it.
But eight days later, the president of the Board of Supervisors signed a contract with Sequoia that prohibits such testing. E-voting systems are protected by trade secrets. Only the federal Independent Testing Authorities are permitted to test every part of e-voting systems.

Alameda County’s Information Technology department will test the machines, but apparently only within the confines of the Sequoia contract.

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Voting systems manufactured by Diebold Election Systems, Inc. have been subjected to a good deal of scrutiny, sometimes without Diebold’s consent. Numerous security flaws were well known in February 2006, when Secretary of State McPherson certified Diebold’s e-voting system, the TSx. This decision—which reversed Kevin Shelley’s previous decertification order for the TSx—is an example of where McPherson and opponent Debra Bowen are at odds.

McPherson did send a letter to Diebold requiring the company to fix the 16 security problems that state reviewers found when they examined parts of Diebold’s systems with permission. He also asked Diebold to ensure that the TSx complies with California law. Here, all e-voting systems must produce a voter verifiable paper audit trail that allows voters who use an e-voting system to check the paper printout of their vote and confirm its accuracy. Without it, a voter has to simply trust that the computer correctly recorded the electronic vote. Currently, blind voters can’t verify the paper audit trail that the TSx, Sequoia AVC Edge, and other e-voting machines produce, because these machines read the electronic record of the vote, not the paper record, back to the voter. And that violates California law.

California law also requires all e-voting machines to comply with federal standards, which prohibit voting systems that rely on the use of interpreted code. Diebold uses this code in its programming but McPherson accepted it anyway.

McPherson hasn’t said whether or not Diebold has corrected the flaws in the TSx machines to bring them into compliance with state law and federal standards. In any case, several California counties used TSx machines in the June primary and likely will use them again in November, whether they’re fixed or not. Dismayed with this arrangement, Bowen says that as secretary of state, she would be diligent in enforcing the law.

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McPherson’s certification order for the TSx disappointed and baffled many, including Bowen—but not Stephen Weir, Contra Costa County registrar of voters and president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials.

“Last year, county registrars were in absolute shock and panic when we realized that we were on the eve of the [HAVA] requirement that there would need to be an accessible [voting machine] in every precinct,” says Weir.

At that time, only the paper-based AutoMark was certified in California. Contra Costa County began using the AutoMark in 2005, after blind voters had tested it and found it satisfactorily intuitive and manageable with little help. And it already allows blind voters to verify their votes because it reads the paper ballot back to them.

But other counties wanted other choices, and by certifying the TSx, McPherson gave them the option of selecting an e-voting system, albeit one that is notoriously insecure. In March 2006, McPherson expanded the field of choices even more by certifying the Sequoia, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic e-voting systems.

“My experience is that Bruce McPherson has developed a positive working relationship with the clerks and registrars. He’s been very responsive to our concerns,” says Marin County Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold.

But election officials in 18 counties that chose the TSx and Secretary McPherson were soon slapped with a lawsuit by the nonprofit group Voter Action. The suit cites TSx’s problems regarding security, verifiability, and disability access. Now 11 of the 18 counties plan to use other systems in November. Although Alameda County was named in the suit, it had already decided against purchasing the system when the suit was filed.

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Evidence of security failings in the TSx continues to mount, and last year, Bruce Funk, a county clerk in Utah, triggered a series of events that led to the discovery of a major security flaw in that voting system.

Funk had been the county clerk of Emery County for 23 years when the commissioners decided to use the Diebold TSx in coming elections. When two of the machines failed acceptance testing and others arrived with damaged parts and a shortage of available memory, Funk became alarmed.

“I thought I was responsible for the integrity of the election,” Funk says. Without notifying the county commission or Diebold, Funk arranged for Finish security specialist Harri Hursti—as well as another expert from Security Innovation, Inc., a company whose clients include McAffee Security, Symantec Security, the Department of Defense, and Microsoft—to test the machines.

That’s when Hursti found what computer scientists across the nation agree is the “worst security flaw ever” in a voting system: an intentional “back door” that makes it too easy to change the software. A few days after Hursti’s finding, Funk’s 23-year career with Emery County was over. The Emery County Commission says Funk resigned, but Funk says he was forced to leave less than a year before his retirement benefits were set to kick in. Emery County voters will use the TSx in November.

Hard on the heels of Hursti’s discovery, primary elections in states across the country this year have demonstrated that the coulds and mights security experts warn of really can translate into real-world electoral snafus. Some TSx machine malfunctions delayed poll openings, voter access cards failed, printers jammed, and ballot programming by Diebold was sometimes incorrect.

In California’s Kern County during the June primary, the Voter Access Cards that activate the Diebold TSx voting machines for each voter didn’t work in several precincts, and people were turned away or left without voting. To investigate, Senator Bowen held the first hearing of the Senate Select Committee on the Integrity of Elections, which she chairs, in Kern County. During the hearing, she learned that the registrar of voters had instructed poll workers not to use the backup paper ballots.

“As many as 500 voters may have been turned away at the polls and not had a chance to vote, due to the Diebold [TSx] failure and the registrar’s decision not to train poll workers on how to use the paper ballot backup system,” says Bowen.

According to David Wagner, a U.C. Berkeley computer scientist, it could have been even worse. McPherson initiated volume testing last year, and it has caught some serious problems. “They were able to catch these problems and tell the manufacturers to go back and fix them,” he says.

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For voters with disabilities, the right to vote is a compelling civil rights issue. McPherson worked to address these concerns when he established the Voting System Accessibility Advisory Committee and developed voting materials with large print for voters with limited vision. And he’s certified e-voting systems.

But it turns out that e-voting systems aren’t nearly as accessible as the vendors present them to be, and for disabled voters, if it’s inaccessible it’s unacceptable. On July 31, the California Council of the Blind, American Association of People with Disabilities, and other organizations sued the secretary of state and four Bay Area counties, including Alameda County.

One of the complaints in the lawsuit is that the paper audit trail that California requires with every electronic voting system doesn’t permit voters who are blind to verify their vote. After voters make their choices on an e-voting system, their vote prints out on a mini-printer that’s connected to the voting system and is easy to see—unless you happen to be blind. Sighted voters can look at the printed record of their vote and either verify it, or reject it, and try again. Voters who are blind can only trust that the electronic vote is accurate.

Once verified, the paper record remains with the voting system, and election officials use it later for California’s mandatory one percent audit of the electronic ballots. Election officials also use the paper audit trail for recounts when election results are questionable. (A law passed in 2004 also allowed election officials to use the electronic record of the vote from the computer’s memory.) But again, blind voters can’t verify the paper audit trail with e-voting machines that read the electronic record of the vote, not the paper record, back to them.

Among other things, the disabilities community’s lawsuit asks the court to prohibit the use of a voter-verified paper audit trail for all voters in Alameda County. The court dismissed a similar lawsuit brought by the same parties in 2004. In the current action, McPherson and the four counties must respond this month.

Jim Dickson, vice president for Governmental Affairs of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), is a powerful force behind the community’s lawsuit. In 2003, he placed his first secret vote after 36 years of assisted voting. The New Standard News, an online publication, quoted him as saying, “It was an incredibly empowering experience” that contrasted sharply with the “embarrassing and humiliating” ordeal of voting with a paper ballot. Accompanied by his guide dog, he’s a familiar figure at public hearings in Sacramento and across the nation.

Dickson, a Washington D.C. resident, is the first blind person to sail a boat alone from Rhode Island to Bermuda, and he brings the same level of commitment to making sure that paper audit trails are eliminated.

On the face of it, voters with disabilities and the organizations that fight for them only want the same rights that other Americans take for granted. But there are those who may want something else, too. In 2000, Diebold agreed to pay the National Federation of the Blind $1 million if the organization would drop a lawsuit against Diebold for installing ATMs that the organization charged were inaccessible to blind customers. In addition to accepting this arrangement, the Federation also agreed to help Diebold develop and market its accessible ATM machines, and later, its e-voting machines as well.

The NFB isn’t the only disabilities organization to receive money from e-voting companies. In 2004, the New York Times reported that Jim Dickson’s organization, the American Association of People with Disabilities, had received at least $26,000 from e-voting companies that year.

Dickson’s group received a different kind of support from Senator Christopher Dodd, one of the authors of the Help America Vote Act and an active opponent of paper trails. After receiving the AAPD’s “Justice for All Award” in 2003, Dodd appointed Dickson to the advisory board of the Elections Assistance Commission, which is developing national standards for voting machines. Dickson also played a central role with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights election reform task force, and co-chaired that group’s HAVA task force. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, League of Women Voters, and other civil rights organizations joined the disabilities community in advocating for paperless e-voting systems.

The League of Women Voters now supports a paper audit trail with e-voting machines, but some members of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, especially in large counties, still don’t. They complain that printers often jam and that handling the vast quantities of paper involved in elections is time-consuming and complicated. As recently as last November, the election officials’ organization showed its support for paperless e-voting in a letter to Governor Schwarzenegger, asking him to veto S.B. 370, a bill by Debra Bowen. But S.B. 370 passed, putting some new teeth into the paper audit trail.

Bowen’s bill takes it a step further by requiring county election officials to use the paper audit trail—not a paper duplicate of what’s in the computer’s memory—to conduct the mandatory one percent tally and any recounts. If there is any discrepancy between the paper audit trail and the electronic record of the vote during a one percent manual tally, the paper record prevails.

McPherson co-sponsored the 2004 bill that requires every e-voting machine to produce a paper audit trail, but he joined the election officials in opposing S.B. 370 in 2005.

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The [e-voting] companies are wagging the dog,” says Dan Kysor, director of Governmental Affairs at the California Council of the Blind. “The process is pretty much driven by companies and what the companies want.” It’s no secret anymore that far from being subjected to a stringent federal testing program, voting systems are privately tested by small laboratories that are paid by the manufacturers, creating an inherent conflict of interest.

David Wagner, the computer scientist at U.C. Berkeley, recognizes the absence of meaningful testing at the federal level. “I think the election world ought to be moving toward performing independent security evaluations as a matter of course,” he says. This is what Michelle Gabriel and the other members of Alameda County’s security subcommittee are asking for. In fact, it’s what the majority of Americans are asking for.

In August 2006, the leading American polling firm Zogby conducted a national poll that included every political party, race, religion, age group, educational level and income group, as well as rural residents and NASCAR fans. (Zogby defines NASCAR fans as pro-Republican, mainly on gay marriage, family values, and other cultural issues.) The poll showed that 92 percent of American voters insist on the right to watch their votes being counted, 80 percent strongly object to secret computer software to count votes, and 60.3 percent are aware that flaws in electronic voting systems can make it possible to change the results of an entire election by tampering with one machine.

The fear that computerized voting threatens democracy is in the air, and concerned Americans are looking for ways to regain control of the voting process. One way to begin that process is to move toward greater transparency.

Computer scientist Barbara Simons, an expert on electronic voting, has testified before both the U.S. and California legislatures on voting technology. She’d like to see the nation move toward “public source code”—making the inner workings of the e-voting systems transparent and eliminating trade-secret protections.

According to Simons, “public source code” is different from “open source code,” where many different people participate in writing the code. She says that when it comes to voting code, you don’t want a lot of people writing it, but you do want a lot of people reading it. Large, complicated programs are bound to have plenty of bugs that are hard to find, says Simons. “The more people you have looking at it and checking for malicious code or software bugs, the better.”

Bowen favors public source code, but McPherson fears it could make voting systems vulnerable to hackers. Simons agrees, but says if a system can’t stand up to public scrutiny, it “should be chucked.”

Another way to move toward greater transparency is to encourage the development and use of alternatives to e-voting systems. Stephen Weir, president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, favors a variety of options. “If one type of voting system is eliminated for whatever reason, I want to suggest that we have an inexpensive alternative to fall back on,” he says.

One such alternative is the Vote-Pad, a device that assists blind voters in voting on paper ballots without assistance and costs less than ten percent of an e-voting system. After receiving positive feedback from dozens of visually-impaired or blind voters who tested the Vote-Pad, registrars in six counties urged McPherson to certify the system so that they could use it in November. But in August, McPherson rejected the Vote-Pad, basing his decision on a test the secretary of state’s office administered to voters who are blind.

Michelle Gabriel would rather have the Vote-Pad than the Sequoia AVC Edge in Alameda County. But that’s not going to happen, at least not this year. For now, she persists in her own efforts to make the November 2006 election as secure as possible, and supports any legal action to increase election security. She’s also thinking ahead to 2008.

“Personally, I think the outcome of the secretary of state’s race in California will affect the 2008 presidential election,” says Gabriel. “If California stands up to the vendors, other states will follow suit. California is the leader.

“Even if you get all the procedures and registration done fairly and accurately, if the votes aren’t counted as cast, all that work has been for nothing.”

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Tara Treasurefield is an independent journalist in Sebastopol who focuses on politics and the environment. She also writes and edits for individuals, businesses, and nonprofit organizations.