Meltdown at the E-Voting Machine
Bowen decertifies faulty e-voting systems in state, and protects the integrity of California ballots
Usually, politicians reserve Friday nights for making unpleasant, embarrassing announcements they'd much rather nobody heard too much about. In the case of Debra Bowen, California's reformist secretary of state, the drama that unfolded in her Sacramento offices last weekend was more a matter of racing to beat the clock.
Bowen had set herself a midnight deadline by which she promised she would decide what to do about the state's inventory of electronic voting machines. For four years, the studies carried out by the country's top computer scientists had been well-nigh unanimous: The systems developed by the likes of Diebold, Sequoia, and Election Systems & Software were riddled with software-writing flaws and security holes that made the likelihood of error or foul play unacceptably high. The fact that the electronic systems had no reliable paper back-up - certainly not before one was mandated by law in many states, including this one - only made the systems' vulnerabilities all the more unnerving. Not only could an election go badly wrong or be outright stolen; there was no guarantee anybody could prove it if it happened.
Bowen, who came into office in January promising to carry out a top-to-bottom review of the state's voting systems, was true to her word and did not just rely on the findings commissioned by others. Starting in May, national teams of researchers, coordinated by the University of California campuses in Berkeley and Davis, conducted their own software inspection of the four major systems in use in the state (the fourth, in Orange County, comes courtesy of the Texas company Hart InterCivic). They also carried out so-called Red Team exercises - controlled attempts at hacking an election.
Two of the systems, Diebold and Sequoia, scored disastrously. Hart InterCivic was found to have gaping, but reparable flaws. ES&S, makers of the InkaVote system used here in Los Angeles which is not an electronic system but rather a hybrid between the old punch card and lever systems, did not submit the required materials in time for the tests to be carried out at all.
In any rational political system, Bowen's decision would have been a no-brainer: The machines are at the heart of the state's democratic process, so the public interest is clearly served by ditching them for something more reliable and, above all, more transparent and auditable. Such a system clearly exists, in the form of optically scanned paper ballots, which have been found time and again to be the best compromise between automation and vote-for-vote verifiability (especially when counties conduct partial manual recounts to make sure the computerized vote tabulators are functioning correctly).
Our system is anything but rational, however, which explains how lousy, multi-million dollar electronic touch screen systems could have been purchased and approved for use in the first place. All the major voting machine companies have histories of schmoozing county and state officials, offering lucrative contracts to former public employees who made nice with them while in office, and spending lavishly on lobbying on their own behalf. They have also sought, unsuccessfully, to keep their software secret, making the argument - echoed by their fans in public office - that all the public needs to do is to trust them.
When Bowen's predecessor, Kevin Shelley, tried to get tough on the e-voting companies in the run-up to the 2004 election - first insisting on a voter-verifiable paper trial and then decertifying a whole class of Diebold machines following a litany of company lies and incompetence - he quickly found himself in a world of trouble, accused of everything from fits of temper in the office to campaign financing irregularities. The veracity of these accusations was spotty at best, but they did their job, and Shelley was forced to resign, his reputation in tatters, in early 2005.
So it was quite a decision facing Bowen last Friday night. But she didn't shy away from doing the right thing. Diebold and Sequoia were ordered to pack up their electronic machines and go home - leaving a maximum of one per precinct to help disabled voters, as well as a handful to help with early voting, under extremely strict conditions including a full manual recount of the paper trail to cross-check with the computer tally. Hart InterCivic were told to make improvements and come back for a new round of certification tests. ES&S were told to hurry up and submit their machinery and other materials if they too didn't want to be drummed out of the state.
The voting machine companies were too shell-shocked to offer much in the way of an immediate response. But a number of county officials - the ones who have been most vociferous in their support of e-voting, the ones whose careers have been built on championing their electronic systems - predictably cried foul.
Steve Weir of Contra Costa, who is also the current president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, accused Bowen of pushing through a blinkered agenda and creating "a feeling of crisis and mistrust." In San Diego, Deborah Seiler - a longtime state elections hack who worked for a while as Diebold's West Coast marketing chief - tried to argue that paper ballots weren't failsafe either.
L.A.'s registrar-recorder, Conny McCormack - a proponent of e-voting who hasn't actually managed to install an e-voting system in her own jurisdiction - was her usual bitter self, complaining that the decertification of InkaVote was based on no actual data at all, but without acknowledging that the data hole was entirely ES&S's fault.
Top prize for head-in-the-sand obtuseness, though, went to Riverside County, whose problems with a Sequoia e-voting system have been amply chronicled in these pages. Intriguingly, the Riverside board of supervisors recently commissioned a blue-ribbon panel to look at the county's voting systems, and the panel - quite independently of Bowen's office - reported back that e-voting was a liability the county should move away from as fast as possible.
That didn't stop Barbara Dunmore, the county registrar, from continuing to defend her Sequoia machines and insisting that they have been responsible for 39 problem-free elections. (No voting rights activist in Riverside would agree that software meltdowns, fishy count reversals, and other major issues met the definition of problem-free.) "I think it's going to be a tumultuous process at the polls," she warned.
These, though, are the last gasps of a dying breed of political sycophant. Bowen is unlikely to face a Shelley-style backlash, first because she has a reputation as the straightest of straight arrows, and secondly because the terms of the e-voting debate have changed significantly in the past three years. "Dozens of researchers all over the country are now working on the reliability and security of electronic voting," said Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation, an early critic of e-voting. "Back in 2004, a lot of it was just guesswork. Now researchers have looked inside the systems and seen where all the holes and the opportunities for error and fraud are."
California is not alone in rejecting e-voting: New Mexico and, intriguingly, Florida have gone down the same road, as have dozens of individual counties across the country. Voters themselves have led the way on this debate: As Bowen herself pointed out, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of California's voters opted for a paper ballot in last November's mid-terms.
The importance of California in the national debate remains considerable - because of our size, and also our concentration of computer science experts - and it's a fair bet that Bowen's ruling will greatly accelerate the nationwide trend away from electronic voting to something more transparent and verifiable. In other words, she has notched an unambiguous victory for the cause of voter rights.
This is, of course, a mess the country should never have gotten itself into. But money and influence go a long way in this political system. It's to Bowen's endless credit that she has refused to be swayed and defended the public interest instead. That used to be what democratic politics was all about. These days, it's a radical act.
Published: 08/09/2007
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