US: When the polls open across the United States for Tuesday's midterm elections, 90 per cent of them will be equipped with new high-tech systems, writes Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington
After the 2000 presidential election in Florida exposed the dangers of punch-card ballots and other vintage voting systems, the US federal government spent more than $3 billion (€2.35 billion) to help state and local authorities overhaul the way Americans record their votes.
When the polls open for Tuesday's midterm elections, 90 per cent will be equipped with new high-tech systems.
However, instead of bringing the accuracy, efficiency and reliability of the corner ATM, the wholesale makeover of the US voting system has brought a new set of concerns: the possibility of software bugs, freeze-ups, vulnerability to hackers, and new forms of human error that could bring their own chaos and controversy.
In Maryland, doubts about the state's touch-screen system are so serious that Republican governor Robert Ehrlich has urged voters to cast absentee ballots instead of going to polling stations. A recent poll in Pennsylvania found a third of voters believe it would be easy to rig touch-screen machines to change election results.
Both states are battlegrounds in the struggle for control of the Senate. The six states that are considered most likely to determine which party controls the Senate have all adopted touch-screen voting systems, but they differ widely in the safeguards they require.
According to the non-partisan Election Reform Information Project, four of the states do not insist on what experts consider the most fundamental protection - a paper trail.
While Missouri and Ohio do require a paper back-up of each vote, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia do not. New Jersey's decision to require paper back- ups will not be fully implemented until 2008 and questions have been raised about the reliability of Ohio's paper back-up. An audit of a primary election earlier this year in Cleveland found that the machine-counted vote total did not agree with the back-up paper ballots. Because of printer jams and other problems, the paper count was significantly lower.
"The election system in its entirety exhibits shortcomings with extremely serious consequences, especially in the event of a close election," analysts from the Election Science Institute said in their report to Ohio officials.
While the old voting systems were far from uniform - or free from errors or corruption - the stakes in Tuesday's elections to decide who controls the House and Senate, as well as the state houses and legislatures, are too high to shrug off the possibility of serious problems.
Experts say many of the problems spring from the fact that the federal government did not impose strict security and accountability standards on the burgeoning industry that makes electronic voting equipment.
"It's all been left up to states and local jurisdictions," said Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California), who said she intends to pursue hearings on electronic voting regardless of which party wins. "In my own view," Ms Feinstein said, "there should be some national standards that everyone has to adhere to." She would support mandatory paper back-ups and random post-election audits of precincts, comparing paper ballots with machine tallies.
Other federal officials say voluntary guidelines are enough.
"Election officials all over the country take great precautions to secure this equipment," said Thomas R Wilkey, executive director of the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency Congress created in 2002 to help the states.
Federal guidelines call for extensive checking of electronic voting machines before delivery, Mr Wilkey said. The testing is done by contractors; states and localities usually perform their own testing too.
However computer scientist David Jefferson of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said manufacturers pay the outside companies that conduct tests. The testing results often remain confidential and manufacturers also claim trade secret protection for their software.
Manufacturers say their software is reviewed thoroughly and that state officials can have access under confidentiality agreements.
Earlier this autumn, computer scientists from Princeton University released an analysis of the widely used Diebold AccuVote- TS machine. They reported that it was easy to hack and they were able to install software which changed votes from one candidate to another without leaving signs.
They were also able to reprogramme the machine to erase vote counts. Poll workers could unwittingly spread such viruses from one machine to another, they said.
Diebold, in a press release, dismissed the Princeton study as "unrealistic and inaccurate".
There is no evidence that such computer attacks have been carried out in live elections, but Edward Felten, a Princeton scientists, said a poll worker, delivery person or warehouse employee could install malicious software without detection.
"It takes less than a minute," Mr Felten said. "You don't have to be an expert to do the installation of the virus." - (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)