Makers of Digital Voting Machines Form a Trade Group

Beset by complaints about the alleged lack of security surrounding their products, six makers of electronic voting machines have started a trade group intended to put to rest public apprehension about electronic voting. The six companies have formed the Election Technology Council in partnership with the Information Technology Association of America. On its immediate agenda are plans to compose an ethics code and conduct a review of security procedures in electronic voting systems. The voting technology attracting the most criticism is touch-screen systems, which allow voters to indicate their choices by touching candidates' names in much the same way they use touch-screen ATMs to withdraw cash. But the machines don't typically produce a paper receipt that would allow voters to double-check their votes and election officials to verify the accuracy of the machines' tabulations. Critics also contend the machines are vulnerable to hacking. This summer, analysts at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University created a stir when they alleged they had found defects in voting code by Diebold Inc., one of the primary vendors of touch-screen voting machines. When university students posted to the Web confidential Diebold memos that seemed to question the security of the company's machines, the North Canton, Ohio-based firm threatened to sue. It withdrew the threat earlier this month. Diebold, also a major ATM manufacturer, is among the founding members of the new trade group. Advocates of the technology defend it by pointing out that the machines are not linked to any external networks, such as the Internet, that would facilitate hacking. They also point to the gubernatorial recall elections in California in October, where results in one county showed that almost 8% of voters who used paper ballots overvoted, that is, mistakenly voted for more than one candidate in a race. Only 0.3% of the voters who used machines overvoted. California now says it will not permit the use of voting machines that don't provide a paper audit trail, and the members of the new trade group say their machines will print out receipts for voters who request them. In the wake of election imbroglios in the 2000 presidential election, Congress last year passed the Help America Vote Act, which set aside $3.9 billion for states to use over three years to replace punch-card and lever-activated voting machines with new technology, improve voter education and the training of poll workers, and to set up statewide voter databases to make voter registration easier and combat voter fraud. A bill now before Congress, House bill 2239, would require that elections officials have access to the code running the new machines as well as a paper audit trail. The new trade association is open to any vendor of digital voting machines. It includes among its founding members Diebold as well as Election Systems & Software, Advanced Voting Solutions, Unilect, Hart Intercivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems.