Don’t trust computer voting machines, verify ballots

On Primary Election day, I voted in Lehigh County on one of the new ”touch-screen” electronic voting machines. I immediately felt that I might as well have cast my vote in the sewer. They contain a glaring flaw that must be corrected before they are used in the general election in November.

The old lever-type machines were easy to understand. They were simple mechanical counters where you could verify your vote before you pull the master lever to close the booth; and they could be checked out by a polling-place staff with minimum education. Those machines could be trusted.

These new touch-screen voting machines are really computers and at present, there is no way of verifying what the electorate voted for! This is dangerous for democracy.

Big problem! How to explain, by simple example, this flaw to the average person who knows nothing about computers. I have been wracking my brain over this problem ever since the Pennsylvania primary election. I think I have the solution.

These touch-screen voting machines are truly, little computers in every sense of the word. They have a display and a printer, and they have to have a program to run or they are useless. This program is stored in the computer’s memory and written there from a CD (Compact Disk); much the same as the DVDs you rent to watch a TV movie. This program contains computer code that operates the machine and, hopefully, tabulates your vote.

The machines are mandated for use in the states by the federal government, according to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) — legislation passed after the 2000 Florida election debacle. The ones used in Lehigh County are made by Diebold Corp., whose principals are known to be strong supporters of the Republican Party.

Let’s suppose that the manufacturer wants to change voting results in favor of a Republican candidate. How could it do it?

One simple way is by exploiting the flaw I mentioned: The machines have no feedback for the voter to show him or her what votes were cast. Oh, they have a final screen on the display which summarizes your vote before one selects the ”Vote” command. But that screen disappears before the next voter enters the voting booth. How does one know what’s recorded on the paper recording tape inside the machine? Well, the ”voting machine” takes care of that. There is no way with the present design that the voter can be sure of this.

Diebold makes the disks that program the ”computer” so that it is transformed into a ”voting machine.” One way Diebold could guarantee a high probability of a Republican victory is by inserting an almost undetectable flaw in the program on, let’s say, 50 percent of the disks for the thousands of machines that it produces. And the flaw would be that the program would call for every fourth vote to be automatically recorded for the Republican candidate! So, 25 percent of the total vote tabulated would be guaranteed to go toward a Republican victory!

How would the voter know this? He has no way of knowing what he voted for because he cannot verify the voting record that is recorded on the paper tape which is saved at the end of the day by the election staff at each polling place.

There are two simple ways that this can be fixed before the General Election in November. Both involve retro-fitting the touch-screen voting machine with a modified printer that produces the paper-tape record which is to be saved by the polling place staff at the end of the day.

One: Put in a printer that has a feature whereby the voter can see in a glass window exactly what vote was recorded on the tape.

Two: Provide the voter with a carbon copy tear-off receipt, like you get at a gas station. This receipt can then be deposited in a lock box before the voter leaves the polling place.

Trust is an important part of our democracy. We trust our government and we trust the voting system. But as Ronald Reagan told the American people about the nuclear test ban treaty he signed with Mikhail Gorbachev, ”We should trust, but verify!”

Our vote is the most precious thing we have left when the chips are down. We should not treat it lightly.

James J. Klinikowski is a resident and voter in Whitehall Township.

”Trust is an important part of our democracy. We trust our government and we trust the voting system.”

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