Des Moines Register
11-02-06
State confident of voting machines
Many Iowans can use touch screens at polls; watchdog groups urge caution
By JENNIFER JACOBS
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
All eyes are on the voting machines as Election Day approaches.
Tuesday will be the first general election when Iowa will use new electronic
voting systems - and in a closely divided state, with three races of national
importance (two congressional seats and the governor's job), the stakes are
undeniably high.
"We've got much more scrutiny, and rightly so, than we've ever had before," said
Charles Krogmeier, an election official in the Iowa secretary of state's office. "But
we're feeling pretty confident."
Nevertheless, some election watchdog groups are urging voters to avoid two
brands of touch-screen machines found in Iowa - the Diebold TSx and the ES&S
iVotronic machines - which have triggered reports of random glitches elsewhere.
With these paperless machines, the "ballot" is just a chunk of computer code
internal to the machine, said Carole Simmons, co-chairwoman of Iowans for
Voting Integrity.
Voters have no way to see how the machine recorded their votes, leaving the
potential for error or fraud, she said. And if a recount is needed, there is no voterverified paper receipt that can be used as the physical proof, Simmons said.
In 58 counties, voters can use the paperless touch-screen machines, but they
can also choose paper ballots that are fed into an electronic ballot scanner.
In 19 Iowa counties, however, voters will have no choice but to use touch-screen
machines - unless they cast an absentee ballot.
Although the touch-screen machines have no paper trail that a voter can see,
they have an internal memory device that produces a paper record that can be
printed out in the event of recount or challenge, Krogmeier said.
Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa who
served for 10 years on the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and
Electronic Voting Systems, said most counties no longer have the technical
resources to evaluate the security of the software running on the computers
embedded in electronic voting machines.
Many counties contract with the voting system vendor to configure the files for
each election.
As a result, it's almost impossible for county officials to make a mistake or rig the
machines, but they create new opportunities for error or fraud by the vendor's
technicians, he said.
Because Pottawattamie County uses the kind of machines that watchdog groups
applaud, the county had paper ballots to fall back on when a voting crisis hit
during the June primary, Jones said.
Nine losing candidates appeared to be winners because a technician supplied by
Election Systems & Software made serious mistakes in programming the
county's optical mark-sense scanners, officials said.
A sharp-eyed auditor called for a hand count after an electronic vote tally showed
an incumbent with 23 years of experience losing to a 19-year-old college student.
In early voting elsewhere in the country this month, ES&S iVotronic touch-screen
machines, which are among the machines used in Johnson County, have
experienced scattered problems.
In Jefferson County, Texas, for instance, there were news reports that the
machines indicated a straight Republican ticket ballot when the voter had cast
straight Democratic tickets.
Iowa election officials pointed out that all of the state's electronic voting machines
underwent a test run during the June primary, and there were no serious
problems except in Pottawattamie County.
In recent weeks, many of the counties have already breezed through their staterequired, pre-Election Day tests. A couple of machines were not reading ballots
correctly, Krogmeier said, but the problems were fixed by switching the
programming cards or reprinting ballots.
"We try to be exhaustive in testing the combinations of votes, and if the machines
have been programmed to, say, shave off every 10th vote, that should pop up,"
he said.
Human error is more common than fraud, and Iowa has taken extraordinary
steps to make sure poll workers and election administrators know what they're
doing, said Paul Coates, who teaches political science at Iowa State
University.
Iowa is one of the few states that offers certification for both auditor's office staff
and poll workers, he said.
Fifty-three counties have trained one or all of their poll workers, said lead trainer
Alan Vandehaar of Iowa State Extension, and all but two counties have sent
election administration staff to the state's 50-hour training course.
Reporter Jennifer Janeczko Jacobs can be reached at (515) 284-8127 or
jejacobs@dmreg.com