Article
Touchscreen voting continues slide
U.S. states turn back to optical scanning machines.
October 31, 2007
Bill Yackey is the managing editor of Digital Signage Today and the editor of SelfService.org, two Kiosk Marketplace sister sites.
As the 2007 election looms, touchscreen voting kiosks appear to be on the way out. At one time, they were expected to remedy the inaccuracies that came with the old punch-card voting systems, which some blamed for gumming up the 2000 presidential election in West Palm Beach, Fla. Now, after several years of audits and inaccuracies in elections, states are now looking for a remedy for the touchscreens.
In the wake of the 2000 election, Congress passed the $2 billion Help America Vote Act to help guarantee that all votes would be counted. Grassroots voter's rights groups like BlackBoxVoting.org and VotersUnite! came onto the scene, and companies like Election Systems & Software andDieboldbegan pushing touchscreen voting kiosks as a way to improve election accuracy.
| |||||||||||||||||||||
A massive under-vote was recorded in the 13th District Congressional race between Christine Jennings and Vern Buchanan, where it was reported that about 18,000 votes were never counted. Critics were quick to target the new touchscreen voting kiosks, manufactured by Election Services & Software.
Several lawsuits ensued, including one against ES&S and the state of Florida from Jennings, the loser in the race.
After investigation, an audit report was released in February 2007 by the Florida Secretary of State and Florida State University for the source code, also called firmware, that was installed in the iVotronic machines. The audit found that the iVotronic brand machines were not faulty and correctly captured the voters' selections the previous November. The report also audited the performance of the poll of the Sarasota County Elections Office workers but found no error in the procedures during the election.
But before the audit was even released, Florida governor Charlie Crist had already announced that the state was replacing all touchscreen voting kiosks that they had adopted just a few years earlier with optical scan machines. The estimated cost of replacing the machines is more than $32 million and according to state officials, the replacement process may take up to three years to complete.
The bill passed in May, and 15 counties are set to have new optical scan systems in place by the 2008 Presidential election. The 15 counties, which include Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough and Palm Beach, account for about 51 percent of the state's 10.4 million registered voters.
The only touchscreens that will remain in use in Florida, except Sarasota County, will be those used by disabled people, which satisfies ADA compliance regulations. Because of a charter amendment which was petitioned during the Jennings/Buchanan race, Sarasota County had to switch to an all-paper voting system, even for disabled people.
"The charter amendment also means we have to switch to paper before all of the other counties," said Kathy Dent, supervisor of elections for Sarasota County and president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. "We're the guinea pig again."
Sarasota County, which manages public elections every quarter, will be using a Premier Election Solutions voting system with the Automark system in their November 2007 municipal elections. With the Automark system voters select their candidate on a touchscreen, which records the vote on a paper ballot. The voter then inserts the paper ballot into the optical scanning machine and the vote is recorded.
Californiadecertifies four touchscreen voting systems
In California the face of change in the e-voting realm is that of Secretary of State Debra Bowen.
In May 2007, Bowen commissioned a top-to-bottom review of California's voting systems and the equipment used in them, in preparation for three statewide elections that will be held in 2008. The review was performed in conjunction with the University of California and was designed to determine which voting systems could retain their certifications and which ones should become decertified.
The results came in late July and were not favorable for touchscreens. UC used three "red teams" to hack into the voting machines to determine if someone could do the same and change the way votes were recorded. The red teams found security flaws in all of the systems tested.
In August, Secretary Bowen made the following announcements regarding the de-certification of voting systems tested at UC:
- Diebold's AccuVote TS system was decertified for use in California as red team members were able to access Diebold voting system software using the Windows based operating system and without requiring access to the source code.
- The Hart InterCivic 6.2.1 system was decertified after the manufacturer voluntarily withdrew its version 6.1.
- The Sequoia WinEDS system was decertified after it was found that the machine's protective vote counter could be reset.
- ES&S's InkaVote Plus system was decertified because the company only submitted their machine for review just five days prior to the release of test results.
The manufacturers responded by noting the unfettered access that the UC red teams had to the machines and their source codes, which isn't a real-life scenario.
"The California Top-to-Bottom Review was not a security risk evaluation but an unrealistic worst case scenario evaluation limited to malicious tests, studies and analysis performed in a laboratory environment by computer security experts with unfettered access to the voting machines and software over several weeks," Sequoia said in a release.
Diebold, Dan and the Docudrama
Diebold Election Systems has seemed to attract the most criticism from activists against e-voting. DESI was a subsidiary of Diebold Inc., based in North Canton, Ohio. The subsidiary has since changed its name to Premier Election Solutions.
In October of 2006, just days before the 2006 state elections, HBO ran a "Docudrama" called "Hacking Democracy," which profiled the efforts of members of a grassroots activist group called BlackBoxVoting.org to find faults in the Diebold touchscreen voting machines around the time of the 2004 Presidential Election.
And those faults were found. Two of the most famous voting machine hacks, the "Thompson Hack" and the "Hursti Hack" were recorded on film, along with footage of a Diebold spokesperson claiming it couldn't be done.
In the movie, Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris accessed a computer program called GEMS, developed by Diebold, which is the software the counts votes on the Diebold machines. Harris found the software on an FTP Web site that was buried but still open to the public.
By having an understanding of the GEMS software, Harri Hursti, a computer systems analyst, was able to alter an executable code loaded onto the memory cards used in the machines to record the votes. He released a report on BlackBoxVoting.org that warned that the program could be modified to change the way the vote totals on the cards. Diebold responded with a stonewall report that denied that there was an executable code on the memory cards.
At the time, Diebold Election Services released a rebuttal to the documentary in the form of a press release. That press release was no longer available after Diebold Election Systems changed its name to Premier Election Solutions in August 2007.
But Diebold wasn't the only company targeted by media-wielding activists.
Former CBS reporter Dan Rather tackled the subject of fraudulent touchscreens in an online investigative report called "The Trouble with Touch Screens," shown on HDNet. The hour-long show began with a look into the manufacturing lineage of Election Systems and Software's iVotronic voting kiosks.
Rather found that one of the common problems found with iVotronic was that the calibration of the touchscreen was off on certain machines, so the machine would sometimes register the selection next to the one the voter actually touched.
He traced the manufacturing of the iVotronic back to the Teletech factory in Manila, Philippines, where shoddy conditions, minimum wages and lax quality control checks may have contributed to problems back in America. Filipino workers told Rather that screens coming in from the OEM were of poor quality.
Even more disturbing, Rather reported, is that the OEM of the screens themselves was the Berquist Company, an American company located in Chanhassen, Minn. Landon Tuggle, the factory manager at Teletech, said he was rejecting 30 to 40 percent of the touchscreens he was getting from the Berquist Company because of quality issues.
*Patrick Avery, the editor of Self-Service World and Kiosk Marketplace, contributed to this article.
Included In This Story
DIEBOLD NIXDORF
As a global technology leader and innovative services provider, Diebold Nixdorf delivers the solutions that enable financial institutions and retailers to improve efficiencies, protect assets and better serve consumers.
Request Info
Learn MoreRelated Media
Subscribe
Get the latest news and resources from Kiosk Marketplace.
Recent Posts
Illinois man sues Home Depot over facial recognition at self-checkout
Instacart partners with Morrisons to bring AI-powered shopping carts to UK
Fiserv expands Clover with acquisitions of CardFree, AIB Merchant Services
High tech meets high touch at Woworks, powered by Qu
Lean, smart, scalable: Fast Casual Executive Summit panel explores the future of self-service
