A 240-page report on failures and foibles during Cuyahoga County's
May primary raised more questions about the accuracy and reliability of
touch-screen voting machines which researchers say failed to match up
electronic ballots to paper versions of the vote.
Perhaps equally significant - and noteworthy - are the details of the
considerable woes that plagued the voter-verified paper audit trail
(VVPAT) system through careless election administration, printer
failures or both.
Buried some 93 pages into the report, which was commissioned by county
leaders and produced by the San Francisco-based Election Science
Institute, are details of errors that included poll workers loading
thermal paper into VVPAT printers backwards, blank audit trails,
"accordion-style" crumpling of ballots, long blank spaces between
ballots that could have represented missing or unprinted VVPATs, torn
and taped-together VVPATs and missing ballot text.
ESI researchers found that nearly 10 percent of VVPAT ballots sampled
were in some way compromised, damaged or otherwise uncountable, an
alarmingly high proportion for a state that requires that paper be used
as the ballot of record in the event of a recount.
That led ESI to the ominous conclusion that "in the event of a recount
or election contest, the risk of legal challenges is exceptionally high
if no significant modifications are made to the current election
system."
"The VVPAT is only as reliable as the administration of the system that
produces the paper trail," said Tracy Warren, the ESI researcher who
led the manual VVPAT recount.
Warren said she hoped the ESI findings would be "immensely valuable" in
helping jurisdictions - and particularly Cuyahoga County - avoid future
mishaps in administrating votes using VVPAT systems.
Diebold Election Systems, the company that produces the TSx voting
system used in Cuyahoga and widely throughout the rest of Ohio, saw the
report differently.
In a letter to the Cuyahoga County Commissioners, Michael Lindroos,
Diebold's vice president and counsel, wrote that the report was
"inaccurate and the result of an erroneous and misleading investigation
that is clearly false."
Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state and Republican nominee for
governor, said in press reports that it would similarly be
"irresponsible to summarily dismiss any of their findings, and it would
be equally irresponsible to sound alarms about the accuracy and
effectiveness of this equipment."
Diebold spokesman David Bear said most of the problems with Cuyahoga's
paper trails were caused by poll worker mistakes, with poor training as
the primary culprit.
"Obviously it reflects poorly on the company and the county," Bear
said. "But the main concern is that you lessen the likelihood of that
occurring. The things that we can do are to lessen the likelihood of
problems with design. The other issue is that you have to beef up
training. We work extremely hard with jurisdictions to help them make
sure their training is at as high a level as possible."
Bear said successful elections using the same equipment in other Ohio
counties and outside of the state suggest "they're not too difficult.
It's an issue of familiarity."
Increasing training will be critical as more states adopt rules
requiring paper trails. The latest count by electionline.org found 23
states require the use of VVPATs. Four other states require paper-based
systems.
Michael Vu, Cuyahoga County's embattled election director, said while
problems certainly occurred, there are safeguards in place. For
example, misprinted or unprinted VVPATs could be reproduced from a
machine's memory. However, he acknowledged a paper version of the
electronic record would not qualify necessarily as an independent,
voter-verified ballot.
"Certainly there's the redundancy issue," he said. "But at least no votes are being lost."
Vu said he was moving ahead with more training for election-day
technicians as well as poll workers in advance of the November vote.
And he sounded at least cautiously optimistic that lost, damaged or
otherwise uncountable VVPATs would not cause a Florida-esque meltdown
with blank thermal paper spools becoming the new hanging chad.
"I think there are a number of ways problems can be resolved," he said.
"One is training, two there is a mechanism confirmed by the secretary
of state in place that resolves any situation that we come across, like
when a paper trail is put in backwards. It's not a perfect system, but
neither was the punch card or optical scan system."
To critics, the high percentage of damaged or uncountable VVPATs damaged rated as significantly worse than 'imperfect."
"Ten percent is a complete disaster and totally defeats the purpose of
a VVPAT," said David Dill, a Stanford University computer science
professor and founder of Verified Voting. "You can blame it on poll
worker training, but there are ways to design equipment that makes user
error less likely. There are indications that Diebold has done a less
than adequate job in design. The company has adopted a generally
reluctant and unenthusiastic stance to paper trails and it shows in the
design."
The answer to VVPAT problems, Dill said, would be precinct-counted optical-scan units.
"There are fewer questions about it," he said. "We know with
appropriate care and poll worker training, we can run a good election
on optical scan." |