E-voting without any paper trail doesn't get my vote

This is a very good article from my local paper.

He who counts the votes wins.  I want to go back
to voting on paper. I want humans to count the
votes I don't want the results within hours after
the polls close. I don't care if it takes days to get
 the answer in counting the vote. It takes days
in other countries. We are the only ones who
come out hours after the vote has been
"so called" counted to declare a winner.
And lately the winner doesn't match
the exit polls.

May peace be inside all of us,
Cindy

E-voting without any paper trail doesn't get my vote

By Ralph De La Cruz
Lifestyle Columnist

July 2, 2006



The issue of electronic voting machines is not going away.

Leon County (that's Tallahassee, for you geo-illiterates) Supervisor of 
Elections Ion Sancho first brought it to our attention at the beginning 
of the year:

Electronic voting machines can be hacked.

He knows, because he had a computer expert do it.

His efforts were rewarded with attacks from electronic voting machine 
vendors and state politicians.

Sancho had access to the e-voting machines that nobody else would have, 
they said. His experiment couldn't be reproduced in the real world. 
Nothing to worry about, they assured us.

Well, here we are in mid-summer and two recent stories have Sancho 
looking nothing short of visionary.

The first happened June 6 in a run-off election in San Diego to replace 
jailed former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

Turns out, some machines were kept overnight at the homes of volunteer 
poll workers. So much for the argument about how inaccessible these 
machines are, and the infallibility of the chain of custody.

The election ended up close, and there was no paper trail to verify 
what happened.

Although the loser conceded, the debacle was enough to spin off town 
hall meetings. Mr. Immigration, Lou Dobbs, sank his formidable teeth 
into the story.

"More evidence tonight that an increasing number of elections in this 
country can be outright stolen," Dobbs began his CNN show Tuesday.

That was also the day New York University's Brennan Center for Justice 
came out with a report -- more than a year in the making -- that 
analyzed electronic voting machine security.

This was no partisan group. President Bush's former cyber security 
adviser was one of the people on the task force.

They found that three systems used throughout the country had more than 
120 security flaws. And that some systems using wireless components 
could actually be hacked from a distance.

They said machines with wireless components should not be used at all. 
That any successful counter-measures against hacking required a paper 
trail that recorded each electronic vote. And further, the paper trail 
was only useful if it was regularly audited to make sure the machines 
hadn't been tampered with.

Twenty-six states now require paper trails, but only 14 also require 
regular audits.

Florida isn't among the 14, or even the 26.

Not that Ron Klein didn't try. Last legislative session, State Sen. 
Klein, D-Delray Beach, tried to push through a bill requiring a paper 
trail. It died in committee.

"Why wouldn't Florida, which has this major blot from the 2000 election 
... not have been the first state to say, `We're going to do it 
better?'" Klein said Thursday.

Congressman Robert Wexler is equally frustrated. He's been fighting the 
state and Palm Beach County in court, trying to force a paper trail.

"Governor Bush and the Republican-led legislature are in denial," he 
said from Washington, D.C. "If we were to have problems in a statewide 
election, we couldn't even run a manual recount for half the state, 
which is a violation of the state constitution."

There is a trickle of good news. Both Broward and Palm Beach are 
scrambling to get printers that can be hooked up to the e-voting 
machines. The bad news is the printers are not yet state-certified.

"The governor's secretary of state refuses to certify the machines that 
could provide a paper trail," Wexler said. "The governor holds all the 
cards in this. He's playing with a time bomb."

At this point, even if the printers are certified, there's little 
chance they could be bought and introduced before the fall elections.

"Definitely not for this election," said Mary Cooney, spokeswoman for 
Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes.

Pass me a paper ballot.

Ralph De La Cruz can be reached at rdelacruz@sun-sentinel.com