A rough guide to voting machines

Ever since punch-card voting machines produced the "hanging chads" that led to the Florida recount in the 2000 election, Americans have been looking for new and more reliable technology to use on Election Day.

One result: The Help America Vote Act of 2002, which authorized $3.9 billion in federal funds for trading in the infamous punch-card and lever systems with either e-voting or optical scan systems. It also stipulates that all polling places should make available a handicap-accessible voting device.

But while the country, for the most part, has moved on from the older, more unreliable machines, the new models present their own set of challenges.?From shadowy conspiracy theories to genuine concerns about glitches, here's what you need to know about the machines that are supposed to make democracy work.

What kind of machines are used, and where?

Sixty percent of the country now supplies voters with optical scanners. To use them,?voters shade in their choices on paper ballots (similar to how they would take an SAT test) before feeding it to the machines. These optical scanners, while not exactly a brand new technology, are the state of the art for both their accuracy in processing votes and their security against tampering.

But the same cannot always be said for the alternative, e-voting equipment (Direct-Recording-Electronic machines, or DREs) used in about 25 percent of the country. These machines are lined up in places including Georgia, Maryland, Utah, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas.

These machines come in three variants: push-button machines sporting a keypad; LCD touch-screens; and machines that utilize a rolling wheel to select and confirm a vote onscreen. All of these register votes on an electronic ballot and the lack of a paper trail preserved by the optical scanners has been causing problems since their inception.

VerifiedVoting.org provides more specifics on the history and different forms of voting technology, including a map showing different states' brand of election equipment.

Does anyone still use the punch-card or lever systems?

Four counties in Idaho still use punch-card ballots, while none in the country have used the lever machines since 2010.

What are some of the examples of problems with e-voting machines?

First, in 2004 there was the issue of electronic votes being wiped from machines in New Jersey and North Carolina. But the much more ominous worries over the limits and liabilities of e-voting became clear in 2008, when a study by Princeton University revealed how easy it would be to hack into the Sequoia brand e-voting machines (used chiefly in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana) and steal votes.

More disturbing is this quote from Roger Johnston, a computer science expert leading a subsequent test on Diebold AccuVote e-voting machines just last year: "I've seen high-school science fair projects that are more sophisticated than what is needed to hijack a voting machine." His crash course in vote-jacking went as follows: the equipment was hacked by inserting a very inexpensive homemade device into the voting machine, which could be remotely controlled from afar. In practice, when the voter attempted to mark her e-ballot, the hacker could intercept and alter the vote from one party to the other.

Despite these widely reported studies, as well as HBO's 2006 documentary "Hacking Democracy," there has not yet been any effort to address these sorts of problems with the Diebold machines, or smaller malfunctions of e-voting machines more broadly.

What's more, software of this equipment is proprietary, which means that only the companies that manufacture the machines have access to their design, which they keep from examination through extended legal battles.

What's with stories about Tagg Romney owning voting machines?

In a tight election, even the most tenuous connections can be spun quickly into a web of conspiracy by those worried about a candidate's undue influence on the electoral process. That's not to say that there aren't genuine links between very enthusiastic Mitt Romney donors and a large supplier of voting machines in Ohio, Hart InterCivic?but the theories attempting to prove that Tagg Romney, the GOP nominee's eldest, owns Ohio voting machines overstep the boundaries of available evidence.

As Rick Ungar reports in Forbes, two Hart InterCivic board members have made direct donations to the Romney campaign; furthermore, several directors of H.I.G. capital, which owns Hart, are major money-raisers for the campaign as well. (Some of them were in the room during Romney's infamous "47 percent" remarks.)

But the link of Hart InterCivic and its parent company to Tagg Romney doesn't weather scrutiny: There is no evidence that his private equity firm, Solamere Capital, invests, owns or controls voting machines made by InterCivic. The closest one gets by following the money is to find Solamere investing in H.I.G.'s medical fund, BioVentures, a wholly separate fund, as reported by Eugene Kiely and Lucas Isakowitz at Factcheck.org.

What will superstorm Sandy's impact be on voting in the Northeast?

In the back of people's minds, the effects of the destructive storm on voting in the Northeast have been a quiet but pressing concern. As Thad Hall, a University of Utah political scientist and researcher for the Voting Technology Project, told the AFP, "Some voters will literally not be able to vote because they will have been evacuated from their local polling place and there is no provision for remote voting."

The voting machines themselves will be left operating on batteries, not an encouraging prospect as Election Day drags on longer in certain areas where debris and destruction have complicated the process and organization.

In New Jersey, the state is allowing residents to combat the aftermath of the storm by voting through absentee ballots?by email or fax. And state officials in New York have said that residents may be granted an extra day to vote if Tuesday's turnout is below 25 percent.

The aftermath of the storm is likely to have a larger impact on supporters of President Barack Obama, potentially affecting his overall performance in the popular vote.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/rough-guide-voting-machines-175213233.html

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