Never mind that those skeptics include computer scientists from Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Rice universities and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Never mind that several high-profile studies -- such as the Florida commission report on the 2000 election -- have concluded that optically scanned paper ballots, not touch-screens, are the safest and most reliable technology available.
The federal government also needs to be held accountable for leaving the technology of voting in a regulatory vacuum, and creating an oversight body -- the Election Assistance Commission -- so weak and underfunded that it is only now scrambling to draft standards for technology that has, for the most part, already been developed and sold.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Monday August 22, 2005 Home Edition California Part B Page 11 Editorial Pages Desk 2 inches; 69 words Type of Material: Correction
Voting machines: An Aug. 4 Op-Ed article about electronic voting said California election officials' recent tests on Diebold touch-screen machines produced a 10% error rate, worse than the punch-card machines used in Florida's November 2000 election. The error rate that the state found referred to the number of machines that had screen freezes or paper jams. Diebold says that no votes were miscast or ruled invalid in the process.
Congress has no control over the machine-certification process, and the Federal Election Commission, which has drawn up technical specifications in the past, is so far behind the curve that most electronic machinery now in use meets standards drawn up as far back as 1990, the Stone Age of computing.
This lamentable state of affairs is not irreversible. Two years ago, when Shelley mandated an independent paper trail for all Californian voting systems -- an essential prerequisite for proper recounts -- it created a chain reaction causing 17 states to follow suit. McPherson's rejection of Diebold's substandard machine may well have a similar effect nationwide.
The voters certainly deserve better. If there is no accountability in the conduct of elections, then no other aspect of American democracy is completely safe either.
