Integrity of E-Balloting System Still in Doubt

At work, we scribble our secret passwords on our desk blotters. At home, we leave our Internet connections open to be peeked through by anyone -- whether the neighbor next door or a geek in pajamas halfway around the world. We forget our laptops in taxicabs, and transmit our credit card numbers to strangers over the Web.

Generally, the consequences are trivial. Most of the information let loose into cyberspace is, frankly, of no interest to anybody.

But there's no excuse for exposing the integrity of our election system to computer hackers. Yet that's what California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson may have done last week by approving electronic voting machines from Diebold Election Systems for use in California elections through the end of this year.

McPherson's approval was conditioned in part on local election officials keeping the Diebold machines under tight security before polls open. Diebold will have to make significant changes to its software and undergo further scrutiny from state and federal authorities for 2007. Given the rising panic among county registrars about having machines ready for the June primary, it's hard to avoid the impression that McPherson's decision reflected expediency more than confidence in Diebold's work.

Indeed, his ruling produced a statewide sigh of relief from county registrars, who were squeezed between a federal law requiring them to install efficient new high-tech poll machines and a state law requiring the machines to be formally certified. "This means I won't have to go to either Leavenworth or Folsom," San Diego registrar Mikel Haas told me. His county, which will stage a primary on April 11 to replace the bribe-taking Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, bought 10,200 Diebold machines for $31 million in 2003, but hadn't been allowed to use them since 2004.

As the last two presidential elections demonstrate, ballot results are of profound interest to everybody -- including determined hackers with partisan agendas. Therefore, it's proper to demand of the high-tech machines replacing the paper ballots and punch cards of yore that they be technologically bulletproof. The Diebold systems certified by McPherson -- an optical scanner that reads hand-marked ballots and a touch screen that totes up votes directly -- fall well short of that standard.