The following is an editorial that was printed in the Richmond, Indiana Palladium-Item on May 6th, 2004

The recent Palladium Item editorial covered the certification issues surrounding the new voting system in Wayne County well but did not examine the more serious basic design flaws common to most "DRE" voting devices, including those used in Wayne County.

The designers of good voting devices and tabulation systems have two minimum goals to meet: First, the tabulation of the votes must be verifiably accurate, with no way for intentional or accidental misuse to alter the results. Second, the system must be easy to understand and use so the voter actually casts the vote that he or she intends.

While the new DRE voting devices may have given us some marginal gains in the ease of use area, those used in Wayne County and many other jurisdictions utterly fail to meet reasonable standards for verifiably accurate results. The failure lies in the ability of local election officials to test the devices adequately.

Although a particular version of the software used in these devices may be officially "certified", due to the design of the voting devices and limitations on examining their inner workings, there is no way for local officials to verify that the certified version is actually installed on their voting devices or test the ability of the installed software to produce accurate results. This means we must take the vendor's word that the software will not be tampered with to alter the results of an election.

ES&S, Diebold and most other vendors of DRE voting devices are asking us to trust a system that has no audit trail or effective means of independent testing.

Even though I do not suspect my bank of stealing money, the reason I never have this worry is that I would never patronize a bank that did not routinely and voluntarily require independent audits. Unfortunately, all of us are being forced to trust a system that cannot be audited to tell us who our next president will be.

There are many ways that an unscrupulous programmer could alter the outcome of an election by tampering with the software in DRE voting devices. I will briefly outline just one here. Suppose the computer equivalent of the following instruction were inserted into the program and used in the last general election:

If the time is later than 6AM on Election Day, every 50th vote goes to Al Gore; Otherwise, record votes normally.

This one tiny instruction would have decisively changed the outcome of our presidential election in 2000 in a manner that is completely undetectable. Because the instruction only gets executed on election day, the voting device would pass all prior certification tests with flying colors. Since the change is less than 2%, nobody would suspect the slight difference from exit polls- but the course of history and the fortunes of many government contractors would have changed in an enormous way. Worst of all, because no record of the actual votes cast exists, nobody could ever prove foul play had occurred.

What should we do about this? Our County and State election administrators are people of integrity trying to do their best to keep elections fair, but they have been forced to buy poorly designed voting systems by Federal and State legislation. To bring about change, we need to petition our State Election Board and State legislators to change the law. We all know that with the power and money that is at stake in every election, if the system can be abused, it eventually *will* be abused.

In the meantime, keep voting! Although we can no longer be completely sure our votes are counted, not voting is the only way to be sure they *won’t* be counted.

This is a very brief explanation of the problems with our voting system. If you are interested in a more thorough discussion of the issues, please go to http://www.fankhausers.com/articles to learn more.

-Nick Fankhauser 5/3/2004