Should California voters be petrified to learn that a team of computer scientists easily broke into and then hacked the voting machines used in state elections, in a test sponsored by the California Secretary of State’s office?

Or should voters be reassured, given that the testers had unusually broad access to the physical machines, in situations somewhat unlikely to be duplicated very often in real life?

The irresponsible voting machine industry is pitching the latter interpretation, of course, in its response to the results announced last week in Sacramento, Calif. But a sensible voter should have more worry than calm about a scandal that just keeps expanding.

The issue has been obvious for years: an inept national response to the 2000 election. That’s when Florida’s dramatically flawed balloting procedures, including the nature of the ballots themselves, led to the state’s Electoral College votes being handed, amid confusion, bickering and rancor that will never entirely dissipate, to George W. Bush — a ballot that sealed his White House bid.

This story continues below
Advertisement

In 2002, Congress passed a law called the Help Americans Vote Act. Its purpose was to improve the system, and it threw a pot of money at the states so they could buy new machines.

The first part of the scandal was a law that didn’t mandate even half-baked safeguards to ensure that the new machines would improve on the old ones. That led directly to the second part.

What many states, including California, then did was to buy electronic voting machines that had no “paper trail” — that is, there was no way of checking to see whether people’s votes had actually been cast for the candidates they’d chosen.

What does this mean in practice? A “recount” asks the machine to verify that the tally was right the first time; machines do what programmers tell them to do, and if the software is flawed or hacked, it’ll keep giving the wrong answer. A disputed 2006 congressional election in Sarasota County, Fla., remains in dispute precisely because of this kind of situation.

You wouldn’t put up with a bank ATM that didn’t produce a paper record of the transaction. Yet voting officials around America have been buying voting machines that don’t offer even this minimal bit of protection.

The reasons for this governmental malpractice don’t universally reflect venality or incompetence, though there’s plenty of that to go around. Well-meaning advocates for the rights of the disabled have been among the most vocal defenders of paperless electronic balloting, apparently figuring that any improvement from their perspective outweighs the obvious problems. And states were being pushed hard to get rid of what many considered, with justice, machines that caused the kinds of problems we saw in Florida.

Some states, including California — whose Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, has been a true champion of honest elections — have changed their laws to require paper trails. But the voting machine industry’s security, as we’ve seen, remains pathetic. Other states continue to drag their heels. That’s outrageous.

Enter S 1487 and HR 811. These bills, now before Congress, would improve on the 2002 law by requiring paper records. The legislation is far from perfect. But it’s an improvement.

It’s also in trouble. Although the bill seems likely to pass in the House, where Rep. Rush D. Holt, D-N.J., has been a spearhead for repairing this mess, the Senate is iffier. Congressional Quarterly reported last week that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., thinks it needs more time — because, as she was quoted as saying, “mandating that all states have voter-verified paper records and audits of these records for the 2008 election could be an invitation to chaos.”

If this bill fails this year, Congress should rewrite it in a simpler way: to mandate paper ballots that can be scanned electronically. This would satisfy just about everyone’s needs and be about as safe and accurate as such things can be.

Meanwhile, we have to keep hoping for blowout elections, where the outcome is so one-sided that no one can doubt that the result is correct.

If Congress can’t get this right — years after an election that showed how terribly wrong a system can be — what can it get right?

Dan Gillmor is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and is director of the Center for Citizen Media at the University of California