TOUCH SCREENS: Machines may be too unpredictable for voters .

By LISA DEMER
Anchorage Daily News

Published: November 4, 2006
Last Modified: November 4, 2006 at 09:50 AM

Alaska voters had little enthusiasm for new touchscreen voting machines
during their shaky debut in the August primary election.

In 20 percent of the precincts, not a single voter cast a ballot on the
machines, according to the state Division of Elections.

Voters may have been suspicious of the technology, unaware that touchscreen
machines were an option or disappointed to find the machines out of service.
In two precincts, the touchscreens arrived damaged and didn't work at all,
according to the division. In others, they may have worked only part of the
day.

Most Alaska voters used the familiar paper ballots that were then fed into
machines that quickly tabulated results. They will probably do so again
Tuesday
on Election Day.

Touchscreen machines are controversial around the country. Critics say they
are vulnerable to hackers who could change the outcome of an election. There
also have been problems with human error and worries about software bugs.

Still, election officials in Alaska and nationally generally defend
electronic machines as reliable and secure. So does Diebold Election Systems
Inc., the
manufacturer of those used in Alaska. Paper ballots weren't exactly
fraud-proof, either.

"You've read stories where the ballots were thrown into some river on the
way from the polling place and never did reach their destination to be
counted,"
said Donetta Davidson, commissioner with the U.S. Election Assistance
Commission, an organization overseeing election administration.

"We had more fraud and more problems with the old-fashioned ballots than we
will ever see with any of the new processes," she said. In states like
Alaska,
the touchscreen machines produce a paper trail of every vote that can be
compared to data stored on the computer memory card, she said.

Still the criticism is revving up as Election Day nears.

Three Princeton University researchers say someone could install "malicious
software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute." The
software
can "steal votes," the doctoral students and professor concluded in a study
released in September. They posted their study, and how-to video, on the Web
but noted they didn't give away all the secrets a real attacker would need.

HBO on Thursday aired a documentary titled "Hacking Democracy" that it said
"exposes gaping holes in the security of America's electronic voting
system."

Maryland's Republican governor says residents there should vote with paper
absentee ballots to avoid the touchscreens at the polls. The Wall Street
Journal
on Thursday hosted an online debate between two experts that it called "Can
Electronic Voting Be Trusted?"

The Alaska Democratic Party also is urging voters not to use the touchscreen
machines when they go to the polls Tuesday. One vulnerability raised by Kay
Brown, spokeswoman for the Democrats, is the wireless capability of Diebold
machines that theoretically could allow someone with a hand-held device to
hack in during an election.

Alaska election officials say they aren't turning on the wireless
capability.

Diebold says that most of the criticisms are unjustified. The HBO
documentary was riddled with errors, the company says in a news release. The
Princeton
University study of vulnerabilities was based on an older-model machine and
the machines now have advanced encryption, according to Diebold.

And Davidson of the federal commission said that, as far as they know, no
one has hacked into any electronic voting machine during an actual election.

Congress has demanded that states modernize antiquated voting systems after
problems with punch cards and other old-school systems were exposed in the
2000
presidential election. It has injected $3 billion into new voting systems.

Alaska's Division of Elections used a federal grant to buy more than 500
Diebold touchscreen machines at $3,500 apiece to meet requirements of the
federal
Help America Vote Act of 2002, division director Whitney Brewster has said.

Alaska's touchscreen system includes a voice-guided feature for people who
are blind and a pointer stick for those who cannot use their arms.

Lynne Koral and her husband, Sandy Sanderson, both are blind and were
excited about using the touchscreens to vote in the primary. But when they
arrived
at their polling place in the Anchorage Senior Center, no one could get the
machines to work, Koral said Friday. She was disappointed, though she has
concerns
about the machines and the possibility of hacking.

"I will try to use the machine again. I guess," Koral said.

There's supposed to be one working touchscreen machine in every Alaska
polling place, from Alakanuk to Yakutat, even in the nearly 150 rural
precincts where
paper ballots are still counted by hand, according to the state elections
division.

Out of 439 Alaska polling places, there were 96 in which the touchscreen was
not used in the primary, including precincts in Sitka, Girdwood and Dimond
No. 2 in Anchorage, the division said. But in others, including Kenai No. 1,
Soldotna and Douglas, more than 100 voters used them.

Some precincts couldn't upload results from touchscreen machines on
primary-election night because there weren't enough phone lines, the
division said.
Election workers were tying up the phone lines for an average of 20 to 30
minutes getting help with their touchscreen units, and two phone lines
didn't
work.

Some precincts had trouble installing the printer for the touchscreen unit,
but there weren't reports of paper jams in Alaska, though there have been in
other states.

Before the primary, the division tripled training time for poll workers to
prepare them to handle the touchscreens and hired 100 troubleshooters to
help
at the polls if needed. It has installed more phone lines to prepare for
Tuesday.

Alaska has a check on the machines already in place. The state review board
hand counts all votes from one precinct in every state House district and
compares
that to the machine-generated number. If the results are off by more than 1
percent, every vote in the district will be recounted, Brewster, the
elections
director, has said.

Daily News reporter Lisa Demer can be reached at
ldemer@adn.comTOUCH
SCREENS: Machines may be too unpredictable for voters.

By LISA DEMER
Anchorage Daily News

Published: November 4, 2006

Posted by Miriam V.