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Meet the new flaws


More election system glitches shake voters' confidence


Published: Friday, August 29, 2008 at 1:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 8:20 p.m.

Two Diebold glitches in one month? That's no way to rebuild confidence
in automated elections.

Sarasota and Hillsborough counties experienced one of the problems
Tuesday night. They suffered delays from a software flaw that revealed
itself when officials tried to integrate absentee ballot totals into
overall election results. The software, linked to special high-speed
scanners, is part of a new optical-scan election system that was
certified by the state in March.

The manufacturer is Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as
Diebold -- a name long connected to doubts about the security of voting.

Earlier this month, Premier accepted blame for the other glitch -- a
coding error that can sometimes prevent precinct vote totals from
electronically transferring to central tabulation systems. The problem
could afflict 34 states.

Good news, bad news

The good news about these flaws is that faulty counts can be detected by
cross-checks and refuted by a paper trail of ballots. The votes still
exist, in other words, though they can be harder to find.

The bad news is that confidence has been shaken, yet again, in
automation that is critical to democratic elections. The extra vigilance
required to thwart these potential glitches adds to election
administrators' burden and cost.

The fact that the Premier problems occur intermittently, undiscovered
during certification or testing procedures, is especially troubling. In
Sarasota County, for example, the high-speed scanner/software glitch did
not surface in a mock election held last month.

So far, three Florida counties -- Okaloosa is the third -- use this
version of Premier equipment. Okaloosa avoided problems Tuesday by
choosing not to deploy the high-speed scanners, according to elections
officials there.

A temporary fix

Fortunately, the glitch exposed in Hillsborough and Sarasota can be
avoided by replacing the high-speed central scanners with slower
machines that don't trigger the software conflict. Premier will do so at
no charge, said Kathy Dent, Sarasota's supervisor of elections. But that
is a temporary fix. Long term, the offending software may need to be
revised and undergo the state certification process again.

The value of the state's examination must be questioned, in light of the
admitted glitches. To be sure, it's not easy to test a system for all
the possible scenarios that can unfold during a real election. But it
remains troubling that the Premier flaws weren't caught by the Division
of Elections' analysts.

This issue isn't limited to Sarasota or Florida. Nationally, new
equipment costing millions of dollars has been purchased to restore
voters' faith in accurate elections. Yet it appears that the investment
largely replaced old problems with new ones.

Despite many reforms since the 2000 fiasco, voting systems are nowhere
near as credible, secure or user-friendly as they should be.