California Experiences Problems with Voting Machines

STEVE WEIR, Election Official, Contra Costa County: If we tinker with it much more, we're going to jeopardize our February 5th election for the president, primary, our June 3 regular, and most importantly the 4th of November next year, which is the presidential, and that is the biggie for us.

SPENCER MICHELS: What do you mean we're going to jeopardize it?

STEVE WEIR: You can't keep changing voting systems. You don't make changes to your voting system without really jeopardizing your own security and your own reliability this close to an election.

SPENCER MICHELS: The problems started in Florida in 2000: a gigantic election snafu, with hanging chads, ballots uncounted, and eventually the court-determined presidential victory by George W. Bush.

So, in 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act and appropriated $3.9 billion that was used mostly by counties across the country to buy, with great speed, new, snazzy electronic voting machines, many of them the so-called touch screens that allow a voter to simply touch the candidate's name on the screen.

Those machines were supposed to remedy the Florida debacle. But doubts about those machines have been percolating ever since.

Computer experts, like David Dill at Stanford, have studied them and faulted them for a lack of reliability and vulnerability to tampering.

DAVID DILL: I know that it's extremely hard to make systems bug-free, so there's a possibility of error in these machines, and a possibility of deliberate tampering, and no real way to detect it.

SPENCER MICHELS: At first, Dill says, computer scientists were voices in the wilderness. Now, they are being listened to.

DAVID DILL: From the perspective of a lot of election officials or politicians, we're a new voice that hadn't been heard before. And so we were initially either ignored or basically mocked.

SPENCER MICHELS: And that's changed, do you think?

Dan Ashby, co-founder of Election Defense Alliance, calls it the outsourcing of our elections.

DAN ASHBY, Election Defense Alliance: The election department public servants are not capable of running the election without having all kinds of technical help from the voting machine companies.

SPENCER MICHELS: And the danger of that is?

DAN ASHBY: Well, they have the access, the means, motive and opportunity, if they were inclined, to change the programming in ways that no election official or voting member of the public could possibly perceive, such that it would change the outcome of the election in an undetectable, untraceable way.

SPENCER MICHELS: County election officials like Steve Weir think the criticism has gotten out of hand.

STEVE WEIR: We're paying for the sins of Florida 2000. And the tragedy is it's eight years later, and people's confidence in the voting system still aren't secure. And I want to tell folks in that eight years there have been tremendous gains, not only nationwide, but specifically in California.

SPENCER MICHELS: Furthermore, Weir says, Bowen's top-to-bottom review was flawed and unrealistic.

STEVE WEIR: It was a test that was conducted in a laboratory without any of the protections that we have on our systems. And in theory -- and only in theory -- were these systems vulnerable.

I think that it gave some credence in the eyes of people who have doubts about our systems in saying, "Aha, see, it can be done." But there's no proof that it has been done.

SPENCER MICHELS: But activist Ashby isn't convinced.

DAN ASHBY: What makes you think that it hasn't happened? Why is the burden of the proof on the voters to prove that the system works? I think the burden of proof is on the election departments who are conducting the election to prove that it can't be hacked.

SPENCER MICHELS: A lot of California voters don't seem to trust the current voting system, no matter what method they use to mark their ballots. A recent Field Poll indicates that less than half of those people have a great deal of confidence that their votes will be counted accurately.

CALIFORNIA RESIDENT: I'm not really confident. I don't know that my vote really counts. I don't know if it's being counted.

CALIFORNIA RESIDENT: Human beings are creating the machines. Machines are not perfect. Human beings are not perfect. But I honestly don't worry about it that much.

DEBRA BOWEN: My great concern is that it causes many people to check out and not participate, not vote.

SPENCER MICHELS: Have you seen that actually happen?

DEBRA BOWEN: Sure.

SPENCER MICHELS: So this is kind of a threat to democracy?

DEBRA BOWEN: I think that it's a major threat to democracy. We need to be able to tell people that, if you take the time to learn the issues and go to vote, your voice will be heard, your vote will be counted.

SPENCER MICHELS: For now, Bowen is encouraging the use of optical scan machines, where a voter uses a pen to mark a ballot, which is scanned and counted electronically.

DEBRA BOWEN: They are counted by a machine, but we have the ability to go back and hand count if the audits that we do indicate that there is any irregularity.

SPENCER MICHELS: Thirty-eight counties out of California's 58 are already using optical scan. For those which still use touch screen machines -- about a quarter of state voters -- a paper trail is required, a printed record of each vote that can be hand counted if there's a question about the election.

Such improvements are encouraging for computer scientist David Dill.

DAVID DILL: My confidence has definitely increased. Plus, my optimism that over the long haul the system will be significantly improved has increased a great deal, too.

SPENCER MICHELS: But you're not completely confident in the system at this point?

DAVID DILL: No, I'm not. I don't think the system is perfect.

SPENCER MICHELS: The system gets a major test on February 5th when Californians vote in their presidential primary. Despite some concerns, state officials insist that election is not in jeopardy.

JIM LEHRER: Our election coverage continues, as always, on our Web site. You can use our interactive election map and keep up with the candidates on our reporters' notebook, among other things. It's all at PBS.org.