After punch card ballots led to a contested vote recount in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, Congress approved a $3.9 billion initiative to help states and localities update antiquated voting machines with electronic voting devices in time for the 2004 elections. The plan offered the hope that the ballot controversies of 2000 would not happen again, by providing Americans with more efficient and accurate computerized voting machines.

Despite the advantages of computerized voting, several academic researchers and security experts have questioned the integrity and reliability of the machines being marketed to states ahead of the deadline outlined in the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

In March 2001, scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a pioneering investigation into why so many problems arose in Florida's ballot count in the 2000 election, voting technologies and recommendations to prevent a repeat occurrence.

The Caltech-MIT study concluded that the widely used "punch cards and lever machines should be done away with," calling "the performance of punch cards alarming." The report also ruled out Internet voting in the near future because of the threat of computer hacking.

But the study by the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project also warned that newer electronic technologies did not automatically improve the situation. According to their statistics, touch-screen machines have performed almost as poorly as punch card machines over the past 12 years, though scientists noted the newer touch-screen voting devices -- such as direct recording equipment (DRE) -- showed signs of improvement. The report determined optical scanning as the most "reliable method of voting."

In July, researchers from Johns Hopkins and Rice University published a report detailing numerous security vulnerabilities with the widely used touch-screen systems from Diebold Election Systems, one of the largest vendors of DREs in the United States.

Avi Rubin, the report's chief author and an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins, warned that because Diebold's voting systems -- and similar devices from other vendors -- lack proper encryption technology, they were vulnerable to even amateur hackers.

"Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards. ...We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk," Rubin's study warned.

Just one week later, Diebold Election Systems released an official response discounting Rubin's study as based on "false technical assumptions." Diebold said the study relied on inadequate data from an older model of its touch-screen machine. Moreover, Diebold charged, the computer scientists lacked a deep or professional understanding of how elections work in real life.

"Rubin alleges scenarios that could not occur within an actual election process due to the checks and balances within the actual equipment and those found in accepted election procedures. ... The authors' expressed assumptions include fundamental misunderstandings of the overall election process -- whether making use of modern electronic voting systems or traditional paper ballots," the company's rebuttal concluded.

In the wake of these troubling scientific reports, a growing number of election officials, politicians and states seem to be reevaluating plans to implement the voting machines in time for the 2004 presidential election.

Shortly after the Johns Hopkins report, Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R) announced his state would wait on its pending purchase of Diebold's machines. In Georgia, the only state to use electronic voting machines in every county, Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) in August demanded Secretary of State Cynthia Cox test the reliability of the 22,000 Diebold machines used in the 2000 and 2002 elections. Cox expressed full confidence in the integrity of Diebold's machines.

In November, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley mandated that all electronic voting machines produce a voter-verifiable paper receipt by 2006, making California the first state to require that computerized voting systems leave a paper trail.

By early December, Ohio, Nevada and other states took official steps to reevaluate the security of the voting devices.

Diebold is not the only company whose voting machines yielded poor marks from independent academics and security experts.

The Ohio Report
In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, commissioned two companies, Compuware Corp. of Detroit and InfoSENTRY Services, to conduct an independent security review of electronic voting machines from the four top vendors: Diebold Inc., Election Systems & Software Inc., Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic Inc.

The review's results turned up enough security flaws for Blackwell to request a deadline extension to comply with HAVA, so vendors could remedy the identified risks. Ohio originally planned to roll out the electronic voting machines in March, but as a result of the state's review, Blackwell's office said the devices would not be used until the August 2004 special elections, at the earliest.

While the analysts concluded there were no "show stopping" security concerns to halt the introduction of computerized voting systems, the researchers did identify a list of security risks, ranked from low to high. Of the high-risk areas, Diebold's AccuVote-TS (touch screen) had five, Hart InterCivic's eSlate 3000 had four, Sequoia Voting Systems' AVC Edge had three and ES&S' iVotronic had one.

The risks for all the companies' machines included potential accessing of supervisor functions and tampering with election results, and the ability to disrupt voting and close the polls early.

Compuware recommended that the secretary of state implement information-technology (IT) and security policy standards for any election using the DRE system. They also urged the state to consider creating a new security director position to oversee procedures and security concerns in any election in which a DRE system is used.

The report concluded that all vendors generally passed the federal Independent Test Authority's requirements regarding the security of their voting machines, and that those vendors found to have security flaws "expressed willingness to improve."

Blackwell's office also stated that all vendors were fixing the problems identified in the independent review, after which Compuware and InfoSENTRY will carry out additional verification testing.

The report says the "onus" is placed solely on the electronic voting machine vendors to "detect, correct and report system defects" to state and local election officials. It recommends the vendor submit weekly reports of system defects to election officials, who can then track problems and order repairs to the equipment.

Finally, Compuware and InfoSENTRY strongly suggested the state "establish a relationship" with its selected vendor to create and implement security policies. The secretary of state's office should also provide and coordinate vendor-specific security awareness and technical training programs for election officials as well as the vendor's employees.

Following the Paper Trail
The Ohio secretary of state's study, the Johns Hopkins-Rice Study and the Caltech-MIT study all recommended that voting machines should produce a paper trail to verify votes.

Rebecca Mercuri, a researcher at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who originated the "paper trail" concept, said she believes in a "voter-verified paper trail" requirement because of "a lack of candor in the electronic voting industry."

"The fact they did not want all this security and openness was the reason I came up with it," she said. "More recently I realized you can have as much security and openness as you want, and you'd still need it. It's important for every voter to look at the ballot and see if that's how they voted or not," Mercuri told the Tri-Valley Herald of the San Francisco Bay area in November.

However, several top manufacturers and election officials question the point of computerized voting if hard copies of votes are necessary. They also argue that the trail mechanism could be prohibitively expensive.

A Political Problem
As computer scientists and election officials focused on the security glitches of electronic voting devices, several advocacy groups, journalists, tech-activists and Internet writers have doggedly worked to expose the political bias of executives heading the top manufacturers of voting machines.

One case concerns Sen. Chuck Hagel's involvement with one of the largest manufacturers of voting machines, Election Systems & Software. According to Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting: Vote Tampering in the 21st Century", Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, served as chief executive of American Information Systems, a voting technology firm that later merged with another company to become ES&S.

Although he resigned a year before running for the U.S. Senate, Hagel continued to be invested in ES&S through a holding company, the McCarthy Group, part of which he headed until early 1996.

While Harris reported she found no evidence of tampering with the Nebraska votes in 1996 or 2002, the year Hagel ran for reelection, she still questioned the possible conflict of interest of a U.S. senator owning part of the company that supplied all the vote-counting machines in his state.

Hagel's campaign treasurer, Michael McCarthy, who also serves as chairman of the McCarthy Group Inc., explained the senator's indirect ownership of ES&S was minor because Hagel owned less than 2 percent of McCarthy. McCarthy, in turn, only owns 25 percent of ES&S.

Despite the accusations of impropriety and calls by some for an ethics investigation, the senator's staff informed The Hill, a Washington D.C.-based newspaper covering Congress, in January 2003 that the Senate Ethics Committee had reviewed and approved Hagel's election filings, clearing the Nebraska senator of any wrongdoing.

Other recent cases of partisan politics have raised similar concerns of apparent conflicts of interest and fueled Web-based conspiracy theorists.

In August 2003, Diebold, which has installed some 33,000 touch-screen voting machines in the United States, came under fire after its chief executive, Walden O'Dell, sent letters to central Ohio Republicans asking them to raise $10,000 in donations in time for a Sept. 26 Ohio Republican Party fundraiser at his home.

O'Dell wrote he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to (President Bush) next year." The Cleveland Plain Dealer also reported that O'Dell was one of President Bush's top fund-raisers, ranked in the elite "Pioneer" echelons for collecting a minimum of $200,000.

Democrats -- including several presidential candidates for the 2004 election -- protested the Diebold CEO's overt political bias, and petitioned Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell to drop O'Dell's company from the list of potential vendors, saying his presence could undermine Ohio's entire election system.

Soon after, Diebold released a statement in which O'Dell expressed regret about the letter, saying he would curtail his political activism.

Nevertheless, a year of mixed reviews and political questions have helped make voters aware of the issue of poll technology, says voter activist Kim Alexander, president and founder of the California Voter Foundation.

"I think it's been a year of widespread awakening among the American public about the risks of computerized voting," Alexander told CNet News in December. "A huge movement has developed across the nation, with citizen activists joining computer scientists, academics, lawyers and nonprofits to demand verifiable voting systems."

Diebold representative David Bear has suggested other reasons to explain the intensified scrutiny of electronic voting systems.

"I would say I think there's heightened awareness as a result of HAVA," Bear said. "All the states are addressing the issue of how they're going to come into HAVA compliance and, doing the right thing, they're involving the general public in that process. Most people did not think about elections except for the dedicated folks who work on election day-- or day in and day out as elections officers. But the Florida (2000) vote and the subsequent HAVA act put a spotlight on this as an issue."

-- By Elizabeth Harper, Online NewsHour