When Georgia adopted touch-screen voting 12 years ago, supporters touted it as a way to significantly reduce the possibility of election fraud. Critics feared it was just the opposite.
The new system, they said, would make it easier to steal elections, and no one would know if electronic votes had been manipulated by hackers or corrupt politicians.
Secure or not, electronic voting has changed the way governments handle recounts in close elections. The paper trail that some say is needed to assure voters their ballots are accurate is mostly gone.
In Thursday’s recounts of the races for Fulton County Commission chairman and DeKalb County School board, most votes were tallied by computer, just as they were on election night.
And the results, for the most part, were the same as on election night.
“You can’t have a good recount,” said Sen. Donzella James, D-Atlanta, referring to elections in general, not the Fulton County race. “It’s going to say the same thing it said from the beginning.”
Election officials say that should inspire confidence that the system isn’t subject to the ambiguities of “hanging chads” and other problems that have plagued paper and punch-card ballots in the past.
“I just don’t see it as an issue,” said Fulton Elections Director Richard Barron. “I’ve yet to read about anyone losing votes with an electronic voting machine.”
Critics still doubt the technology is as foolproof as supporters argue. Computer scientists have said it’s possible to hack the machines, though no reports of it actually happening have surfaced, experts say. With no paper ballots to double-check the results, critics fear entrusting something as important as a vote solely to cyberspace.
“That screen just goes `poof,’ and (the vote is) gone,” said Garland Favorito, a Roswell computer consultant who filed an unsuccessful lawsuit to overturn Georgia’s electronic voting system in 2006. “You have no way of knowing what it recorded.”
Georgia turned to touch-screen voting after watching Florida suffer through the close 2000 presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The state came under intense scrutiny as many punch-card votes were not counted because of “hanging” chads and other problems.
Georgia had a higher percentage of uncounted votes than Florida. But it avoided the scrutiny that Florida received because Bush won the Peach State handily.
In 2002, Congress passed a law encouraging states to get rid of punch-card and lever voting machines. That same year, Georgia introduced touch-screen voting statewide.
State officials said the new system would significantly lower the number of uncounted votes and decrease the likelihood of election fraud. One measure of its success: In the 1998 Georgia U.S. Senate race, nearly 5 percent of votes were not counted. With touch-screen machines in use, less than 1 percent of votes were not counted in 2002.
That hasn’t silenced critics.
“They’re wide open for fraud,” Favorito said. “They always have been since the day they were purchased.”
Such concerns prompted calls to allow voters to print a copy of their ballot, which voters could check against the touch screen before casting their final ballot. In 2005, the General Assembly considered bills that would have required such a “paper trail” of votes.
“At least people would have confidence that their votes would count,” said Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, who sponsored one of the bills.
Ultimately, the state opted for a pilot project. In 2006, three Georgia precincts allowed voters to create a paper trail, and local election officials used that trail to verify election results. But a Secretary of State report later concluded that comparing the paper trail to electronic records was costly and time consuming, and the push for a paper trail faded.
Barron, the Fulton election director, said it would be difficult to hack into an electronic voting system. He said voting machines aren’t connected to a network, so a hacker would need to compromise individual machines. If someone was motivated enough to do that, they could do the same with the optical scanners that tally paper votes, he said.
Gary Smith, an election consultant hired by Pitts to review the Fulton election, said electronic voting is more secure than paper systems – as long as proper procedures are followed.
“Look at the issues we had with punch cards. Look at the issues we had with paper ballots,” Smith said. “An election someone was trying to subvert can be done easier with paper ballots than with anything.”
Daniel Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University, has studied the security of electronic voting systems. He said there are “some genuine concerns about electronic voting technology. But there are concerns with every type of technology.”
Tokaji said mistakes have occurred. Some communities haven’t allocated enough voting machines to particular precincts, causing long lines. One Maryland community didn’t provide the cards necessary to start the machines on Election Day. And he said some governments have had problems transmitting and reporting electronic voting data.
But Tokaji doubts adding a paper trail would provide a significant boost to security. And he said he’s not aware of any documented case of someone hacking into an electronic voting to influence an election.
“Some of the concerns have been exaggerated,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to completely debunk a conspiracy theory, but the nightmare scenarios have not come to pass.”
Though the bills to require a paper trail did not pass, Fort said it’s possible the issue could be revived. He cited the recount in the Fulton chairman’s race.
“With a few more elections like this you might find an increased appetite for it,” he said.
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