Broke Vote: The General Accountability Office Reports Voting Problems

Many of us have to make special arrangements in order to find time to vote. We have to find a sitter, order out for dinner, arrange a carpool, or take a break from work. After rearranging the day and standing in line, we want to know that our vote is accurately counted.

But an investigation from the General Accountability Office (GAO), an independent non-partisan agency that works for Congress, found that many computer voting systems are flawed and may not be fixed before the 2006 elections.

GAO report

In the fall of 2005, John Conyers (D-MI), a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines in the 2004 presidential election.

After about a year of investigation, the GAO concluded that "election officials may not always rigorously ensure the security and reliability of their systems when they acquire, test, operate, and manage them."

As a consequence, some voting systems did not secure cast ballots, so it would have been possible to alter the results without being detected. In some counties, the computer voting system itself was not secure, so files could have been altered to favor one candidate. And some vendors installed uncertified versions of the voting software, which prevented local election officials from solving computer glitches.

The GAO reported several actual examples of voting system failures in 2004, including an incorrect ballot in California that prevented residents from voting in certain races and a tabulation computer in Maryland that was directly connected to the Internet without security measures. In North Carolina, electronic voting machines with no remaining memory continued to accept votes, causing at least 400 votes to be lost, and some of Florida’s touch-screen machines took over an hour to activate, causing long delays.

Why so many problems four years after the flawed 2000 elections?

In 2002, Congress passed and President Bush signed the Help Americans Vote Act or HAVA. The legislation is meant to fix the glitches in our voting system, to prevent the Florida fiasco from ever happening again in any state.

The bill authorized $3.9 billion dollars for election reforms like replacing those passé punch card and lever machines, training poll workers, and creating voter databases. And although Congress set some voting standards through HAVA, after much debate the majority left most of the responsibility for election reform to the states.

HAVA’s requirements seem specific; the law says that a state’s voter registration database must be a "single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the state level that contains the name and registration information of every legally registered voter in the state and assigns a unique identifier to each legally registered voter in the state." But as it turns out, these directions are vague enough to produce very different security and reliability standards from one state to another.

Some argue that local election officials have had little to no guidance on how to set up and secure their electronic voting systems, though taxpayers are spending millions of dollars on the new equipment.

New legislation needed?

In the House of Representatives, Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Tom Davis (R-VA) reintroduced the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, which now has the bipartisan support of 150 members.

The measure would require all voting machines to produce an actual paper record by 2006 that voters can view to check the accuracy of their votes and that election officials can use to verify votes in the event of a computer malfunction, hacking, or other irregularity. Experts often refer to this paper record as a "voter-verified paper trail."

The bill was first introduced in 2003 and is currently pending in the House Administrative Committee. Despite its bipartisan support, House leadership does not seem interested in moving it forward.

For more on election reform, click here.

Considering the vote

Our voting system is largely dependent on private companies. Not only do they create voting machines and software, they tally our votes and provide the results. What do you think of that? What needs to happen for every vote to be accurately counted? Is this an important issue to you?

What do you think?

Let your representative know what you think. Email right from WomenMatter - click here.

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Update Posted on: 12/3/2005