Utah to cast electronic ballots
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By LORETTA PARK
Standard-Examiner Davis Bureau
lpark@standard.net
LAYTON -- Utahns will touch-screen their votes this November, but other parts of the country are returning to paper ballots.
Some of the electronic voting machines have problems, including creating conflicts with antivirus software that caused hundreds of votes to be dropped as they were uploaded to tallying services, according to news stories.
A number of states are opting for paper systems, but Utahns will be among the 36 percent of registered voters relying on touch-screen technology.
State officials across the nation had said the new electronic systems would eliminate human error and political tampering, and Congress allocated $3 billion to replace punch-card and lever-operated machines.
Gloria Berrett, elections administrator for Weber County, said Premier Elections Solutions Inc., is the system the entire state uses and "the only machines that have been certified."
Weber County plans to use its 657 machines in the November election and promote early voting so it doesn't have to use any more machines.
The machines are kept under lock and key until it's time to set them up, she said. The memory cards are locked into the machines and then sealed. Election judges check the seal for tampering every 30 minutes on Election Day.
The database for the electronic machines is not connected to any county server, making it difficult for hackers. The independent server is locked in a room that is inaccessible to the general public, Berrett said.
Morgan County Election Specialist Teresa Lake has heard the talk about other states scrapping the machines, but said, "There has been no talk in Utah to scrap them."
It would cost the state more money to go back to a paper ballot system, she said. The voting machines used by the counties cost about $3,000 each.
"We are one of the few states where there have been no major problems with the machines," said Steve Rawlings, Davis County clerk/auditor.
The problems that have occurred have been "people mistakes, not machine," he said.
Davis County will use 1,016 machines Nov. 4 and during the early voting period, Rawlings said.
The machines are tested and audited, and election judges are constantly trained on how to use the machines, he said.
Rosemary Rodriguez, chairwoman of the Election Commission, the federal agency that oversees the $3 billion federal allotment, said most of the reported problems with the electronic machines have to do with management-type issues, including machine setup, ballot design and failure to clear votes cast during accuracy tests.
She expects most states will eventually go to the paper ballot system, which is a paper ballot scanned electronically.
More jurisdictions across the country are opting for the paper ballot system, Rodriguez said.
It is unlikely Utah will take up the paper ballot system, said Thad Hall, associate professor of political science at the University of Utah.
Utah hasn't had problems because "the counties have done a good job in planning the implementation" of the electronic voting system, he said.
According to the Help America Vote Act Funds 2008 report, Utah spent 100 percent of the $25.3 million in federal funds allocated to it on new voting machines, training and voter registration databases.
Add Your Comment
Loretta,
Thank you for covering this issue. Please continue to research and cover it.
Your article, however, errs by stating that: "Some of the electronic voting machines have problems, including creating conflicts with antivirus software that caused hundreds of votes to be dropped as they were uploaded to tallying services, according to news stories."
This virus software problem *was* the excuse that Utah's voting machine company Diebold/Premier first used to excuse its software flaw, but Diebold/Premier (upon pressure by the Ohio Secretary of State) has now admitted that it was a Diebold/Premier software bug that caused the vote counts from entire touchscreen memory cards to fail to be included in its final reported tallies.
Here are some recent articles on the subject (top one perhaps the best):
Warning on voting machines reveals oversight failure
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/greg_gordon/story/50485.html
E-voting outfit confesses vote-dropping software bug Ten Years Later
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/26/decade_old_evoting_error/
Diebold/Premier 'fesses lost OH votes
http://blogs.computerworld.com/diebold_premier_fesses_lost_oh_votes
Republican computer expert re need to have audited paper ballots
http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/2008/08/republican-computer-expert-re-need-to.html
BTW, keeping the machines locked up securely can do *nothing whatsoever* to keep Utah's election results from being electronically manipulated in any of a dozen or more ways because inserting vote rigging software could be done undetectably under the nose of even honest diligent election officials during the normal course of inserting memory cards, doing normal upgrades or maintenance or ballot programming, or could be done prior to shipping Utah memory cards or machines from the vendor; and there are many easy ways to undetectably rig elections using Utah's Diebold/Premier voting machines without even corrupting the software - with only a minute's access to the central tabulator. The only way to ensure accurate vote counts would be to do valid post-election manual audits - something Utah unfortunately is not doing, or it would have caught the Diebold central tabulator errors a long time ago.
Please question Utah election officials by asking them what they plan to do to make sure that Utah's election results are accurate, given the known inaccuracy and security flaws of Utah's Diebold/Premier voting machines.
Thad Hall is *not* a reliable source for accurate information. Hall's unfounded opinions in support of paperless voting systems and electronic balloting have been rebutted by experts on electronic voting in these documents:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1367
http://accurate-voting.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/risk-eval-final.pdf
http://www.josephhall.org/nqb2/index.php/2008/08/16/nakedeval
http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf
The *real* reason he can make that Thad Hall can indisputably make the unsupportable claim that "Utah hasn't had problems..." is because Utah's election procedures are so secretive that no evidence can come to light of any possible election integrity problems. Please see http://utahcountvotes.org/legislature/UTLegislativeElectionReformSummary.pdf
See http://Utahcountvotes.org for more info.
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