A Survey of Voting Systems

A recent New Times Article about computerized voting systems follows:

December 17, 2000, Sunday  Money and Business/Financial Desk 	 <<...>>

BUSINESS; Armed to Send Chads Into Voting Oblivion 

				By JOHN HENDREN 
				BY the time Samual R. Shoup finished
tinkering with the voting machine he began assembling in a Philadelphia
basement in 1895, he had built a family business that endured nearly a
century. 
				Then, in 1992, financial troubles forced
Ransom F. Shoup II, the founder's grandson, to stop making a new generation
of computerized voting machines and to turn the business into a parts and
service shop. His predicament lay largely in the 100,000 lever-operated
machines that the company had sold from the turn of the century to the
Carter administration: They still worked. Half were in use this Nov. 7, and
local governments were happy to have them. 

				A revitalizing jolt from Florida changed
that. The 2000 presidential election left voting equipment makers with a
black eye visible from Tallahassee to Tibet. And now, as Congress, state
legislatures and chagrined election officials consider updating the
geriatric machinery of democracy, an unprecedented opportunity awaits Shoup
Voting Solutions and other voting-equipment makers. 
				Local governments had little incentive to
replace their antiquated machines for decades, until the disputed ballots of
Florida exposed their weaknesses. 
				''I guess our timing is just right,'' said
Mr. Shoup, who as the company's director of government relations has started
demonstrating a new Shoup touch-screen machine to municipal governments in
North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
''Our phones have been ringing off the hook.'' 
				It is too early to tally sales, but the
handful of small and mostly private manufacturers that dominate the industry
report a surge of inquiries. Many are from local election officers who
oversee punch-card and lever machines and from state lawmakers who want to
replace a patchwork of county-selected voting devices with a uniform system.

				''Normally counties don't call a vendor.
It's the other way around,'' said Larry Ensminger, a vice president for
corporate development at Global Election Systems, based in McKinney, Tex. He
said his company had heard from election officials in Florida, Texas,
Washington and elsewhere. ''This is kind of a unique situation.'' 
				Last year Diversified Dynamics was looking
for a company to make its computerized voting machine. Now the company,
based in Richmond, Va., is fielding cold calls from would-be partners, said
Thomas G. Davis, the founder. More than 50 local governments have asked
about the system since the election. The product manager, William Akers, has
logged thousands of miles over the last month, showing a prototype to local
election officials along the mid-Atlantic coast. 
				''It's an industry that nobody cares about
-- until something happens,'' Mr. Akers said. ''My biggest concern is we
won't be able to get enough'' machines to meet demand. 
				Voting-machine makers are receiving
unsolicited help from the federal, state and local officials whose careers
are decided on the Republic's creaking gears and levers. Among the states
considering new laws governing voting machines are California, Connecticut,
Illinois, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Washington. 
				Wisconsin banned punch-card voting systems
on Nov. 29, and the Speaker of the California Assembly, Robert Hertzberg,
wants to spend $300 million to upgrade voting machines in his state, the
nation's most populous. In Michigan, Secretary of State Candice Miller wants
the same machine in every voting booth. 
				LOCAL county commissioners are calling
experts like Kimball Brace, a consultant at Election Data Services, based in
Washington. A task force of the National Association of State Election
Directors met in early December to consider what advice to give local
governments. 
				''Nobody wants to be the next Palm Beach,''
said Mr. Brace, who testified in Florida's Leon County Circuit Court in Vice
President Al Gore's challenge of the election results. 
				Americans have quibbled over voting methods
since landowners in the 13 colonies first spoke their candidates' names to
an election officer. By 1888, voters were marking their first secret
ballots. Like voice votes, the paper ballots still used by 1 percent of
voters are vulnerable to misreadings or mischief. 
				The modern voting machine industry was born
in 1869, when Thomas A. Edison patented a mechanical device intended for
members of Congress. In 1892, Lockport, N.Y., held the first public election
using a lever-operated machine, made by a Rochester safemaker, Jacob H.
Myers, according to Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment. Sequoia inherited the
company that Myers created in 1895 to ''protect mechanically the voter from
rascaldom.'' 
				A CENTURY later, the rascaldom and
error-prone systems persist. The counties and municipalities that oversee
elections in the United States have patched together a quilt of varied
voting systems. Each has problems. The most-often reviled culprit in the
2000 election was the punch-card ballot used by one in three voters. Voters
pick candidates by poking out pencil-point sized holes -- or chads, in
election parlance -- in the ballot. 
				Any system can fail, but experts say the
relatively cheap punch-card systems tend to render more votes uncountable.
''It took me twice to make sure I got through the chad completely,'' said
Deborah Director, 28, a speech pathologist in Boca Raton, Fla. ''I heard
lots of people complaining that they didn't know if they voted for the right
person.'' 
				Twenty-seven percent of voters fill in the
dots on ballot cards that are counted by an optical scanning machine, the
way high school multiple-choice tests are scored. But these can also cause
voters to unwittingly nullify their ballots. An errant pen stroke picked up
by the scanner makes it appear the voter chose too many candidates, called
overvoting. In some cases, pen marks fail to show up on the scanner. 
				The lever-operated machines once made by
companies like Shoup and Sequoia Pacific are still used by 18 percent of
American voters. Voters pull a lever next to the candidate's name and the
machine counts how many times each lever is pushed. The machine bars
overvoting, but if the levers break, replacement parts are often
unavailable. And the machine leaves no audit trail. 
				Voting-machine makers are just beginning to
sell 21st-century touch-screen and automated teller-style machines they
consider ''Floridaproof.'' Their challenge is to persuade the nation's
10,000 local election jurisdictions to buy the latest -- and priciest --
machines. 
				Shoup plans to start selling the Cadillac of
voting machines next year. The touch-screen SVS system, which costs $4,000
to $5,000 each, fits into a suitcase, prevents overvoting and confirms votes
with an X next to the candidate's name on a large color screen. A final page
lets voters confirm or change the slate of candidates they have selected. 
				Blind voters use the Shoup system by
listening to verbal prompts through headphones and touching a corner of the
screen to choose candidates. The cost, however, could give some county
officials sticker shock. The company recommends one machine for 500 to 700
voters. For Palm Beach County, where 462,644 citizens cast ballots this
year, the machines would cost $2.6 million to $4.6 million. 
				''If you're a county commissioner and the
choice is to pave the streets or put a new wing on the public hospital or
buy a new voting system, most of the time the new voting system loses,''
said Doug Lewis, head of the Election Center, a nonprofit training and
research group based in Houston. 
				With that in mind, Shoup will lease the
machines and may offer up to $1,000 for trade-ins of the company's circa
1982 electronic machines. 
				Diversified Dynamics, meanwhile, is
preparing to sell the Chevrolet of computer voting systems. The A.T.M.-style
device weighs 10 1/2 pounds, uses soft buttons to the side of the monochrome
screen, fits in a metal briefcase and sells for $1,500. 
				''This machine is ugly,'' the company's Mr.
Akers acknowleged, ''but economical. Bridges and roads buy votes. Voting
machines don't.'' 
				To use this machine, a voter first receives
a credit card-sized smart card from the polling place and slides it into a
reader. The card, which carries a magnetic strip with data, tells the
machine which ballot to pull up. If the voter overvotes, a warning pops up
saying, ''You are trying to enter more votes than this contest allows.'' The
brains of the computer lie in the removable programming card that the
manufacturer can update via e-mail messages. The machine also has a
politically connected pitchman: its chairman, L. Douglas Wilder, is a former
governor of Virginia. 
				Of course, electronic systems have critics,
too. Some fear clever programming could alter outcomes. Manufacturers say
trial runs and limiting access to programming prevent that. Like lever
machines, there are no ballots for an audit trail, although the machines can
print out each voter's electronic ballot. 
				Some lawmakers appear willing to make the
leap. In Connecticut, Susan Bysiewicz, the secretary of state, has said her
office had considered replacing Roosevelt-era lever machines with optical
scan technology, but now leans toward touch-screens after Florida's
problems. 
				Either way, Global Election Systems may
gain. The company is hedging its bets. It sells a touch-screen system,
already in limited use in seven states, for $3,200 to $3,600, and a
decade-old optical scanning system for $5,700. Counties need only one
optical scanner for each precinct, compared with several computerized
systems. 
				OTHER manufacturers, including the MicroVote
Corporation of Indianapolis and Election Systems and Software of Omaha, have
developed competing computerized systems. 
				''The fight out there is between the A.T.M.
machines, and the optical scans,'' said Christopher Thomas, director of
elections in Michigan, where 3,000 out of 5,500 precincts use optical scan
systems. ''All these cities and townships are going, 'Jeez, $5,000 versus
$20,000 per precinct?' If we did nothing we would probably be at 85 percent
optical scan within the next two to four years.'' 
				The District of Columbia Board of Elections
plans a $1 million upgrade of its punch card system by putting a Sequoia
Pacific optical scanner in all 160 precincts. 
				The Connecticut legislature's nonpartisan
research office found that optical scan systems were no cheaper than
touch-screens over time, when paper ballots and other costs were considered.
That offers little allure to Michigan, where local municipalities buy the
machines and counties buy the ballots. Even optical scans would be a
modernization in states like Washington, where 16 of 39 counties still use
punch cards. 
				Whether rising interest in the products of
an industry that usually draws about as much attention as attic insulation
will translate into an explosion of new orders remains to be seen. Sluggish
growth has been part of the reason the industry has been dominated by
comparatively small private companies. Even the industry's only major public
company, Global Election Systems, had sales of only $20.2 million last year.
Major makers like General Dynamics and Rockwell International have entered
and left the market. 
				Florida's experience has taught election
directors caution. They often take three to five years to consider new
systems, and even then see little reward in taking risks. 
				While many have been impressed by the
Diversified Dynamics machine, which has been approved by an independent
testing regimen created by the Federal Election Commission, ''nobody wants
to be the first,'' Mr. Akers said. 
				To governments that are sanguine about their
aging systems or plan a partial upgrade, Richard Caruso, Shoup's chief
executive, invokes Florida in a warning likely to be repeated in sales
pitches in coming months: ''That could have happened in any state in the
country.'' 


-- 
TNET Mail-To-News Gateway Version - 1.6
For information about this gateway email programs@tnet.com