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| Author | Topic: Partisan goals undermine faith in vote machine |
| Harry Hagedorn |
posted 1/12/04 10:23 PM
Let me see if I understand correctly. The column "How safe is your vote?" (Opinion Commentary, Jan. 7), mentioned that the CEO of Diebold Election Systems has written in a letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." As has also been extensively reported, all elections in Maryland will soon be conducted on machines purchased from Diebold that leave no paper trail or any other means of verification of the vote and which run on software that nobody but a few employees of Diebold has ever seen. Yet in the same feature, the chairman of the Maryland State Board of Elections assures the public that these machines can be trusted. OK, there you lose me. The state is buying voting machines that run on software that we've never examined, from a company whose CEO is on record as being committed to delivering votes, and I'm supposed to trust the results? That's not going to happen. I've written enough software myself to know that this situation is nothing short of an obscenity. The state assures me that the machines have been "successful" in two elections in four counties and a host of Maryland cities. That's an interesting, but unsupportable, conclusion since these machines left no paper trail from which the validity of the results could have been determined; the evidence of success seems to be simply that the outcomes were uncontested. If you wish to be sure that your vote isn't going to be "delivered" in our coming elections using touch-screen machines, you have no choice but to use an absentee ballot. John Sorge Betterton No grounds to trust touch-screen voting Put simply, there is no scientific or factual basis for the assurances of Gilles W. Burger, chairman of the Maryland State Board of Elections, to Maryland's voters that our voting system is the most accurate ("How safe is your vote?" Opinion Commentary, Jan. 7). And despite his blind faith in the expensive and soon-to-be outdated Diebold Election Systems machines, voters will not be able to verify that any of their votes have been recorded accurately or whether they have been recorded at all. Why should voters expect Maryland's electronic voting system to operate flawlessly when no other electronic system in existence can make this claim? Software and hardware glitches are inherent to any computer system. Mr. Burger also erroneously claims that the multiple recording functions of Maryland's machines enable an electronic audit. This is analogous to a company making two sets of records of its financial transactions and then claiming you can perform an audit by comparing the two sets. Mr. Burger has no way of guaranteeing that the internally recorded ballot matches the image that the voter sees on the screen. Consequently, no viable independent audit or recount can occur with our present system unless a voter-verified paper ballot is added. Robert Ferraro Burtonsville The writer is director of the Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland. |
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