Booth Ache

To avoid scandal, legislators will reintroduce bills to safeguard elections.


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Published: Oct 18, 2006

Elections

Will this be the last election Pennsyl-vanians have to worry about whether their votes actually counted?

As many states have rushed to upgrade election equipment — a prerequisite to get federal aid to buy to gear was meeting a 2006 deadline — Pennsylvania sits in the minority that doesn't require a paper backup for new electronic machines. Today, 27 states require such documentation so voters can check for accuracy and election officials can use them for recounts.

Last year, bills introduced in the state House and Senate would have required counties to use electronic machines that employed so-called voter-verified paper audit trails. Both failed to receive committee hearings and are expected to die when the current legislative session ends in November. According to bill co-sponsor Delaware County Republican state Sen. Edwin Erickson, lawmakers didn't want to complicate the transition as counties struggled to get new machines operable before last May's primary.

"We had enough difficulty in the counties trying to get the systems in place so we would meet the guidelines of the federal legislation, without them laying another layer on top of it," said Erickson. After November, he added, the state has "the luxury" of trying to improve the system.

For his part, state Rep. Dan Frankel, an Allegheny County Democrat who introduced the House bill, expects the pay-raise revolt to spell a different outcome and plans to reintroduce it since there's evidence (read: Florida and Ohio) that machines without backup can cause major problems. State Rep. Paul Clymer, a Bucks Country Republican and chair of the State Government Committee, predicted hearings would likely be held this time.

"A lot of people were skeptical," Frankel said. "Some people thought it was a bunch of conspiracy theorists, but the more information we get, we see that there are some real problems with electronic voting machines. I think the tide is turning against the skeptics."

The use of electronic voting machines has been encouraged by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which promised federal aid to states that replaced lever and punch-card systems. After the federal government tested and approved electronic systems, states ran their own tests. After testing, Pennsylvania officials tapped machines from seven manufacturers. Counties were free to choose from the list; models from six manufacturers are currently in use. (About a dozen of the state's 67 counties, not including Philadelphia, use machines with vote counts that can be verified by a paper trail.)

The new machines were tested in all but one county during the May 16 primary. State officials said that most were reliable, but acknowledged some problems. In Philadelphia, which has been using the machines since 2002, some failed to work after paper rolls were improperly loaded. Still, state officials say they are confident their machines will produce accurate results.

"No system is foolproof," said Harry VanSickle, commissioner of the Bureau of Commissions, Elections and Legislation, which oversaw machine certification. "[Problems] happen in each election, but hopefully they are kept to a minimum."

Still, some remain concerned. Voting activists point to incidents like a June primary in Pottawattamie County, Iowa, where faulty programming resulted in a miscount (later corrected by a recount of paper ballots), and a study of a May primary in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, that showed the vote totals on some machines' electronic backup systems did not match. The machines studied in that survey, Diebold's AccuVote TSV, are being used in 16 Pennsylvania counties.

"You don't need a catastrophe" to affect an election, said Steven Hertzberg, project director of the Election Science Institute, a San Francisco-based nonpartisan group. "You just need a regular election day with regular people running it and things will go wrong."

As attention shifts towards a Santorum/Casey contest that's drawn national attention, Pollworkers for Democracy is helping recruit poll workers to fill empty positions across the country. More than 3,000 have been recruited, including close to 300 in Pennsylvania and 73 in Philadelphia, according to state coordinator Marybeth Kuznik.

The Philadelphia-based Vote Count Protection Project is also working with a consultant to conduct exit polling in some 20 precincts to check whether predictions match outcomes. They also plan on running a computer analysis looking for abnormal patterns.

The real struggle will occur after November, when legislators and advocates again push for mandatory backup systems to, in their view, avoid a potential crisis of confidence.

"Any time you have a question in the back of a mind of the voter whether their vote is going to count or not," Frankel said, "I think you need to address it."

(b_finkelstein@citypaper.net)