The Coming Ballot Meltdown

The Nation: Ohio Election Chaos A Harbinger Of Things To Come

(The Nation) 
The technicalities of the voting process were already a huge problem in 2004, when everything from the updating of voter registration lists to the number of voting machines made available in each precinct to the opening hours of polling stations was subject to undue political influence and rank bureaucratic incompetence, prompting an avalanche of complaints. (Blackwell's office rejected every last one of them.) That election, though, was held predominantly with the old machinery, which may have lost an unacceptable number of honestly cast votes but at least had the virtue of familiarity. Now the advent of e-voting has opened up a whole new world of pain for election officials and their woefully undertrained precinct volunteers. The first big test of the new machines, in the May primary election, resulted in a multiplicity of problems, especially in Cuyahoga County in and around Cleveland, where poll workers lost seventy memory cards recording the votes from electronic touch-screen terminals (the votes had to be retrieved through back-up data systems inside the terminals) and more than 15,000 paper absentee ballots had to be counted by hand, delaying the results by six days, because of a system failure in the automated tabulation system. And that was on a turnout rate of only 23 percent.

"Our turnout in the fall is bound to be over 50 percent," Rosenfield said. "That'll include a lot of less sophisticated voters struggling with new machines and new rules. The poll workers still won't be trained well enough. The boards won't know how to get the equipment ready.... The secretary of state's office isn't providing resources to the counties — no money to attend training sessions, no expertise to answer questions or provide technical support.... We've made this so complex, I'm not sure we're capable of administering it."

The story of Ohio's adoption of new voting technology and the mess it is creating is in many ways typical of the overhasty and shockingly underregulated rush across the country to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA). But Ohio has also followed its own peculiar trajectory, teaching us above all how difficult it is to prevent the elemental viciousness of two-party politics from compromising the integrity and safety of our voting systems.

Back in 2003 Ohio was admirably skeptical about the lure of computer voting — even though the parent company of Diebold Election Systems was based in Ohio and its chief executive, Wally O'Dell, was a prominent campaign contributor to the state and national Republican Party. O'Dell notoriously wrote a fundraising letter in August 2003 declaring himself "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." If this was some dark hint that Diebold intended to collude with the Republicans in stealing the 2004 election — something that, in retrospect, seems a lot more doubtful than many voting rights activists feared at the time — Ohio's Republican establishment was not especially inclined to play ball. The source code for Diebold's AccuVote-TS touch-screen system had been left lying around on an open Internet site and was scrutinized by a team of top-flight computer scientists from Rice and Johns Hopkins universities, who found it to be riddled with security flaws and basic programming errors. Ken Blackwell decided to order a comprehensive technical review of all touch-screen voting systems and subsequently decided to postpone a major statewide buy of electronic machines until after the 2004 election. The Republican-dominated state legislature, meanwhile, proved remarkably receptive to arguments in favor of fitting the touch screens with a voter-verified paper audit trail so their results could be independently verified in a close or contested election. A state law mandating a paper trail was passed in early 2004.

That cautious, consensus-oriented approach evaporated, however, in the heat of the 2004 campaign season. A state planning committee on HAVA implementation that had met several times was never invited to convene again, despite a barrage of new questions raised across the country about the integrity of electronic touch-screen and tabulation systems being sold by Diebold and its principal rivals, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Right after the 2004 election, Governor Taft signed a law increasing the limit on campaign contributions by individuals or political action committees from $2,500 to $10,000 — a move widely seen as benefiting Republicans more than Democrats. Around the same time, Blackwell compounded the conflict-of-interest issue by buying himself just under $10,000 of Diebold stock. (He later sold, at a loss, after his shareholding became public.) For several months last year and stretching into this, the Republican state legislature expended its energies on mandating an ID requirement at polling stations. At best this was an unnecessary solution to a nonexistent problem, since there was no evidence of significant ballot fraud at the individual voter level; at worst it was another baldly partisan maneuver, because the 12 percent of the adult population without driver's licenses, the most readily available form of government ID, tend to be poor, elderly or both, and thus likely to lean Democrat.