With just nine weeks before the state’s Aug. 8 primary election, concern is growing about how Coloradans will cast their ballots – and how their votes will be counted and verified. Sadly, there’s plenty of room for skepticism.
Many counties have been forced to buy new electronic machines to comply with federal and state laws, and they haven’t had enough time to install, test and train election officials. Some 23 counties still don’t have the machines in hand. Now, a lawsuit is alleging that the new machines are unreliable, inaccessible to handicapped voters and vulnerable to security breaches. Election officials and voting machine vendors say the problems are exaggerated, but they can’t back up their optimism with any successful test results.
Whatever the case, the court needs to act quickly so county clerks can get on with preparing for the elections, whether with machines or paper ballots.
After the 2000 presidential election snafus that introduced the world to hanging chads, Congress moved to replace paper ballots with electronic voting machines. The Colorado legislature also passed a bill requiring that all new voting machines contain verifiable paper backup records. Secretary of State Gigi Dennis certified four voting machines in February and March, and counties have rushed to purchase them in time for the Aug. 8 primary and the Nov. 7 general elections.
The machines certified for the 2006 elections are Sequoia Voting Systems, Diebold, ES&S and Hart Intercivic. Dennis said her office used a “very stringent certification process.”
The lawsuit filed last Thursday by a nonpartisan voter group would block nine counties and the state from using electronic voting machines. One of the lawyers who filed the suit said the documents were “produced in such a chaotic incomprehensible manner that it was impossible to tell what testing had been done.”
Already there have been security hiccups with Diebold’s touch-screen electronic voting machines in Pennsylvania and California, which prompted several counties in California to switch to printed ballots with optical scanners for today’s primary there. Other states have filed lawsuits to block their use. Lawyers in the Colorado case cited widespread problems, one of the worst being that the touch screens can cause vote switching, where the voter chooses one candidate but the machine records a vote for another candidate.
Spokeswoman Dana Williams of the secretary of state’s office said Colorado’s elections will be protected if voters check the printout on the machines before they hit the button to cast their votes to make sure the paper matches the electronic votes. (And, by the way, voters cannot take the printout with them.)
Colorado has many critical races this year, and the last thing anyone wants to see is a disputed result. If there are problems, we need to know in time to take steps for the fall elections.
