Super Tuesday: Groups say states face e-voting risks

Six U.S. states participating in Super Tuesday primary elections are at high risk for voting-machine malfunction or tampering because they don’t have paper backups, according to a report released by the Verified Voting Foundation and Common Cause.

Ed Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton University, added visuals to the report’s findings when he published a picture on his blog showing him standing next to unattended e-voting machines in New Jersey Sunday evening. The picture, and a second photo from Monday evening of unattended e-voting machines, was a repeat performance for Felten, who also published a picture of unattended machines during the 2006 election.

“It’s well known that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering if an attacker can get physical access to a machine before the election,” Felten, an e-voting critic, wrote on his blog Tuesday. “Most of the vendors, and a few election officials, claim that this isn’t a problem because the machines are well guarded so that no would-be attacker can get to them. Which would be mildly reassuring — if it were true.”

New Jersey was one of the states most at risk with the others being New York, Tennessee, Georgia, Delaware, and Arkansas, said the Common Cause/Verified Voting Foundation report. All of those states, except New York, use electronic voting machines without paper ballots in all or part of the state. New York has passed a paper record law but has not yet replaced lever machines used across most of the state, the groups said. Lever machines can malfunction and are subject to tampering, the groups said.

But e-voting advocates said the Common Cause/Verified Voting Foundation report exaggerates potential problems with electronic voting machines.

“In the history of the United States, there has never been a case of tampering with electronic voting equipment in an actual live election environment with all of the associated procedures and election personnel, either with voter verifiable paper trails or without,” said Michelle Shafer, vice president of communications and external affairs at e-voting machine vendor Sequoia Voting Systems. “Election administration is about the people, procedures and the technology, not just the technology itself.”

In many cases, states maintain individual electronic files of all votes cast, added David Beirne, executive director of trade group, the Election Technology Council. Many states also require logic and accuracy testing both before and after an election, and many e-voting machines have redundant memory mechanisms, he added.

“No voting system represents a high risk for the states that are using them,” he said. “The main objection from Verified Voting … is that the voter is not verifying a paper document in addition to the electronic record. The voter does verify the electronic record, and the election can be verified for its integrity through the use of the appropriate security procedures by local election officials.”

The report “reflects a series of perceptions which are not grounded in fact,” Beirne added.

But the high-risk states have no choice but to trust the information that the electronic machines spit out, said Pamela Smith, president of the Verified Voting Foundation. “The vote is what it is, or what the machine says it is,” she said. “There’s no way to do a recount.”

In addition, another five states — Alabama, Arizona, Massachusetts, Utah, and Oklahoma — use paper ballots along with their e-voting machines, but don’t require regular audits to check the electronic results, the groups said. Four states with primaries on Tuesday use voting machines but also require regular audits, and were listed as low-risk in the report. Those states were California, Connecticut, Illinois, and Missouri.

Twenty-four states hold presidential primaries or caucuses on Tuesday, but just 15 of them use electronic voting machines.