ShareThisAn editorial / By Dale McFeatters
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Two years after the 2000 Florida vote count debacle Congress passed the Help America Vote Act to insure that the embarrassment of hanging chads never returned by replacing paper ballots with electronic voting.
Next Tuesday's election is the first real nationwide test of HAVA because somewhere around 80 percent to 90 percent of the vote will be cast or counted electronically through such devices as optical scanners and touch-screen voting. One-third of the nations precincts will be doing so for the first time.
And Tuesday is, as we have been endlessly but correctly lectured, a vital election, with control of both houses of Congress at stake in races that are tossups.
But HAVA does not appear to be succeeding in its most important goal: Assuring the voters that their votes have been cast accurately and counted fairly.
Primaries in several states have been marred by glitches, both human and electronic, and computer experts insist the systems are vulnerable to hacking. And then there is a factor that HAVA didn't anticipate: The difficulty of training enough poll workers, particularly election judges, in the intricacies of electronic voting. And the problem is exacerbated by the fact that polling volunteers tend to be retirees with limited computer skills.
And it doesn't help that the third largest supplier of electronic voting equipment has asked the federal government to clear it of accusations that Venezuela's loopy Bush-hating dictator Hugo Chavez owns a hidden interest in the company.
Even where the federal government is directly involved in overseeing the voting there are questions. To make it easier for the U.S. military overseas to vote, the Pentagon has set up a system to expedite absentee ballots by e-mail and fax. But there, too, critics say the system is vulnerable to tampering and identity theft. One computer scientist told The Washington Post the system "is about as dangerous as you can get."
Although HAVA doesn't affect the Pentagon, the military voting system does raise the all-important issues of accurate voting and a fair count.
The new Congress may be unlikely to question the system that voted it into office, but sufficient questions remain about electronic voting to warrant the lawmakers revisiting HAVA. Come Wednesday morning, those paper ballots may not look so bad.
