Hack the Vote?

The potential perils of electronic voting systems are bedeviling state officials as a Jan. 1 deadline approaches for complying with standards for the machines' reliability.

Across the country, officials are trying multiple methods to ensure that touch-screen voting machines can record and count votes without falling prey to software bugs, hackers, malicious insiders or other ills.

These are not theoretical problems -- in some states they have led to lost or miscounted votes.

One of the biggest concerns -- the frequent inability of computerized ballots to produce a written receipt of a vote -- has been addressed or is being tackled in most states.

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In North Carolina, more stringent requirements -- which include placing the machines' software code in escrow for examination in case of a problem -- have led one supplier, Diebold Inc., to say it will withdraw from the state, where about 20 counties use Diebold voting machines.

A different type of showdown is brewing in California, where Secretary of State Bruce McPherson says he might force makers of the machines to prove their systems can withstand attacks from a hacker. One such test on a Diebold system -- Diebold machines were blamed for voting disruptions in a 2004 California primary -- is planned.

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Similarly, elections officials in Franklin County, Ohio -- where older voting machines gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a preliminary count in 2004 -- recently asked computer experts to test newly purchased touch-screen voting machines from Election Systems and Software Inc.

Such designated hack attempts might be a flawed approach, because a failure proves only that a particular hacker could not break into a machine under certain conditions. That is not the same as opening things up to a broader group of researchers, as software developers sometimes do. Many critics of touch-screen election computers argue that the software should be publicly examined to make sure vote tampering could not occur.

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Since then, largely because of warnings from computer security experts and grass-roots activism, many states have began requiring the machines to produce paper receipts that voters can examine. At least 25 states have such rules and 14 more have requirements pending, according to the Verified Voting Foundation.

"There's a long way to go -- making our elections truly trustworthy in this country is a multifaceted problem," said David L. Dill, a Stanford University computer scientist and founder of the foundation. But he added that he expected a "much better situation in 2006" and noted that improving electronic voting has become "a delightfully nonpartisan issue."

Imagine that, the "sore losers" of past elections as the preservers of the most basic American 'right': one person, one vote.

Just one question. Why not paper trails?