Since the 2000 presidential election mess, we've checked in periodically on the vital issues of voter fraud, election reform and the rapid spread of electronic voting machines (see, most recently, our June 15, 2005, and April 15, 2005 issues). Critics have raised serious concerns about the safety of electronic voting; yet more and more states seem to be rushing to embrace this technology.

Battles over electronic voting have been raging recently at the state level, largely out of the view of major media. We asked the knowledgeable Warren Stewart to give our readers a primer on the troubles inherent in electronic voting and to catch us up on reform efforts still underway in several states. Stewart is the Director of Legislative Issues and Policy at VoteTrust USA, a non-partisan national organization that advocates for election integrity and e-voting reform.

he troubling truth about voting in America today is that a majority of the electorate casts their ballots on computers that run software that is hidden from public view and lacks any independent means of verification. The process by which our votes are cast and counted is controlled by private corporations to an extent that threatens the foundations of democracy.

Last September, the Government Accountability Office released a report on the security and reliability of electronic voting machines. The report, which detailed the findings of a nine-month study, said that "concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes." The GAO reported that it had confirmed instances of "weak security controls, system design flaws, inadequate system version control, inadequate security testing, incorrect system configuration, poor security management, and vague or incomplete voting system standards."

While acknowledging that efforts were under way to improve the situation, the report warned that "these actions are unlikely to have a significant effect in the 2006 federal election cycle." Not exactly reassuring.

And the situation has hardly improved in the months since. In many states, it is still unclear what kind of voting machines will be used in primaries only a few months away. Running elections has always been a daunting and largely unappreciated job performed by state and county officials. But the challenges they face in 2006 are unprecedented, and many have their fingers crossed hoping their experiments with voting technology will work out.

In the wake of the 2000 election debacle, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which authorized $3.8 billion to help states upgrade voting equipment and establish statewide voter registration databases. HAVA established the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which was given the task of developing guidelines to assist states in spending federal funds on voting systems and with establishing a new process for certifying voting equipment.

All this was supposed to have happened in time for the 2004 elections, but George W. Bush didn't nominate the EAC commissioners until the fall of 2003, and Congress appropriated just a fraction of the agency's intended budget in its first fiscal year. As a result, new guidelines were only released in December 2005 and plans for the new testing and certification process are just now taking shape.

With all the delays, almost every state applied for a waiver of the original 2004 deadline for HAVA compliance, until the first federal election in 2006. While some states long ago completed their voting system upgrades, many are still scrambling to meet the requirements.

A BOON FOR THE VOTING BIZ—HAVA marked the first time that the federal government had ever provided funding for the administration of elections, and it was recognized as an unprecedented sales opportunity for the voting industry. With such an opportunity unlikely to occur again, there was little incentive to develop "better" machines and every incentive to sell as many machines as possible, especially if those machines required expensive ongoing programming and maintenance. Voting machine manufacturers were eager to promote Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines, particularly the new "touch-screen" models, as the solution to all the problems ever faced by an election official. Few of those officials had the technological or financial resources to evaluate, independently, the merits of the industry's multimillion-dollar marketing campaign, and officials in many states erroneously believed that HAVA required them to replace all of their voting equipment with paperless DREs.