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The Computer Ate My Vote 


By Kim Zetter  |   Also by this reporter Page 1 of 1

02:00 AM Feb. 16, 2004 PT

Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream fame will be dishing a little political activism with his ice cream tomorrow in Washington, D.C., when he calls on secretaries of state throughout the country to secure electronic voting machines.

The Computer Ate My Vote campaign, which raised $100,000 in its first two days of fundraising last week, aims to convince other states to follow the lead of California. In December, California mandated that e-vote machines used in the state must produce a voter-verified paper trail by July 2006. Shortly thereafter, Nevada and Washington state followed suit.

The states made their move in response to growing concern about the security of e-voting machines. Three separate groups of computer scientists have released reports in the last year detailing serious security flaws in the system of at least one e-voting manufacturer.

Cohen's campaign does have an apt name. In 2002 in North Carolina, voting officials discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems & Software had lost 436 absentee votes. State officials only caught the error by luck because the devices had no auditing mechanism. The voters had to cast their ballots again.

Cohen is taking his message to the annual conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State, who meet tomorrow at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the capitol.

The group follows on the heels of VerifiedVoting.org, which was launched by Stanford computer scientist David Dill about a year ago. The organization wants to garner grassroots support for making a paper audit trail part of the e-vote process and pressure legislators to mandate it. Verified launched its own fundraising campaign last week. Over a thousand computer scientists, academics, lawyers, elected officials and regular citizens have signed the group's resolution to require a voter paper trail.

Cohen's "The Computer Ate My Vote" campaign is being run by TrueMajority, an online activist organization that he launched in June 2002, to provide a political outlet for people who are concerned about justice issues and environmental sustainability.

The nonprofit, non-partisan organization has 400,000 members, though Cohen believes the group's goals are shared by more than 50 million Americans. The group sends e-mail alerts to members when issues arise that concern them and organizes fax campaigns to congressional representatives.

The group is focusing on e-voting regulations at the state level because a bill before U.S. Congress to mandate a voter-verified paper trail has stalled.

Representative Rush Holt's (D-New Jersey) HR 2239, also known as the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, would have amended the Help America Vote Act of 2002, or HAVA, to require electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail of voter receipts. The receipts would allow voters to verify that a machine recorded their ballot correctly and would be used if a recount were necessary. The receipt would scroll behind a glass partition so voters couldn't take it home or touch it.

The bill currently has 118 sponsors, but it is stuck in the House.

Concern about e-voting is growing as states scramble to upgrade voting systems in order to obtain the $3.9 billion in federal matching funds granted by HAVA for the purpose.

In California's recall election last year, almost 10 percent of voters cast their ballots on e-voting machines. Some 28 percent of voters in the state are expected to use paperless electronic touch-screen machines this year. And about 75 percent of voters nationwide will likely cast ballots electronically by 2010.

Cohen's group is focusing on secretaries of state because they generally have the authority to certify election systems in their states.

"Three of them have taken the step to safeguard their voters," said Duane Peterson, an organizer with TrueMajority. "We're calling on the rest to similarly protect theirs."

Accompanying Cohen on Tuesday will be the secretaries of state from Washington and Vermont, as well as Rice University computer scientists Dan Wallach who co-authored one of the first reports that detailed security problems with the Diebold Election Systems voting system.

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