[Page 5: Dysfunctional Performance: The U.S. Voting Machine Debacle and the Machinery of Democracy]

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Electronic Voting Machines: The Debate

On July 28th, 2004, the front page headline of The New York Times read, "Lost Record of Vote In '02 Florida Race Raises '04 Concerns. (13)" The Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizens group trying to investigate voting machine irregularities, requested to see records from the first election in their county that relied on electronic voting machines. Officials of the manufacturer of the touch-screen machines, Election Systems and Software, were forced to concede what they had earlier presented as unthinkable: all the records from the 2002 Democratic primary election were erased following two unforeseen computer crashes that occurred just months after the election. When, two days later, the data miraculously reappeared on a disc in an election official's desk, it was hard to know which truth would be more astounding: that the machine manufacturers and election officials had (illegally) recreated the lost data or that they could have so carelessly misplaced it. When asked about the incident, Linda Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer who is chair of the Election Reform Coalition, had this to say: "This shows that unless we do something now—or it may very well be too late—Florida is headed toward being the next Florida." (14)

This mishap is far from an isolated incident. Similar mishaps have been reported across the country in election after election that has relied on electronic voting machine technology. In November of 2003 in one county in Virginia, all the electronic voting machines stalled, jammed, and shut down when 953 precincts called in their tallies simultaneously (15) . In March 2004 an improperly calibrated mark-sense scanner overlooked 6,692 absentee ballots (16) . In Riverside County, CA the Registrar of Voters' office was the scene of possible criminal activity when technicians from Sequoia, one of the nation's largest manufacturers of electronic voting machines, apparently interrupted the election to tamper with the machines' software (17) . None of these voting machines was equipped with a paper back-up system and all of them were programmed with proprietary code developed with a Microsoft-based operating system.