HOW THEY SEE IT Democracy on the cheap

By STEVEN HILL
and ROB RICHIE
KNIGHT-RIDDER TRIBUNE
After the 2000 presidential race, many Americans saw new voting technology as the obvious means to avoid the millions of votes lost due to voter error around the nation. After that botched election, Florida spent millions of dollars for new touch-screen voting equipment.
Yet this equipment had major problems in its debut in the 2002 gubernatorial elections. In the hotly contested Democratic primary, the touch-screen equipment used in Dade County, Fla., produced a higher rate of nonvotes that disproportionately hurt minority voters than the old punch-card equipment, according to the ACLU of Florida.
Now a burgeoning national movement questions the security of such equipment and calls for paper trails that will provide a voter-verifiable audit trail.
Important advantages
When made fully secure and publicly accountable, touch-screen voting offers important advantages. Take Brazil's experience. A country of 180 million people, with great diversity and vast stretches of rural territory, much like the United States, Brazil has a national touch-screen system. When voters select a candidate, they see the name, party and photo of the candidate to verify their vote. No overvotes, no undervotes, no confusing butterfly ballots. No disfranchisement of language minorities and voters with disabilities or low rates of literacy.
There's a simple reason the United States is playing catch-up to Brazil -- and most other nations -- when it comes to modernizing election administration. Under our decentralized election administration regime, we have a shockingly weak national commitment to fair and secure elections. In fact the main players in running elections are the more than 3,000 county election administrators scattered across the country.
With the 2002 Help America Vote Act, the federal government for the first time established some national election standards and provided some funds to states. But standards are weak, and funds available for only three years. There's little training for election administrators, and too often county election chiefs are selected based more on whom they know than training and experience. There's limited guidance to assist counties when they bargain with the equipment vendors.
The vendors themselves spark questions. Three companies dominate the field: Elections Systems and Software, Sequoia Pacific and Diebold. They are relatively small profit-making corporations, often cutting corners to make a buck, stretched beyond their capacities, strained by the myriad of state bodies certifying equipment, and all to quick to put aside public interest concerns if not spelled out in contracts. Their equipment isn't nearly as good as it could or should be.
Political connections
Vendors make up for these deficits through political connections. They typically hire former election regulators as their sales representatives. Besides the government-to-industry revolving door, they have been known to give big campaign contributions.
In fact there is no fire wall between the corporations who run elections and partisan politics. The CEO of Diebold, for example, attended strategy powwows with wealthy benefactors of George Bush and wrote in a fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" -- even as his company seeks to win Ohio's multimillion dollar contract for new equipment from the Republican-run state government.
The manufacture and selling of voting equipment shouldn't be just another business. There indeed is something special about our electoral infrastructure that cries out for a federal system with national standards and regulations. After Sept. 11, 2001, we moved to have federal workers monitoring airport security. But after election 2000, we did nothing comparable for our elections.
Imagine an alternative reality, in which the federal government used its immense resources to invest in developing voting technologies that were truly cutting edge and secure, with open source software, voter verified paper trails, national standards and the public interest incorporated without resistance. Imagine national voter registration lists that better assured clean lists and a big increase in the barely two-thirds of American adults now registered to vote.
But no, instead we are stuck with the current shadowy vendors and decentralized hodge-podge that lately have made U.S. democracy a laughingstock around the world. Call it democracy on the cheap. The debate over voter-verified paper trails is a window into a far bigger problem of decentralized elections that inevitably will lead to future debacles until corrected.
XSteven Hill is senior analyst for the Center for Voting and Democracy, and Rob Richie is executive director of the center in Washington, D.C. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.