Voting machines sore point for losers

Some of the losing candidates, who asked Whitley County Clerk Tom Rains Monday for a recanvass of the election results, say there are problems with the voting machines used in last week’s election, but a state election official says they are good machines, including one that has been in use around the state for nearly 20 years.
Linda Chinn Schutz, who lost the race for circuit clerk by two votes six years ago and by 799 votes last Tuesday, said she was asking for the recanvass because she feels the public needs to know what kind of voting machines Whitley County is using.
“We have a problem with the machines. I think there are 93 or 94 counties in the state that have those machines,” Schutz said.
“There is not a paper to back it up. Nothing. We just have the suspicion that maybe something was tampered with. The purpose of the recanvass is to go in and see what happened.”
Through a grant, Whitley County purchased new E-slate voting machines this year, which are handicap accessible for disabled voters, but can be used by anyone. The county also uses the ELECTronic 1242 voting machine, which were purchased four years ago.
The 40 electronic 1242 machines replaced the county’s 50-year-old level voting machines, which had long since been discontinued and which the county was having trouble getting replacement parts for.
After the election, Schutz said she did some research at www.verifiedvoting.org and learned that there are some problems with Direct Recording Electronic voting machines, such as those used in Whitley County, because most don’t have any type of physical paper trail to verify how voters cast their ballots.
Verifiedvoting.org describes itself as a nonprofit organization championing reliable and publicly verifiable elections. The organization supports a requirement for voter-verified paper ballots on electronic machines allowing voters to inspect individual permanent records of their ballots and election officials to conduct meaningful recounts as needed, it writes on its website.
“The risks of paperless DRE machines are large,” the website writes on its list of frequently asked questions. “Programming errors are an inevitable fact of life given current technology. With these paperless DRE machines, there is nothing that can stop a determined group from achieving large-scale election theft.
“We see no reason why major problems will not occur, including obviously messed up elections, elections of incorrect candidates, and, certainly, disillusioned and disenfranchised voters.”
The website lists specific problems with the ELECTronic 1242 machines that have occurred elsewhere, including:
• November 2003 in Tennessee – A poll worker in Rutherford County inadvertently cast a ballot during a demonstration that may have resulted in a tie for a town council position.
• October 2001 in Tennessee – A voting machine in Knox County showed an error code that corresponded to a discrepancy between internally stored vote tables, and local officials could not retrieve the data, or have the machine print out the results. A technician with the company that makes the machine was able to crosscheck the internal memory tables and provide results.
• November 2000 in Tennessee – About 7 percent of the member cartridges in Knox County were temporarily unreadable and three cartridges remained unreadable. There were also problems with transmitting precinct-by-precinct vote totals.
• November 2000 in Tennessee – In Fayette County, problems including double counting of some ballots, were resolved after borrowing a tabulation machine from a neighboring county.
Les Fugate, Director of Communications for the Kentucky Board of Elections, noted the 1242 machines have been used in Kentucky since the mid-1980s, and have been reliable machines.
“We’ve seen no evidence of problems,” he said.

Local voting complaints
Several candidates say they received numerous calls from people last week, who told them that they pressed the button to cast the ballot for one candidate, and that the light next to another candidate’s name lit up instead.
For instance, someone pressed the button by H.D. Moses name on a voting machine, but that the light beside Lawrence Hodge’s name lit up.
Schutz declined to go into specifics about how many people she has spoken to that reported problems voting, but did say that some of the candidates have spoken with an attorney they are “talking to.”
On the new E-slate voting machines, Fugate said it would be very easy to notice if there was a problem with casting a vote for one candidate and having the machine register the vote for another candidate.
“There is a page that comes up at the end that says this is who you intend to vote for, press the cast now button basically,” Fugate noted. “You would know very quickly whether you were voting for someone, who you did not intend to. On the new machines I would find that pretty difficult to believe. The voter would really have to be not taking the time to look over the ballot if that had been otherwise.”
As for the county’s ELECTronic 1242 voting machines, Fugate said he hasn’t heard any specific references to problems voters have had pressing one candidate’s name, and having the voting indicator light coming on for another candidate outside of Whitley County during this election cycle.
“If it did occur, then as a voter, you would notice it the minute you did it,” Fugate said. “Those voters would see it immediately, and have the opportunity to tell someone, ‘Hey, this isn’t working properly.’ You could see it right there on sight. Our office has not specifically heard of any situation where someone has said that to any of the precinct officers.
“This isn’t to say that it didn’t occur, but we have not heard of any situations. When the vendors went out with the clerk and said, ‘We don’t see any evidence of this,’ that certainly made our office feel better about the situation.”
Fugate said this is the second full election cycle he has been with the office, and that he would think if there was a problem of this nature, then with the high turnout in the last presidential race he would expect to hear reports about something like that.
“We certainly did not hear anything similar to that,” he added.