April 28, 2004

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Palo Alto computer scientist helps develop "public" voting system

by Karen Coleman

Fearing massive costs and flawed reliability of computerized-voting systems entering the market, Palo Altan Arthur Keller and some high-tech friends from around the country are developing a less expensive alternative.

Keller, 47, a computer scientist who holds a doctorate from Stanford University, hopes to put a chunk of California's multimillion-dollar election industry into the public domain -- at a fraction of the cost of corporate systems and with full safeguards against fraud or tampering.

Keller managed technology projects at Stanford until 1999. He now is a part-time professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and runs a consulting practice out of his Palo Alto home.

He is the vice president, chief operating officer and chief financial officer of the Open Voting Consortium, a not-for-profit membership organization created to improve public-election technology. The Granite Bay-based group has come up with a computer-integrated paper-ballot system its founders hope will set more rigorous standards as the nation moves into electronic voting.

Keller and other consortium members demonstrated the technology-- nothing more than an off-the-shelf computer, a monitor, a printer and some custom software -- for Santa Clara County officials on April 1. Keller said the system could be ready for market in time for the 2006 elections if adequate funding is found.

He said the costs of the system would be vastly less than commercial products because it would use existing off-the-shelf computers to do the relatively simple processes required. The system could even use refurbished "recycled" computers from among the many thousands that are retired each year by companies.

In a modern-day twist on the centuries-old practice of hand-marking votes on paper ballots, the Open Voting Consortium system generates numbered but otherwise anonymous printouts that can be read by both people and machine counters -- and can be used for audits or recounts in disputed races.

The system includes recorded audio instructions so vision-impaired voters can use headphones to vote in complete privacy.

He said he got involved with the consortium after founder Alan Dechert, a Sacramento software engineer, couldn't find enough support for an abstract study of voting technology.

"I said, 'I think it's time to build. The way to get something going is to build something,'" Keller said he told Dechert.

Because state and local governments are constantly upgrading their voting-technology requirements, voting technology is a potentially lucrative business niche that is hard to value because of the multiplicity of jurisdictions involved.

A spokesman for Santa Clara County's voting machine vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, put the contract for this county at "just under $19 million."

Sequoia representative Alfie Charles said the touch-screen voting machines cost $30,000 apiece.

He said the Open Voting Consortium approach "still has a ways to go" because it will have to meet a range of state and local regulations and remain free from malicious tampering.

"I would hope that people reviewing the code are reviewing it to make improvements and not to create any kind of problems with the election."

Keller said private companies' reliance on "security through obscurity," is nonsense. If that were true, the open-source Linux operating system would not be so common in security and stability, and top-secret systems such as Windows wouldn't be so vulnerable to hackers, he said.

Keller said the Open Voting Consortium hopes to promulgate its systems and standards through the for-profit private sector, much like companies that sell proprietary software based on the open-source Linux software code.

The equipment must be simple and capable of being inspected by anyone "if you want to help restore the voting public's faith in voting machines," Keller said.

Santa Clara County early this year switched from punch cards to the Sequoia touch-screen machines. The company is seeking certification for a printer-ready upgrade for its system. The new system would generate a receipt behind glass, so voters could see but not touch the paper ballot before approving it and allowing it to scroll back into the machine.

Sequoia's "receipt" technology hasn't yet been certified for use in elections, but Registrar of Voters Jesse Durazo said Sequoia's contract depends on its ability to meet state requirements for providing an external printout of each voter's selections.

He said voters lauded the new touch-screen machines in the March election. Unlike scannable punch cards or fill-in ballots, the touch-screen will keep a voter from selecting more than one candidate in a race. It also limits inadvertently skipped votes by confirming the voter wants to skip a race if no candidate is selected.

Secretary of State Kevin Shelley issued a directive in November requiring that touch-screen voting machines produce "voter verifiable" receipts -- external printouts that users can view -- by July 2006. A bill that would back it with the force of law and require receipts by 2005 is pending.

The Open Voting Consortium is drafting a grant proposal to fund a "threat analysis" to determine vulnerabilities and potential for improvement of the electronic-input systems that are currently in use. Most are supplied by Sequoia and Diebold Election Systems.

Diebold spokesman David Bear said he didn't have an opinion on whether receipts are needed. He said electronic voting already employs more duplication than any method that has gone before.

Both Sequoia and Diebold machines keep an internal paper log of votes cast. No other voting method, from pull-levers to punch-cards, produces a written receipt, Bear said.

"When you fill out a punch card and hand it in and then a chad falls off, there's no record of the vote you tried to cast, at the end of the day," he said.

Keller said voters need a printout they can see and hold in order to check their ballot and have confidence that the results will be counted. Current computer-voting systems display voter choices on a temporary screen -- they have to trust it is going to be relayed accurately into the machine's internal records, he said.

With the Open Voting Consortium system, voters can look at and touch the exact piece of paper that will later be counted as their voting record.

Sequoia's Charles said allowing voters to handle their ballots is a bad idea. "If there's a potential for the voters to interfere with the paper record, for the paper audit trail to be compromised, then there's a serious crisis in voter confidence that will occur. ... It is crucial to keep the paper audit trail observable but secure from the voters," he said.

Charles also said a visible record won't make voting machine tallies any more reliable than now. "It wouldn't increase the accuracy at all, but it would increase voter confidence."

Computers are great for standardizing voter responses, Keller said. They can be programmed to eliminate common mistakes, such as unintentionally voting for too many or too few candidates in any given race.

Diebold has said it is prepared to retool its systems to meet any state requirements for external receipts. The company unsuccessfully bid to provide voting machines for Santa Clara County and is encountering major criticisms in California. During the March primary, for example, a glitch on the poll worker-side of the system delayed the opening of polling places throughout Alameda and San Diego counties.

A state voting-systems panel looked into Diebold problems and recommended last week their machines be decertified in four counties and a criminal or civil investigation be taken against the firm.

Durazo stressed in a recent interview that any questions about Diebold's performance have nothing to do with Santa Clara County.

"We had a great voting experience ...," he said. "I think the system Santa Clara County has is the best."

Karen Coleman is a freelance writer for the Weekly. She can be e-mailed c/o editor@paweekly.com.

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