The Daily Star

This disaster is coming to a local government near you. It’s called electronic voting. It wouldn’t have to be disastrous, but it will be.

It all started with the election disaster that was Florida in 2000. As a result, the federal government passed HAVA, the Help America Vote Act of 2002. It’s a well-intentioned idea. The problem is the way it’s being implemented.

What the feds did, in a nutshell, is to set some minimum standards and provide a lot of money, with a deadline for the money to be spent. It doesn’t sound like a bad idea, does it?

The devil is, however, always in the details. Or, in this case, the lack of details.

Now, for the record, I hold our right to vote as the strongest, most important pillar of our society. It’s the sacred basis of our democracy’s existence. Over the years, thousands upon thousands have given up life itself for it.

I can’t think of anything more important to our country than our right to vote. Just as importantly, that vote must be counted and reported correctly. Our confidence in elections, and the correct counting and reporting of votes, is too important to be risked to any procedure that is not beyond suspicion.

The way things are unfolding, get used to lots of suspicion.

The key to this debacle is, of course, all the money that the feds have pushed out on the table. It’s a lot: much more than $1 billion to start with, and it’s to be spent by local municipalities, with the final specifications for equipment finalized by, in our case, the state. Even little old Otsego County can get more than $600,000.

This available money has American businesses falling all over themselves, our politicians and our local elections boards trying to get as much of it for themselves as they can. They see a river of gravy that will never dry up developing before their eyes and are trying to divert as much of it as possible to irrigate their own fields.

In other words, lobbying and pork-barrel businesses are in high gear.

A little explanation may be in order. In the old days, municipalities bought a voting machine, and with a little maintenance from some local mechanically minded guy, it lasted 50 years or so. It was a one-time investment.

Now, we are opening up the field to computers. And service contracts. And support. And upgrades.

And how long do you expect that computer-based voting machine to last?

This is just the beginning. You can see why all these electronic voting machine companies want to be your best friend.

All this has to be done in a hurry, too, or else the federal money dries up, and the local governments will have to pay for it themselves.

Now, let’s not talk about the money any more. Let’s talk about voters’ confidence in the process. This is even more important than the money.

You would think that the tech experts would be lining up behind the electronic voting idea. They’re not. They’re wary of it.

You see, they know how easy it is for highly technical things to screw up, or be maliciously manipulated.

There are places that have already begun using electronic voting. I can’t list all the screwups that have occurred in these locations already, but one example should be enough.

Miami-Dade in Florida bought electronic voting machines that cost $24.5 million.

In March, officials found that a computer glitch caused the machines to throw out hundreds of ballots in a special election, and raised further questions about votes in five other municipal elections.

The resulting controversy eventually led the resignation of the elections supervisor. The subsequent supervisor issued a report recommending the touchscreen system be scrapped in favor of one that used paper ballots and optical scanners.

The direct problem in this case was a coding error, which should have been detected.

But the particularity doesn’t matter. The real problem was that it didn’t work right, and it should have.

The upshot of all this is that we are all rushing to do something that shouldn’t be rushed. It has to be done right.

What would be right? Help me up on the soap box, please.

The federal government should have written all the specifications and then done the development of the equipment itself, instead of leaving it up to the state and local governments.

That’s a pretty wild idea in today’s corporate-friendly society. Sometimes private enterprise works best, but sometimes not. This is one of those "not" times.

Don’t forget, we’re talking about very important stuff here, the basis of our country.

The feds could have designed the hardware and written the software themselves (remember — the feds do have rocket scientists), then contracted the manufacturing out to several companies.

Then the government-written software should be open for every citizen to inspect, and elections officials wouldn’t be encumbered by relationships with greedy suppliers.

Everyone would use the same voting equipment, and having everything out in the open would provide the transparency and trust that voters need in their election process.

Is this such a hard idea to understand? I don’t think so.

Neither do I think it will come to pass. Not unless there is an enormous uproar from the citizenry. It would require too many people involved in politics to admit that they were wrong.

So, start the uproar.

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Bruce Endries is the systems manager at The Daily Star. He can be reached at (607) 432-1000, ext. 239, or by e-mail at techgp@dailystarmail.com.