Sunday, December 10, 2006
Montgomery County secures its elections
Christian Trejbal
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The switch to electronic voting machines has generated considerable debate. It's easy to argue broadly about whether the public should trust electrons and proprietary software to count votes on Election Day, but ultimately, the issue is as much a local one.
Randy Wertz is a familiar face around the halls of Montgomery County government. During the 1990s, he was deputy assistant county administrator, and for the past 212 years, as the general registrar of elections, he has had the unenviable task of replacing the county's old mechanical election systems with electronic ones.
Wertz has taken some heat from activists and on these pages for choosing a system that does not produce a paper trail. Knowing that I do not see eye-to-eye with him, he graciously invited me in to see the county's security.
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"I want to take every precaution I can to make sure the machines are secure and ready to go on Election Day," he said in his Virginia Tech-adorned office. "There are a lot of localities that don't take the steps we do because they don't have the money."
He also knew the computer experts at his alma mater in Blacksburg would be watching.
Montgomery County spent nearly a half million dollars on its 115 WINvote election machines. Most of the money came from the federal government through the Help America Vote Act, which funded upgrades across the country.
When it comes to securing and preparing the machines for an election, Wertz explained, the action starts about three months before Election Day.
Once the candidate roster is set, Advanced Voting Solutions, the company that manufactures the WINvote machines, assembles ballots for the county, and the State Board of Elections reviews them for accuracy and formatting.
After that, the ballots are finally ready for loading onto the machines, which have been stored in a secure facility at an undisclosed location in the county.
The county contracts the ballot-loading out to a private firm. Hugh Gallagher of Election System Acquisition and Management Services verifies the machines are operating correctly and loads the ballots. Election officials watch him throughout. When he is done, he attaches a seal to prevent tampering before Election Day.
Then the machines are locked back up. The night before the election, they are loaded into locked cages for transportation to election sites. Only Wertz and site election supervisors have the keys.
It's an extremely secure setup. I don't see where a malevolent hacker could cheat.
But I'm not a malevolent hacker. There are far cleverer people who might find ways to rig the vote count.
For example, they might exploit the exposed USB ports on the backs of the machines, or they might tap into the wireless network that connects them.
Wertz said both attacks would fail because exploiting the ports would still require breaking open the front panel of the machines in full view of election workers, and the network is heavily encrypted.
Let's assume he is right: The machines are protected. Then the real question is one of trust.
Do voters trust a private contractor to behave while installing the ballots? Do they trust Advanced Voting Solutions not to slip something into their proprietary software? If either did it right, the change would be all but undetectable.
That is precisely why voters should demand a paper trail. If they could review their choices on a piece of paper, there would be a means of detecting fraud and performing a recount in a close election.
Gallagher and AVS are almost certainly legitimate. Gallagher is upfront talking about the machines.
Still, to borrow a line from Ronald Reagan, "Trust, but verify."
Wertz does not like the idea for two, strictly practical reasons. First is cost. Upgrading the machines would be expensive. Second, he sees printers as another layer of complication, another point at which things could go wrong, all to add little to a system that is already very secure. He concedes, however, that changes are likely someday.
"This isn't the final thing," he said. "With all the hoopla, they'll come up with ways to address concerns. The systems are evolving."
Evolution might come sooner than he thinks. A federal panel studying electronic voting last week voted to start developing a national standard for paper trails that could phase out paperless electronic voting in the future.
The anticipated lifetime of Montgomery County's electronic voting machines is 10 years. That is about the right timeline for a federally mandated overhaul.
Paper trails aside, Montgomery County residents should vote a little easier knowing that Wertz and his staff take elections very seriously and have erected impressive barriers to would-be cheaters.
Christian Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley Bureau in Christiansburg.
