Howard Dean, Democrats sound off on e-voting security

IDG News Service - Former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean joined prominent Democrats yesterday to call attention to the need for election machines that are accurate and secure and can be audited.
Dean joined Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) at a news conference with the Campaign for America's Future and Rock the Vote to call attention to a plank in the Democratic Party's 2004 platform that calls for voting systems to be "accessible, independently auditable, accurate and secure," and to excoriate Republicans in Congress and state governments who have blocked legislation mandating a paper trail for votes cast using electronic voting machines.
"We can spend millions on security; surely we can do just as much to safeguard the central piece of representative government -- the voting process," Holt said. He spoke in a hotel in Cambridge, Mass., across the Charles River from Boston, where Democratic Party delegates and luminaries from across the country are meeting in the FleetCenter to nominate presidential and vice presidential candidates.
Holt was joined briefly by Dean, who said that he initially heard of the now-notorious security problems of e-voting machines while running for the Democratic nomination and dismissed the complaints as coming from "conspiracy whackos." A closer look convinced Dean of the seriousness of the issues, which he said threatened to undermine democracy in the U.S. if left unaddressed.
"If people don't think votes count, the first thing they'll do is stop voting. And when people stop voting, elected officials will stop caring about [them]," he said.
Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) talked about how the Missouri secretary of state had suspended the use of e-voting machines pending further security assessments. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley also attended. Shelley has issued a directive requiring touch-screen electronic voting machines to meet minimum security standards and produce a paper trail that can be verified by voters.
Shelley, Dean and others called on the federal government to institute standards for the security of voting machines and to require that all voting machines can be audited to verify the accuracy of vote tallies.
"The American public wants one thing, and it's not a partisan issue; they want their votes to count in a legitimate election to elect a legitimate president," Shelley said.
Perhaps the most impassioned presentation was by Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who railed against resistance within Ohio's Republican-dominated state government and at the federal level to address the issue of voting security. The Bush administration has underfunded or ignored key elements of the Help Americans Vote Act of 2002