Audit is next for e-vote

State elections officials plan to take one more step — and the most important — to ensure the accuracy and security of electronic voting.

Sometime this summer, Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert plans to organize an audit committee to evaluate the votes cast on the ATM-style machines during the November general election, said Joe Demma, Herbert's chief of staff. Although the audit procedures are currently undetermined, it would most likely be conducted administratively by the state elections office.

"As long as we're in this office, we want to do everything we can to ensure the security of the vote," Demma said.

The extent of the audit would depend heavily on the associated costs, especially since there is no specific money appropriated for the audit. It is likely, however, that they will seek funding from the Legislature next year for future elections.

They may also try to pass a law requiring the audits, although Demma said that the problem with any law would be in the specifics. Because the machines are new and only a few states have conducted audits, the procedures are still being developed.

"We don't know what will work and what won't work," he said. "But we hope to use this one go-around to determine some of the better methods."

Audits of the machines are one of the best ways to protect against fraud and malfunctions, and without them even machines with a paper receipt — such as the ones used in Utah, which are manufactured by Diebold Elections Systems — are extremely vulnerable, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School. The report, which was released Tuesday, demonstrates how an election could be manipulated using almost any type of electronic voting machine. But a properly conducted audit will "go a long way towards making the least difficult attacks more difficult," the report stated.

Lawrence Norden, associate counsel for the Brennan Center and chair of the task force that put together the study, said audits need to be "random and transparent" and happen as quickly as possible after an election to be effective. There also needs to be a clear chain of command for the machines and paper receipts.

Any audit should include a count of the votes cast on the paper receipts and in the machines, as well as a comparison of the votes cast on the machines within a precinct to the number of voters who registered. Auditors can also look for other signs of malfunction or malfeasance, such as a high number of canceled ballots.

As for cost, he doubted that it would not be prohibitively expensive, "but the pay-off is it makes the system more secure," he said. "That will give people more confidence that their vote was counted."

David Dill, founder of Verified Voting and a computer science professor at Stanford University, said that the more random and independent the audit, the better it will be for election security. Ideally, the state would randomly select approximately 1 percent of the machines used statewide — although most states only select machines from random precincts — and allow the people to observe the audit.

One thing the state officials should not do is simply conduct an audit to prove that an audit is not necessary, Dill said.

"It's a very good thing to try different audit measures out, but it has to be done with a good-faith effort. If you want to prove that audits are too expensive or unnecessary, then that's probably the result you can find," he said. On the other hand, if you audit for potential problems "and find discrepancies, even if that takes more time and money, then it is money well spent."

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