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Election Day: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Voter turnout could be the highest in a century

By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)

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After a brief meltdown at her polling station, Winfrey caught the problem in time to vote for her candidate.

But University of California computer science professor David Wagner says that bad design choices could be rooted out if the federal government included user-interface testing as part of the certification process.

Proposed next-generation voting standards would require this type of testing, but it's not clear whether these standards will be adopted, Wagner said.

Voter registration database problems

Database issues may play a more important role in this year's election too, as many states have recently met HAVA guidelines that forced states to set up a centralized computer database of registered voters by Jan. 1, 2006.

Whether these databases will work properly or make voting difficult remains to be seen, but there could be a lot of voters who show up on Tuesday only to find that they are not registered to vote.

States are using the HAVA requirement to clean up their voter lists and are knocking the names of ineligible voters off the rolls, but some states -- Florida, for example -- have tougher requirements than others, Wagner said.

The Berkeley professor said he'll be watching these voter registration databases closely on Tuesday.

"I don't know what to expect," he said. "Everything could go smoothly, or we could have a substantial fraction of voters who show up on Election Day, think they're registered and are told that there is some problem with their registration."

Malicious attack

Although this is certainly the most frightening potential problem, it's frequently downplayed by e-voting experts, who say that mechanical glitches are much more likely to happen.

Still, it is possible to hack the election.

States like California and Ohio have sponsored tough audits of their e-voting technology, and they universally discovered that a motivated attacker could change election results on virtually every voting machine that was tested.

"It's something that anybody who has technical skill could do," said Ed Felten, who has looked closely at security problems with Diebold and Sequoia voting machines.

Because voting systems vary from county to county, it would be hard to rig a presidential election in any kind of widespread way, but concerns will not go away until more states make it impossible for election results to be changed with a couple of keystrokes.