Local voters aren’t yet confident that electronic voting machines offer a safe and accurate option for casting their ballots.
An online poll conducted on The Gazette’s Web site asked the question, “Do you think electronic voting is as safe and reliable as paper ballots?”
With 215 responses from readers, the yes and no votes were almost evenly divided, with 97 voters (45 percent) saying “yes” and 105 voters (49 percent) saying “no.” Thirteen voters, or 6 percent, were undecided.
Electronic voting had been the focus of a documentary, “Hacking Democracy,” broadcast last week on Home Box Office network. The documentary “exposes the vulnerability of computers — which count approximately 80 percent of America’s votes in county, state and federal elections — suggesting that if our votes aren’t safe, then our democracy isn’t safe, either,” HBO contended in a program synopsis.
The program included information from Seattle grandmother and writer Bev Harris, who “stumbled across an ‘online library’ of the Diebold Corporation, discovering a treasure trove of information about the inner-workings of the company’s voting system.”
Diebold Election Systems are used for voting in Lyon County.
Harris took the information to Johns Hopkins University, where a computer security expert “determined that the software lacked the necessary security features to prevent tampering,” the synopsis said.
Diebold President David Byrd contended that Johns Hopkins expert who issued the negative report had a conflict of interest because the expert owned stock options in a competing company.
The Diebold company issued a statement before the HBO broadcast to assert that the program “contains significant factual errors and does not meet HBO’s standards for accuracy and fairness.” Diebold asked that HBO run a disclaimer with the program to indicate that HBO had not verified the accuracy of claims made in the movie.
Diebold forwarded its response to HBO by e-mail to Lyon County Clerk Karen Hartenbower, who said in an interview last week that she was confident of the Diebold voting machines and that problems are more likely to come from human error than from hackers.
“Never in the history of the United States on any equipment has anyone ever hacked in and changed votes,” she said. “That’s the bottom line. It has never happened.”