I'm a "Touchscreen Inspector" for a precinct in San Diego County, a hotbed of intrigue and lawsuits as a result of the practice of allowing poll workers to take home voting machines prior to the elections (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3685). To convince myself of the accuracy and honesty of the process I volunteered to assist at my local polling place.

The system used for voting here is the Diebold AccuVote TSX with printer (there is a demo of this device on the Diebold site at http://tinyurl.com/ybb9mq).

I currently have 4 of the Diebold touchscreens sitting on my living room floor and I've had them for 2 weeks. I received them after taking a 4 hour training class from the Registar's office. My ID was verified by the Registrar before the training and I was sworn in during the class.

The touchscreens are sealed in 3 places - the cover has a plastic seal and there are paper seals over the memory slot and power-on slot. I don't have the key for the memory/power cover (this will be provided on election day with the paper ballots).

Once the system has been setup and powered on it can only be enabled with a supervisor card that is provided on the day of the election. Once enabled it can only be closed down by the supervisor card as well. This cycle (enable/disable) can only be done ONCE and then Registrar needs to reset the machine.

1 of the machines will be the master system and the other 3 are for balloting. 1 of the 3 balloting systems has a keypad for handicapped use. With that one exception they are physically identical. On election day we use the supervisor card once to make one system the “master” that will be used exclusively for creating SmartCard reprogrammable voting cards to give to voters after their identities are verified. 2 SmartCard cards per machine are provided on election day.

The master system is behind the volunteer table and inaccessible to the voters. When a voter comes in a new card is programmed and then the voter uses the card to vote at one of the 3 polling machines. The card is only usable ONCE before it needs to be reinserted in the master system and enabled again. The card is returned to the poll workers after the voter uses it so it can be reprogrammed for the next user.

When the systems are initially connected, powered on and enabled the first voter to show up is asked to look at each touchscreen and verify the vote count is 0 (this number is always displayed on the bottom of the screen as well as the cumulative total of ALL votes cast on this machine from this and all previous elections).

The touchscreen itself seems very easy to use. A printer on the side of the machine prints out your choices once you've committed your ballot (the paper goes into the machine in a sealed canister, not to the voter). Rolls of used paper tape from the balloting machine are sealed and labeled with the serial number of the machine that created it as well as the roll number.

When the polls close the supervisor card is used to shut down each machine. 3 paper summary tapes (cumulative totals only) are printed from each machine - one for the sealed packet that goes back to the Registrar, one that feeds into the canister on the machine and one that is posted on the door outside the polling place. After that the seal is broken on the memory slot and the PCMCIA card is removed from the machine. These go in the sealed packet for the Registrar along with the summary tapes, all broken seals and the supervisor/voter SmartCards. Once sealed this bag is retrieved by the Registrar at then end of the evening along with the voting machines.

Here are the potential problems I see with this system:

1) Poll workers can create voter cards and vote without a voter being there. Obviously the numbers wouldn't match - that is, the number of voters reported would be greater than the number on the tally sheet done at the end of the day so the error would be detectable. The question I asked of the Registrar workers is, given that situation, how could you tell which votes were valid and which weren't? And since we are using 3 machines they couldn't even tell WHICH machine had the invalid votes. What then? Are all the results from that polling place thrown out? None of them knew the answer to the question.

2) The voter isn't given a paper tape of his vote and the window that showed who/what they voted for is very small. Given the large number of items on the ballot the voter can't verify all of their votes.

3) ALL the balloting machines have their power daisy chained together. That is, machine 1 is connected to the outlet, machine 1 is connected to machine 2 and so on. What if I kick out the power cord? What if a system has a power supply malfunction? Conceivably I could take down an entire voting location. Do the machines just reboot? Is there some step required to restart voting? We weren't told.

4) Its unknown (to me anyway) how the votes are actually counted. Apparently there is a GEMS (Global Election Management System) that Diebold sells that is used to tabulate and report the election results at the Registrar’s office. Information about this on the Diebold website is a one page document that is remarkable in its lack of specifics. The lack of transparency about this part is extremely alarming to me.

Finally, on the plus side anyone can insist on a paper ballot, but only a limited number is given to each polling place and workers are discouraged from giving them to voters, although each polling station is able to completely run from paper ballots if required.

Nothing proves a point like name calling, you're clearly out of ammo. How do you have time to post from work and still ask the customers if they want fries with their order? I'm done here.