Senator urges federal e-voting probe

No one's sure whether touch-screen electronic voting machines used in Sarasota County, Florida were solely to blame for some 18,000 votes that went unrecorded in a tight congressional race last fall.

But the incident is cause for a "top-to-bottom" investigation of the voting system and software used in that race and more broadly, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a Wednesday letter to the Government Accountability Office.

Feinstein, the chairwoman of a Senate panel with jurisdiction over election matters, asked the federal watchdog agency to compile information about irregularities in direct-recording electronic voting systems, or DREs, which do not typically produce a paper record.

She requested that investigators scrutinize both the 2004 and 2006 elections and include in their research the ES&S iVotronic System used in Sarasota, the Avante Touch Screen, the Diebold's TSX, the Sequoia/Smartmatic HAAT (Hybrid Activator, Accumulator & Transmitter), and the Sequoia AVC Edge System.

The senator also asked the investigators to examine printers that have been attached to some of the systems to provide a paper record of the voter's intent. Although paper trails are widely supported by computer scientists and voting advocacy groups, reports of paper jams and other glitches in those systems have prompted skepticism by some election officials about the necessity of such an approach.

Feinstein has said she intends to introduce a bill soon that would require use of paper trails in electronic voting machines, preferably in time for the 2008 presidential race. Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate have for paper trail mandates in recent weeks.