The New York Times June 11, 2004

    MAKING VOTES COUNT

    Opinion

    The Disability Lobby and Voting

    Two obvious requirements for a fair election are that voters should
have complete confidence about their ballots' being counted accurately and
that everyone, including the disabled, should have access to the polls. It
is hard to imagine advocates for those two goals fighting, but lately that
seems to be what's happening.

    The issue is whether electronic voting machines should provide a
"paper trail" - receipts that could be checked by voters and used in
recounts. There has been a rising demand around the country for this
critical safeguard, but the move to provide paper trails is being fought
by a handful of influential advocates for the disabled, who complain that
requiring verifiable paper records will slow the adoption of accessible
electronic voting machines.

    The National Federation of the Blind, for instance, has been
championing controversial voting machines that do not provide a paper
trail. It has attested not only to the machines' accessibility, but also
to their security and accuracy - neither of which is within the
federation's areas of expertise. What's even more troubling is that the
group has accepted a $1 million gift for a new training institute from
Diebold, the machines' manufacturer, which put the testimonial on its Web
site. The federation stands by its "complete confidence" in Diebold even
though several recent studies have raised serious doubts about the
company, and California has banned more than 14,000 Diebold machines from
being used this November because of doubts about their reliability.

    Disability-rights groups have had an outsized influence on the debate
despite their general lack of background on security issues. The League of
Women Voters has been a leading opponent of voter-verifiable paper trails,
in part because it has accepted the disability groups' arguments.

    Last year, the American Association of People With Disabilities gave
its Justice for All award to Senator Christopher Dodd, an author of the
Help America Vote Act, a post-2000 election reform law. Mr. Dodd, who has
actively opposed paper trails, then appointed Jim Dickson, an association
official, to the Board of Advisors of the Election Assistance Commission,
where he will be in a good position to oppose paper trails at the federal
level. In California, a group of disabled voters recently sued to undo the
secretary of state's order decertifying the electronic voting machines
that his office had found to be unreliable.

    Some supporters of voter-verifiable paper trails question whether
disability-rights groups have gotten too close to voting machine
manufacturers. Besides the donation by Diebold to the National Federation
of the Blind, there have been other gifts. According to Mr. Dickson, the
American Association of People with Disabilities has received $26,000 from
voting machine companies this year.

    The real issue, though, is that disability-rights groups have been
clouding the voting machine debate by suggesting that the nation must
choose between accessible voting and verifiable voting.

    It is well within the realm of technology to produce machines that
meet both needs. Meanwhile, it would be a grave mistake for election
officials to rush to spend millions of dollars on paperless electronic
voting machines that may quickly become obsolete.

    Disabled people have historically faced great obstacles at the polls,
and disability-rights groups are right to work zealously for accessible
voting. But they should not overlook the fact that the disabled, like all
Americans, also have an interest in ensuring that their elections are not
stolen.

    Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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