At the request of election officials, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation has seized voting machines for forensic analysis and has launched a criminal investigation into the Franklin County Board of Elections.

The investigation was launched after Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's Secretary of State and chief election official, found that a candidate's name was marked as withdrawn on the electronic voting machine that she used during the recent primaries, an irregularity that was also reported by voters in other precincts. The state attorney general is now working with a team of computer forensic consultants to determine if there was any tampering.

Preliminary analysis conducted by specialists from SysTest Labs indicates that the internal audit capability of the Franklin County voting machines had been manually disabled by county election board programmers last year, making it almost impossible to tell if any nefarious changes have been made to the systems. SysTest also discovered that the election board had failed to adhere to routine machine testing standards and had tested only one machine in each precinct rather than all of the machines.

Ohio has seen one electronic voting disaster after another ever since counties in the state began adopting the technology. Two Cuyahoga election officials were convicted of rigging a recount in May 2004 because they literally admitted to doing precounts and displayed the evidence while being recorded on videotape. A different Cuyahoga county recount, for a November 2007 local election, was equally marred when Brunner turned the state's voter-verifiable paper audit trail law into a mockery by conducting the recount with paper ballots reprinted after the election from voting machine memory cards.

After all of these incidents, Brunner launched a $1.9 million security review which determined that the voting machines used in the state are all egregiously insecure and susceptible to manipulation and outright fraud in numerous ways. The review produced over 1,000 pages of documentation describing the profound flaws that impact the systems.

According to WHIOTV, which conducted a television interview with Brunner, the state will consider dumping the faulty touch-screen voting machines and switching to more reliable optical scanners that read votes from conventional paper ballots. Rep. Kevin DeWine, a state legislator and deputy chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, vehemently opposes returning to paper ballots because doing so would likely cost the state an estimated $64 million. His arguments seem dubious in the face of the growing costs associated with cleaning up the messes created by the defective touch-screen voting systems.

Security evaluations conducted in several states demonstrate clearly that electronic voting machines commercially available from virtually all of the mainstream vendors utterly fail to meet even the most basic security standards. With the important 2008 elections approaching quickly, states need to reevaluate the implications of their election policies and seriously consider going back to paper if more advanced technology can't get the job done.

Further reading

