As state election officials scurry to prepare for projected record turnout rates in November, two reports issued this week suggest that efforts to modernize the American election system since the notoriously fraught presidential vote in 2000 are falling short.

Coming up short, too late to fix

A report issued by the Government Accountability Office Tuesday summarized the findings of a year-long performance audit of the Election Assistance Commission, established by the Help America Vote Act of 2000 to aid states in upgrading their voting systems. The Commission is supposed to act both as an information clearinghouse and as a certification and oversight body for voting machine manufacturers. On both counts, the report found significant problems with the agency's efforts to date.

The EAC is supposed to provide a federal-level certification process for voting systems, and though it currently has 12 certifications pending, it has yet to complete any—meaning states must rely on their own procedures. One reason for this, GAO found, is that EAC had failed to "define its approach for testing and certifying electronic voting systems in sufficient detail to ensure that its certification activities are performed thoroughly and consistently."

The need to reconcile differing interpretations of the commission's vague guidelines had "contributed to delays in certifying systems that several states were planning on using in the 2008 elections... forcing states to either not require EAC certification or rely on an alternative system."

This problem of vague criteria and procedures appears to plague EAC in a number of areas. EAC is responsible for responding to any problems or defects discovered after the fact in systems it certifies. Unfortunately, "it has yet to specify how this broadly defined approach will be executed, including what steps will be followed, what criteria will be used to reach decisions, how it will know if system problems have been corrected, and how it will use the information to improve its testing and certification program."

The agency is empowered to conduct periodic inspections of manufacturing facilities to ensure that the production process is up to snuff, but there don't appear to be any concrete guidelines specifying who is to conduct these inspections or what criteria they are to use in making their assessments. The EAC manual "does not include procedures or criteria for determining the credibility of reported defects, or any other aspect of the inquiry or investigation, such as how EAC will gain access to systems once they are purchased and fielded by states and local jurisdictions."

Moreover, the commission "has not established an effective and efficient repository for certified versions of voting system software, or related procedures and tools, for states and local jurisdictions to use in verifying that their acquired voting systems are identical to what EAC has certified." There doesn't appear to be any long-term plan to remedy this problem, but the commission's interim solution is distinctly low-tech: it told GAO that it will "maintain copies of certified versions in file cabinets and mail copies of these versions upon their request by states and local jurisdictions." There is no mention of whether anyone has introduced officials at EAC to the concept of a "hash."

The problem of ensuring that certified software is the same as that installed on the machines used on election day is not a hypothetical one. In numerous cases, voting machine manufacturers have shipped out systems with software different from the version certified for use in state elections. Last year, for example, Election Systems & Software was found to have sold almost 1,000 uncertified machines to five California counties.

EAC blames most of its shortfalls on lack of resources. The commission told investigators that the testing and certification program had only three staff, all of whom had other responsibilities, and all of whom were expert consultants limited to working half the year at most.

Any solution the commission did implement to fix these problems would not come in time to affect the election in November, GAO concluded.

Lag: it's not just a problem for video games

A second study issued Monday by the Century Foundation and the advocacy group, Common Cause, examined a broad range of potential electoral problems in 10 key swing states: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Much of that report focused on longstanding, low-tech problems, such as poor poll worker training, the use of deceptive practices by partisan activists, insufficient allocation of voting machines or ballots to polling places, and restrictive voter ID requirements. But technological changes have presented new difficulties—often going beyond the familiar security and reliability concerns with electronic voting systems, on which Ars has frequently reported.

In an electoral dry-run conducted in Colorado earlier this year, for example, officials discovered "on-going problems with lag and connectivity" in the centralized voter registration system used to "check in" voters at their local polling station. While the problems did not rise to the level of "disasters," officials were moved to make backup plans in the event of a crash or excessive delays.

Even when machines function properly, the Common Cause study found that user confusion with new electronic systems could create a problem if states have not taken adequate steps to familiarize voters with the new machines. For example, some systems implement a "straight ticket" option, which automatically selects all the candidates from a voter's self-declared party at the outset of the voting process. A voter who then clicks on a specific candidate of that party may inadvertently deselect the candidate—and higher rates of "under-voting" (failure to select any candidate for one or more races) in counties with this option suggest that at least some voters do make this error.

Florida, whose electoral fiasco in 2000 prompted the drive to modernize state voting systems, was ranked "unsatisfactory" on 11 of 24 dimensions that the report evaluated.