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A legal center and voting integrity group have teamed up to send a message to secretaries of state around the country warning them that voting machines they use could be susceptible to the same kinds of problems that voters in West Virginia, Tenneesse and other states have recently experienced.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and the Verified Voting organization sent a fax to secretaries of states on Monday urging them to follow West Virginia's lead and re-calibrate touch-screen machines each morning during early voting and on election day. Last week voters in several West Virginia counties reported that ES&S's iVotronic touch-screen machines were flipping their votes from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to Republican rival John McCain. West Virginia Secretary of State Betty Ireland addressed the problem by directing the 34 West Virginia counties that use the touch-screen machines to re-calibrate them each morning.

Shortly thereafter, three voters in Tennessee complained of a similar problem on ES&S machines in their state, though they said their vote flipped in the opposite direction, from McCain to Obama.

In their fax addressed to Tennessee and other states using the machines (.pdf), the two organizations write that, "There is a real chance that voters using iVotronic machines in your state will experience 'vote flipping' similar to that experienced by voters in West Virginia. You may already have provided guidance to your state?s iVotronic jurisdictions, but if not, we urge you to take actions similar to those taken by Secretary Ireland, to avoid voter confusion and frustration, and to ensure that every vote is cast as intended. Where a voter-verifiable paper available, voters should also be urged to confirm their candidate choices."

Dan Wallach, professor of computer science at Rice University, has described how calibration works and fails to work on touch-screen machines:

The calibration process, familiar to anyone who owns a PDA, involves the machine displaying a series of cross-hairs and asking the user to press on the center of each cross-hair. The machine then computes a correction to ensure that selections are mapped to the correct part of the screen below. Of course, if the calibration was done incorrectly, or even if the voter is notably taller or shorter than the person who did the calibration, then presses on the screen might still be misinterpreted. Furthermore, different voters may use different parts of their finger (ranging from the fingernail to the whole finger), which may differ from how the system was calibrated.

Wallach, who is also associate director of ACCURATE -- a voting research center funded by the National Science Foundation -- says that when a machine's calibration is wrong, it is generally wrong the same way each time a voter touches the screen and will produce the same incorrect response -- for example, switching a vote from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to Republican presidential candidate John McCain each time. Wallach says it should be safe for a poll worker to cancel the ballot, put the machine into administrative mode and re-calibrate the machine without the machine losing any votes.

[REMINDER TO VOTERS: If you have problems casting a ballot, please contact us at vote@wired.com or add a report about your issue to our election map so we can track and investigate problems that come up. If you're adding a report to the map, please provide as much detail as you can to make it possible for us to verify the information. If you can provide us with your name and contact information to follow up with you and get more details, that would be even better. If you don't feel comfortable putting your name on the map, contact us at vote@wired.com.]

strong>See also:

• Voting Machines Switch Votes; Officials Blame Voters
• ES&S Voting Machines in Tennessee Flip Votes
• Votes Flipped in Ohio Race that Used E-voting machines
• After Records Reveal E-Voting Glitches, Election Official Jokes She'll Stop Keeping Records
• ES&S Failed to Disclose Manila Manufacturer to Fed Agency -- UPDATED
• Dan Rather Investigates Voting Machines -- Uncovers New Surprises ...
• ES&S to be Rebuked, Fined and Possibly Banned in CA?

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