Computerized Vote Tallies Have Too Many Glitches, Experts Charge : Technology: Critics say current Federal Election Commission guidelines are flawed. They want tougher rules governing software and equipment.

Election and computer experts have sharply criticized proposed federal guidelines aimed at assuring the accuracy of computerized vote counting. They contend the rules are cosmetic, contain serious flaws and are “a mishmash of sense and nonsense.”

The critics, who have asked the Federal Election Commission to reject or modify the present draft of the proposals, include computer scientists widely consulted by election officials as well as two citizens groups: Election Watch and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

Several critics said in interviews that a pending recount of the Virginia gubernatorial election underscores the need for strong computer standards. The apparent winner by less than 1% of the vote, Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, piled up a huge margin in Fairfax County, whose new-wave electronic voting machines are difficult to check for mistakes or fraud.

One of those machines, in fact, printed a sample ballot in Italian and failed to record a vote on paper in a demonstration last spring.

“The Virginia situation points up the need for mandatory federal standards because without them, the integrity of elections on highly sophisticated electronic systems cannot be guaranteed,” said Mae Churchill, director of Election Watch, a Los Angeles-based, nonpartisan organization.

Congress, mindful that local election officials were moving ever farther from paper ballots, four years ago ordered preparation of federal standards for computer hardware and software used to tally votes.

To address concerns about potential sabotage and glitches in electronic vote counting, the FEC was asked to recommend computer designs, tests and security procedures to preserve the integrity of elections.

Penelope Bonsall, a former Alaska election official and data processing expert who heads the FEC project, called the 500 pages of proposed guidelines “a good first start that balances competing interests. . . . Categorically, this is not a flawed product.”

The FEC effort also has support in Congress. An aide to Rep. Al Swift (D-Wash.), chairman of a House subcommittee on elections, called the draft guidelines “a fairly good job.”

Critics, however, complain that the standards would be voluntary, not mandatory, and that they fail to require that computer vendors write programs that are easy to check both before and after the voting.

The critics demand that a program’s “source code” be written in “high-level language” that would not take days to decipher. They also insist that new direct-recording electronic machines provide an “audit trail”--that is, a voter-by-voter record that officials can go over in a recount. Currently, these machines provide only a summary of all voters’ choices.

The most prominent critics are computer scientists Roy G. Saltman of Gaithersburg, Md., and Robert J. Naegele of San Jose, Calif.

Saltman, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the government’s top expert on computerized vote counting. He has documented numerous instances of mistakes with such machines. Even so, the FEC asked him to provide only limited advice on the standards--largely, FEC officials said, because his agency wanted to be paid and FEC funds were meager.

In a letter to Bonsall, Saltman said the standards had “serious flaws” because they failed to specify “numerical accuracy requirements” for voting-machine software and failed to assure that vote-tallying software was “logically correct” and contained “no hidden code.”

In an interview, Saltman complained that the guidelines call for inadequate internal controls and for no testing by independently managed computers.

Naegele, a computer expert who has been a consultant to election officials in California and elsewhere for 20 years, drafted most of the early versions of the FEC standards. But he has since repudiated much of the rewriting by Bonsall, calling it “a mishmash of sense and nonsense.”

He particularly objected that the new draft recommends high-level language programming, but does not require it. Such language, he said, “makes it a heck of a lot easier to understand and test a program.”

Bonsall suggested that the preferred language was made only a recommendation to accommodate vendors and election officials who had made deals on equipment that would take a couple of years to deliver.

Saltman said he was asked by a representative of J. Marshall Coleman, the defeated Repubican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, to appear before a three-judge panel with recommendations on how to carry out the recount. However, his employer, the Commerce Department, told him he could not take part because his appearance might be viewed as partisan.

Saltman said he could have made the point that “there are no real national standards against which you could measure how well the computing equipment has performed its job in Virginia.”

The state apparently intends only to re-tally votes without making detailed checks of computer programs and vote-tallying procedures.

A simple recount, however, would not explain why one of Fairfax County’s 600 Shouptronic machines fouled up in a demonstration for Times reporter William Trombley last May.

“The machines have worked very well,” Jane G. Vitray, secretary of the county board of elections, said as she prepared to demonstrate one of the machines to Trombley.

But the machine that prints out the names of candidates and issues--the information that appears on the face of each machine--printed everything in Italian. The ballot plotter also prints in French, German and Spanish, as well as in English. “We didn’t know it did that,” Vitray said with some annoyance. “We didn’t want that feature.”

While an aide was left to deal with the language problem, Vitray and the reporter moved on to the voting booth, where bells were chiming and red lights were blinking and an inviting green button at the bottom right corner of the machine said “vote.”

“Don’t push that,” Vitray warned. “Once you push that, you can’t vote for anything else. You only push that button when you’re finished.”

In a previous election, a number of voters had pushed the green button too soon and then “called to tell us we were depriving them of their constitutional right,” Vitray noted.

After Trombley finished voting, another red light came on to indicate that the result had been printed on a tape at the back of the machine. But when he and Vitray checked the tape, it was empty.

Vitray was exasperated. “I can’t understand it,” she said. “Everything worked so well last week, when the Girl Scouts were here.”