Roy G. Saltman, the federal authorities’s main skilled on computerized voting whose ignored warning concerning the vulnerability of punch-card ballots presaged the hanging chad fiasco in Florida that got here to represent the disputed recount within the 2000 presidential election, died on April 21 in Rockville, Md. He was 90.
His demise, in a nursing residence, was brought on by issues of latest strokes, his grandson Max Saltman mentioned.
In a 132-page federal report printed in 1988 and distributed to hundreds of native voting officers throughout the nation, Mr. Saltman, an analyst working for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, cautioned that the bits of cardboard that voters have been imagined to punch out from their ballots, generally known as chads, may stay partly connected (therefore, hanging), or pressed again into the cardboard when the votes have been counted.
Either occasion would render the voter’s selection unsure or, if the poll seemed to be choosing multiple candidate, invalid.
“It is recommended,” Mr. Saltman mentioned flatly, “that the use of pre-scored punch card ballots be ended.”
His suggestion was largely ignored, definitely in Florida, the place the preliminary depend within the 2020 election gave the Republican candidate, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, a 1,784-vote lead over the Democrat, Vice President Al Gore, a margin so shut that state legislation required a recount.
Armies of legal professionals and political operatives descended on Florida, fits and countersuits have been filed, and recounts have been began and stopped in varied counties. The spectacle of election employees analyzing punch-card ballots by magnifying glasses, to attempt to decide a voter’s intent, popularized the time period hanging chad because it raised doubts concerning the accuracy of the depend.
After 5 weeks of recounts, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in on Dec. 12, 2000, and, in a 5-to-4 determination, stopped a state court-ordered recount, with Mr. Bush holding a 537-vote lead over Mr. Gore. Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes, and the presidency, have been awarded to Mr. Bush.
“It has always puzzled me why my report never got a wider acceptance,” Mr. Saltman advised USA Today in 2001. “It takes a crisis to move people, and it shouldn’t have.”
The counting disaster that crippled the presidential transition in 2000 prompted congressional hearings that led in 2002 to the Help America Vote Act, which outlawed the usage of punch playing cards in federal elections.
As lately as final month, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to resolve a defamation go well with filed by Dominion Voting Systems after Fox TV personalities falsely claimed that Dominion’s voting machines have been prone to hacking and had switched votes within the 2020 election from President Donald J. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr. The firm’s patents cite Mr. Saltman’s early studies on punch-card vulnerabilities as proof that Dominion’s voting expertise had overcome these flaws.
As early as 1976, Mr. Saltman warned that “we have a serious problem of public confidence in computers and a serious problem of public confidence in public officials, and around election time they tend to coalesce.”
When his bosses on the federal company discounted his early issues, Mr. Saltman acquired a $150,000 grant to review voting mishaps across the nation.
He discovered a report that reviewed Detroit’s first punch-card voting expertise in a 1970 major election. It turned up “design inadequacies of the voting device” that had invalidated ballots as a result of voters had unintentionally voted for greater than the prescribed variety of candidates. Similar issues about punch-card voting have been raised after a 1984 election for property appraiser in Palm Beach County, Fla.
In 1988, Mr. Saltman’s prescient report, “Accuracy, Integrity and Security in Computerized Vote Tallying,” really helpful banning the pre-scored punch-card voting machines that may create the counting disaster in Florida in 2000.
He additionally really helpful in opposition to the usage of laptop programs that may forestall voters from analyzing their ballots for accuracy earlier than leaving the polls, and that may not produce a direct printed paper path for election officers to look at in a recount.
“The defects in the pre-scored punch card voting system are fundamental and cannot be fixed by engineering or management alterations,” Mr. Saltman wrote. He added that “manual examination of pre-scored punch card ballots to determine the voter’s intent is highly subjective.”
“For example,” he continued, “manual counters are forced to determine whether a pinprick point on a chad demonstrated an intent to register a vote.”
Max Saltman mentioned his grandfather had expressed concern that almost all digital voting programs within the United States nonetheless relied on advanced working programs, regardless of his warnings about their vulnerabilities.
Charles Stewart III, an M.I.T. professor of political science who consulted with Mr. Saltman, mentioned by electronic mail: “Roy appreciated how computers could help to make election administration better, by automating vote counting, which is a very tedious and error-prone exercise when done by hand. But, he demonstrated that these machines sometimes broke down, and it was foolish not to design systems that took this fact into account.”
Roy Gilbert Saltman was born on July 15, 1932, in Manhattan to Ralph Henry Saltman, a son of immigrants from Russia, and Josephine (Stern) Saltman, who had immigrated from Budapest as an toddler. His father was a manufacturing supervisor within the garment trade and later at {an electrical} equipment manufacturing facility. His mom was a homemaker.
Raised within the Bronx and in Sunnyside, Queens, Roy graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School.
He earned a level in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., in 1953. In 1955, he obtained a grasp’s in engineering from M.I.T., the place he labored on the steerage programs for the Nautilus, the primary nuclear submarine. He additionally studied engineering at Columbia University and was granted a grasp’s diploma in public administration from the American University in Washington in 1976.
In 1969, after jobs at Sperry Gyroscope Co. and IBM, he joined the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, the place he labored on software program coverage and served on the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the company charged with sustaining the uniform utilization of geographic names inside the federal authorities.
His first marriage, to Lenore Sack, led to divorce. In 1992, he married Joan Ettinger Ephross. She died in 2008.
In addition to his grandson Max, he’s survived by his sons, David and Steven, and a daughter, Eve, from his marriage to Dr. Sack; his stepchildren, David, Peter and Sara; two different grandchildren; and 6 step-grandchildren.
After he retired in 1996, Mr. Saltman grew to become an election marketing consultant.
The belated consideration his studies obtained after the 2000 election, partially because of his testimony to the House Committee on Science in May 2001, prompted him to write down what grew to become a definitive ebook, “The History and Politics of Voting Technology” (2006).
He additionally continued to talk out on election points. In a letter to The Washington Post in 2005, he warned that Georgia’s requirement that voters have a photograph ID card, at a value of $20 each 5 years, may violate the Constitution’s prohibition of a ballot tax.
As Sue Halpern wrote in The New Yorker in 2020, loads of potential issues with digital voting machines that Mr. Saltman recognized stay: “tallies that can’t be audited because the voting machines do not provide a paper trail, software and hardware glitches, security vulnerabilities, poor connections between voting machines and central tabulating computers, conflicts of interest among vendors of computerized systems, and election officials who lack computer expertise.”
Mr. Saltman typically mentioned that there was no margin of error in voting, that civic engagement and confidence within the electoral system was too important to a democracy to depart any grounds for misgivings.
“An election is like the launch of a space rocket,” he typically mentioned. “It must work the first time.”
Source: www.nytimes.com