From
PBS’ I, Cringley, who
recommends that to prevent another Florida 2000 we submit to a little Northern
exposure. -
KWC
Dec.
4, 2003: No Confidence Vote; Why the current touch screen voting machine
fiasco was pretty much inevitable @
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031204.html, which
ended with…
“Now
here's the really interesting part. Forgetting for a moment Diebold's
voting machines, let's look at the other equipment they make. Diebold
makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for
trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including
self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings
for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic
cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of
these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just
like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these
other kinds of Diebold machines -- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can
be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home
Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect
the livelihood of their owners. If they can't be audited they can't be
trusted. If they can't be trusted they won't be
used.
Now
back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make
includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a
capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are doing is
adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn't it be logical to carry
over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other
kind of transaction device?
This
confuses me. I'd love to know who said to leave the feature out and
why?
Dec. 11, 2003: Follow the Money; Why the
Best Voting Technology May Be No Technology at
All
By Robert X.
Cringely
This
is my follow-up to last week's column about the U.S. voting technology fiasco
as an IT problem. We don't seem to do a very good job of running
elections in this country. Our answer is to throw more technology at the
problem, and last week, I suspected that our proposed solutions would just
make the problems worse, not better. And I still feel that way, but this
week, I have a solution to propose, and I promise you it isn't what you
expect.
Last
week, I questioned why the new touch screen voting machines coming into use
don't create a result that can be audited. That is, they don't produce a
paper trail. The rationale for not giving each voter a receipt that
shows how he or she voted and can be used for later verification has always
been that this would enable vote selling. If you could prove with an
official receipt that you voted for Mr. Big, then it would be practical for
Mr. Big to buy your vote, becoming Mayor Big. So receipts are bad, or at
least, they can be bad. But that doesn't mean that auditing an election
is bad, though many people -- some of them election officials -- make that
illogical jump.
These
same people also claim that receipts are bad because printers are unreliable
or need to be refilled with paper, which they fear poll workers would be
unable to do. We don't seem to have a problem printing ATM receipts or
lotto cards, but then maybe the folks down at 7-11 are more technically
sophisticated.
I
asked the question, “Who
decided to leave out this auditing capability?” The
ability to audit is actually required by the Help America Vote Act of 2001,
which is providing the $3.9 billion needed to buy all those touch screen
voting machines. Or at least it appears to be required. Certainly,
most of the Congressmen and Senators who voted for the Act thought it was
required. But then the
language was changed slightly in a conference committee,
and for some reason, though the auditing requirement remains, most systems
aren't auditable. Huh? The best explanation for this that I have
seen so far says that the new machines are "able" to be audited in the same
sense that I am "able" to fly a Boeing 747. I am a sentient being with
basic motor skills just like all 747 pilots, so I am "able" to fly a
747. So we are "able" to audit these machines. We just don't know
how.
But
it would be a mistake to think that with touch screen voting we are
necessarily giving up an auditing capability that we traditionally have
had. The old lever voting machines that were used in the U.S. for most
of the last century produced no paper trail, just lists of total
votes.
Still,
auditing in some form would be a good idea now because we seem to be entering
a period when electronic elections can be subject to voter fraud
on
a massive scale.
Rather than buying votes one at a time, the bogeyman is stealing votes en
masse. Or even worse, it could be stealing votes on a very intelligent
basis to just shade an election in a way that would go undetected. As
President Kennedy once joked, his wealthy father might be willing to buy him
an election, but he wouldn't buy a landslide.
There
are lots of auditing ideas and systems under consideration. Many people
don't see how these could work given the difficulty of rounding up all those
receipts, but others point out that if even a random one percent of votes were
audited, it would be a powerful discouragement to voting
fraud.
My
favorite voter receipt idea is the Vreceipt,
which creates an auditable receipt that can't be read by the voter or by Mr.
Big.
Now
underlying all this is a deep distrust of the new technology and the people
behind it. Software for these machines tends to be proprietary and
hidden even from the officials who are supposed to "certify" that the code is
accepted. This certification
is
a joke in that bug patches are routinely distributed after certification ---
patches that ought to be re-certified, but aren't. Even worse, some of
the software is considered to be off-the-shelf and not subject to
certification. This applies to Windows CE, which is used in many new
voting machines. But Windows CE isn't really an off-the-shelf
product. Microsoft distributes it in the form of source code that is
compiled for each target hardware device. So here is software that can
be supremely compromised, yet the certification officials never even take a
look at it.
And
there's the big problem -- the people running the elections aren't actually
running them. Vendors are doing that. Election officials don't
know how their equipment works and won't know if it works
wrong.
This
is lunacy.
And
it is also patronage.
There is a lot of money in replacing all those machines, and that money is
going primarily to the usual suspects. Remember that every public crisis
in America is an opportunity for someone to make
money.
In
the last week, I have heard from all the voting machine companies and from
some of their workers. I have heard from election officials and voting
reform advocates. I have heard from all sides, including those who think
I am a nut. I could take all that information those people have dumped
on me and drag this thing out for another week or two in agonizing
detail. I could write about the Open Source voting software being
developed in Australia or the hard-wired electronic voting machines being used
successfully in India. But I choose not to do that in favor of making a
couple simple suggestions.
First,
the area where technology might be useful but isn't being used much, as far as
I can tell, is voter
validation.
This could be a pretty straightforward database application that simply
ensures that people are who they say they are, and they only get to vote
once. The Help America Vote Act and its $3.9 billion don't touch this
problem. If I were even more of a cynic than I am, I might suggest
that's because it is often easier to disenfranchise specific blocks of voters
by losing or corrupting their registration data than any other
way.
As
for voting itself, I think we have made a horrible decision to solve this
problem with technology. While the voting technology we have been
considering is flawed, the best answer doesn't have to be some other voting
technology that is somehow better. We turn to technology because it
supposedly eliminates human error. I suggest that we add humans to the
process in order to eliminate technological errors. And we'd save a lot
of money in the process.
My
model for smart voting is Canada.
The Canadians are watching our election problems and laughing their butts
off. They think we are crazy, and they are
right.
Forget
touch screens and electronic voting. In Canadian Federal elections, two
barely-paid representatives of each party, known as "scrutineers," are present
all day at the voting place. If there are more political parties, there
are more scrutineers. To vote, you write an "X" with a pencil in a one
centimeter circle beside the candidate's name, fold the ballot up and stuff it
into a box. Later, the scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all
sit at a table for about half an hour and count every ballot, keeping a tally
for each candidate. If the counts agree at the end of the process, the
results are phoned-in and everyone goes home. If they don't, you do it
again. Fairness is achieved by balanced self-interest, not by
technology. The population of Canada is about the same as California, so
the elections are of comparable scale. In the last Canadian Federal
election the entire vote was counted in four hours. Why does it take us
30 days or more?
The
2002-2003 budget for Elections Canada is just over $57 million U.S. dollars,
or $1.81 per Canadian citizen. It is extremely hard to get an equivalent
per-citizen figure for U.S. elections, but trust me, it is a LOT higher.
This week, San Francisco held a runoff mayoral election that cost $2.5
million, or $3.27 per citizen of the city. And this was for just one
election, not a whole year of them.
We
are spending $3.9 billion or $10 per citizen for new voting machines.
Canada just prints ballots.
No
voting system is perfect. Elections have been stolen and voters
disenfranchised with paper ballots, too. But our approach of throwing
technology at a problem with a result that election reliability is not
improved, that it may well be compromised in new and even scarier ways, and
that this all costs billions that could be put to better use makes no sense at
all.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031211.html
