Voting machines
Good intentions, bad technology
Jan 22nd 2004
From The Economist print edition
High-tech voting machines are making things worse, not better
ANOTHER election year, another recount fiasco in Florida. On January 6th,
a local election was held for a seat covering parts of Broward and Palm
Beach Counties. A total of 10,844 votes were cast, and Ellyn Bogdanoff won
by a margin of just 12 votes. There were also 137 undervotes, in which
voters' choices failed to register. Under state law, there must be a
manual recount of all undervotes and overvotes (ballots marked more than
once) in any election where the winning margin is less than 0.25%. But no
recount is possible, because the votes were cast using touch-screen voting
machines whose only paper output is the final tally.
AP
Spot the missing chad
The machines can be asked to print out the same result again, of course.
But as Robert Wexler, a Democratic congressman, likes to point out, “a
reprint is not a recount”. He has just filed a suit arguing that the
machines violate state law, and asking a judge to order that they be
equipped with printers, so that voters can verify their decisions on
paper. The paper copies would then be placed in a ballot box, for
recounting if necessary.
This case has highlighted a growing debate about the merits of high-tech
voting machines. Touch-screen machines are particularly controversial,
since they generally do not produce paper output, cause confusion among
voters, and seem to go wrong rather often. It is (just) possible that the
137 undervotes in the Florida case were all cast by voters who
deliberately chose to go to the polls, stepped up to the machines, and
then decided to abstain. It seems more likely that they pressed the wrong
button, or that the machine failed to register their votes properly. But
without a paper trail, it is impossible to say.
Machines that do not produce bits of paper verified by voters are also
open to the charge that their software is full of bugs, or has been rigged
to favour a particular candidate. Stories abound of voting machines
producing dodgy results. In one case in Indiana, 5,352 voters somehow cast
144,000 votes. In Virginia, machines subtracted votes rather than adding
them to a candidate's total in some cases. Machines have broken down and
been taken away, only to reappear with their seals broken; memory cards
(on which votes are recorded) have gone missing.
Conspiracy theories have been fuelled by damning memos leaked from
Diebold, one of the leading makers of touch-screen voting machines. The
firm's voting-machine software, which also leaked on to the internet, was
found to contain numerous security flaws.
The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002 in the wake of the
Florida fiasco of 2000, was supposed to sort things out by replacing
old-fashioned punch-card machines (and their infamous “hanging chads”)
with more modern voting equipment. But HAVA has only served to confuse
matters further.
The federal government, for good reason, is not allowed to tell the states
how to run their elections. Instead HAVA offered $3.8 billion, which the
states could apply for in order to purchase HAVA-compliant voting
machinery. But the technical committee that is supposed to decide on the
HAVA standard has not even been appointed. In the meantime, the money is
being doled out to the states anyway. Some of the new equipment purchased
meets only the now-obsolete 1990 standard; other machines meet the 2002
standard, which experts also regard as flawed. The result is a mess. Even
the regulations surrounding gambling machines are tighter.
Yet there is surely a simple answer: new voting machines should be
required to produce a paper output that voters can check. Any funny
business, whether accidental or deliberate, could then be exposed by a
hand recount if necessary. In November, California became the first state
to require that all voting machines must produce a paper trail by 2006.
But the debate is far from over.
To begin with, some electoral officials oppose the idea of paper trails on
the basis that printers will be too expensive, or they might jam. This
strikes Rebecca Mercuri, an electronic-voting expert at Harvard's John F.
Kennedy School of Government, as an odd argument: after all Diebold and
other voting-machine manufacturers also make cash registers and ATMs, and
they seem to work.
Another objection is that voters might walk off with the paper ballots. Dr
Mercuri's preferred solution is that voters should be able to see the
paper ballot under glass to verify it, after which it drops into the
ballot box. Another option would be to use paper forms that voters place
under optical readers, which would confirm their choice before the form is
placed in the ballot box. The counting is automated, in other words, but
not the voting.
It is hardly rocket science. But it is too late to sort out the mess
before November, when perhaps 20% of the votes will be cast using
paperless touch-screen machines. Worries over their reliability and
security, and the lack of a common standard, mean the new machines may
have made a Florida-like fiasco more rather than less likely. “We're going
to have digital hanging chads,” says Dr Mercuri.
Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All
rights reserved.
[ ]s
Eng. Amilcar Brunazo Filho - Santos, SP
Em Defesa da Cidadania
http://www.civilis.org
Pelo Voto Seguro
http://www.votoseguro.org
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