If the 2000 election taught us anything, it's that balky voting equipment can make the difference between a president and a loser. This year, in an attempt to correct what went wrong four years ago in Florida, many states will replace paper-based voting machines with ATM-like gadgets called direct-recording electronics, or DREs. Many election-watchers already think the new system won't work: What if the computers screw up? One presumptive solution, a hard copy backup called a voter-verifiable paper trail, has become a requirement in some states. But it might be financially insupportable and logistically disastrous. And that's just the beginning. Here's why evoting isn't everywhere.
What's so great about paper?
Many electioneers say that when faced with the inevitable political challenges to electronic-vote tallies, the digital totals will be meaningless without a physical record. Some techies like the idea of encrypting the vote counts, but paper is the most popular choice. Nevada is mandating that its evoting technology include paper trails this year; California and Ohio are demanding it by 2006. Before pulling the virtual lever, voters will get to see a printout listing their choices. Once the voter OKs the ballot, the printout falls into a sealed box. But dissenting computer wonks say testing and redundant memory make hard copy unnecessary, and many election officials call paper costly and wasteful.
Weren't those tech-savvy Californians supposed to have figured it all out?
Kevin Shelley, the forward-thinking secretary of state, persuaded voters to earmark $200 million for new equipment and created a panel of experts to review the options. By the March 2004 primaries, nearly a third of the state's electorate was slated to vote on paperless DREs. But Shelley's panelists rebelled, hackers found gaping security flaws in one machine's code, and DREs had widespread failures - in one county more than half of the precincts were affected. By April, Shelley beat a tactical retreat, yanking the DREs until officials could provide a paper trail and satisfy security standards. Later that month, he called for a criminal investigation into Diebold, a major DRE vendor.
Diebold? Isn't it part of a conspiracy?
Diebold became the bad guy after it shut down the Web site of an activist who stumbled upon the code for one of its machines. Then documents emerged that suggested the company fudged certification requirements in Georgia's 2002 election, which popular Democrats lost. (CEO Wally O'Dell is a major Republican donor.) In California, Diebold had to apologize for claiming certification for a DRE that later had problems. But its mistakes look more like sloppiness and arrogance than corruption.
E-voting worked in India. Why can't the US get it right?
India's national elections in May involved 380 million voters and more than a million evoting devices. The Congress Party won in an upset. The machines, developed by two government-controlled tech companies (instead of the States' hodgepodge of vendors), were extremely simple, resembling a UPS driver's tracking pad, and couldn't network. But it's a little early to call India a slam dunk. A lawsuit was filed during the election to force the implementation of a verifiable paper trail. As Stanford computer science professor and Verified Voting Foundation founder David Dill points out: "Any time that many people vote on a first-time technology and the results are a surprise, I'm going to have questions."
So what do we do?
Stop studying machines out of context. Even the geeks have broadened their focus to the entire election process, from ballot design to polling-day procedures. Election officials have finally developed a healthy mistrust of vendors' promises. The most rabid activists (and a few officials, too) are gravitating toward optical-scan technology like InkaVote, which substitutes pen marks on paper for hole punches through it. Voters can read the cards before leaving the booth, and computers can make an accurate count. The irony? It's the same technology developed to score standardized tests like the SAT - before the tests were scored by computers.
Paul O'Donnell (podonnell@beliefnet.com) wrote about electronic voting in Wired 12.01.
credit: Elliot Haag
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Why You're Still Voting on Paper
