Computerized Voting: Is It Trustworthy Yet?

This newsletter will reach most of you on the day that we in the United States go to the polls to elect a new president. And although you'd never know it from reading most of the media reporting, we'll also be voting on many candidates and issues that are much closer to home: Congressional choices, state representatives, judges, and in my own city, a set of charter amendments that make changes to the way the municipality operates.

Despite all the hype about the national election, in many states there's little question as to which presidential candidate will get the electoral votes for that state. These local elections, however, are a different story. In the 2004 presidential election, which was considered a "photo finish," there was a difference of over 3 million votes. In my city's most recent council election, one of the candidates won (and his opponent lost) by a mere 3 votes.

What does all this have to do with technology? Following the debacle over hanging chads in the 2000 election, most places in the U.S. have switched to some form of electronic voting, and many voters aren't entirely comfortable with that. In fact, I discussed this four years ago, but today electronic voting systems are even more widespread. Have they gotten more trustworthy?

There are two basic types of electronic voting machines in use: touchscreen machines and optical scanning machines. According to this report on CNN, about one third of Americans will vote using touchscreens and over half will use optical scan systems. There are still a few holdout precincts that use the old fashioned curtained voting booths with mechanical levers, a few that use even more old fashioned paper ballots counted by hand, and a very few that still use the infamous punch cards:
Voting machines could bring Election Day glitches - CNN.com

The touchscreen machines work something like my kitchen computer. Well, actually, I hope it works a little better. Not that we have any major problems with the TouchSmart - but I'm not sure I would trust it to register my vote. It's awfully easy to inadvertently touch the wrong thing and open a program you didn't intend to. In fact, our cat regularly opens or closes windows by waving his tail across the screen.

But hey, that can't happen with the machines that are used for voting, can it? They must surely be designed to prevent such accidents. Maybe - but maybe not. There have already been reports during early voting in at least four states from voters who say the touchscreen system registered their votes for the wrong candidates. Still, we know that touchscreens can work fairly well. After all, we use them in ATMs and supermarket checkouts all the time. Of course, if something does go wrong at the checkout counter, the clerk or a manager can override the machine and fix things. If a problem occurs at the ATM, you might lose a few dollars but you probably won't affect the fate of an entire city, state or nation.

Oh, there will be trained people at the polls to help you if your vote registers incorrectly, too. But it will be difficult to do so without threatening the integrity of the secret ballot, which is an important tenet on which our election process is based.

With an error rate of one percent, touchscreens are slightly more reliable than punch cards. And 99% accuracy might be "good enough" in a national presidential contest where millions of votes are cast. But a single dropped vote could mean the difference between winning and losing for a candidate in a city or county election.

Optical scan systems work a little differently and are more reliable. These work like the standardized tests that you may have taken in school - you fill in a circle on a paper ballot and then it's run through a scanner that counts the votes according to the position of the marked circle. One advantage is that there is a physical piece of paper that can be recounted if necessary.

The big worry is that electronic voting results can be manipulated after the fact, without the voters knowing about it. This is a particular concern with touchscreens that don't provide a paper trail. But even if there's no deliberate manipulation, all of us who use computers know that electronic data sometimes gets changed or lost. Who among us has never lost a file to the vagaries of a failed drive or corrupted memory chip? The electronic voting machines have been shown to lose the records of some votes during the upload to the server.

Like it or not, some type of electronic voting is probably with us to stay. Other methods have been proposed. Some folks want to allow people to vote over the Internet. Talk about a free-for-all! How do you keep people from voting twice or as many times as they want? How do you ensure that everyone who votes is a citizen who's qualified to do so? And how do you do that without recording the actual vote linked to the name and thus destroying the secrecy of the ballot box? On the other hand, Internet voting would almost certainly result in higher turnout and would make it much easier for the disabled and those without transportation to cast their votes.

A friend of mine had this suggestion to simplify the process: in order to avoid long lines at the polling place, issue everyone a "smart card" in place of a voter registration certificate and let people vote for one candidate or the other by simply swiping his or her card in the Democrat or Republican slot. Aside from the fact that many of us don't vote a straight ticket, and the fact that there are generally independent candidates and candidates from minor parties on the ticket, and the fact that a "straight ticket" swipe wouldn't register your vote for or against propositions such as our charter amendments, once again this would seem to link your vote to your identity.

Is there a better way, a way that's foolproof and will ensure that every qualified person's vote counts and that only qualified votes get counted? Tell us what you think. Should we be looking for a way to enable secure and reliable online voting or is that an oxymoron? Should the federal government mandate a standardized type of voting system for national elections or should the voting method be up to the state or locality? When you cast your vote electronically, do you feel more or less confident that it will be registered and counted properly than back when we used paper ballots, lever machines or punch cards? Tell us what you think .