This is based on a RoadDave from the old website from November 11th, 2004. Since the US is falling uphill towards e-voting in five weeks time, it might be worthwhile to look at it again.
Mechanical or electromechanical voting machines have been around for quite a while in the US. Enter the polling place, close the curtain, pull the handle for the droog you want in the office, open the curtain and go home. When the polls close, the vote counting people open a locked door on the back, read off the numbers, then call the numbers into the central office. Vote is done, life goes on and a new group of thieves and pimps get to take office.
We’ve used a limited form of Electronic voting in Canada for quite a few years. Many polls use what is called a Mark-Sense ballot. Just like those IQ tests you took in high school, you shade in the little oval with a #2 pencil, next to the name of the candidate you want to vote for. Put the ballot in a paper sleeve to keep your choices away from prying eyes and bring it to the machine.
The machine, which looks like an old fashioned laser printer, sucks the ballot in and reads it, doing the counting on the fly. Results are written to a memory card inside the machine.
The machine tells the poll worker and the voter if they have overvoted or undervoted and asks them if they want to confirm their overvote or undervote without disclosing what the particulars are. I’ve done this; overvoted to spoil a ballot when I couldn’t hold my nose long enough for any of the meat puppets running for the office. I did vote, even if my vote was to create a deliberately spoiled ballot.
After the vote is counted by the machine, the paper Mark-Sense ballot is kept, in case the machine coughs up a lung, pees its pants, or is hammered to pieces by an unhappy scrutineer. The ballots are put in a regular, sealed, ballot box. When the polls close, the memory card is removed from the machine and put in a laptop. The results are displayed along with any errors the machine has encountered. If the memory card is truly pooched, it says so.
The vote numbers are either read off the screen and phoned in, or sent electronically to the central office for tabulation using wireless or a dial up modem. In any case, a broken machine, a tampered card, a busy signal, or blithering idiot poll worker, the paper ballots are retained and sent to the central office, still sealed in their ballot box. This is the backup when the technology fails or a judicial recount is ordered.
Full e-voting dispenses with the paper step altogether. You go behind the curtain and touch-screen your choices, hoping the technology works as intended. We’ve found that the technology doesn’t always work as intended.
In one case, the e-voting machine ran out of memory after only a few thousand votes but didn’t shut down, or cry, or beg, or beep. People kept voting away and the machine kept showing the voters the ballot and accepting their choices. Then, it would toss their choices in the bit bucket, gone forever. Those who see black helicopters everywhere are certain that it only tossed out Democrat or Libertarian votes, but the endgame is the same. No votes were recorded.
The tradition of secret ballot, accurately counted, has a tradition going back to the Ancient Greeks: Voters marking their choice on the shards of a clay pot and putting their choices in a big basket which were then counted by impartial counters. If there was a dispute over who got how many votes, a judge could always recount the pot shards.
The issue comes down to three things: We want a secret ballot. We want accurate results. We want the results as fast as possible.
The secret ballot, we can do. Accurate results using paper balloting is about as good as it gets, but it isn’t fast. Paper has the advantage in that it allows for a judicial recount, as you just bundle up the ballots and drive them over to a central warehouse for counting by the judicial folks.
There have been hiccups with mechanical systems, notably the punch ballot and the hanging chad issues in Florida, but at least someone can go back and look at the paper. Much of the problems with mechanical voting come back to poor design, untrained poll workers, broken technology and inept voters. These are all things that can be fixed easily.
Pure e-voting, without paper, is problematic. If there is a demand for a judicial recount, what do you do? Take the touch screen over to the judges and have them eyeball the output? What happens if a bratty seven year old at the polling place decides to dump his 32 oz. Mister Freezie into the guts of the voting machine?
The concern is that the internal programming of a pure e-voting machine is not subject to scrutiny by an independent third party. We are trusting the manufacturer to put in programming that doesn’t lie, or juggle the output, or drop zeros, or just round up to the nearest 10,000 for the Republicans.
Programming code is hard to validate without very specialized knowledge and even harder to test for security. So much of the internals of an e-voting device are labeled ‘proprietary’ and ‘confidential’ by the manufacturer. We are not allowed to look, or question. This is the heart of accuracy and by definition, democracy. Remember we want a secret ballot, accurately counted. If we can’t verify the counting, then we don’t have democracy.
We want a system that is fast, which e-voting is. We want a system that is secret, which e-voting can be, or at least the steps up to actually touching the screen to indicate my choices. We want a system that is accurate, so if I do screw up, I can change my selection before it goes into the ‘ballot box’ either virtual or physical. E-voting is not accurate because the computer code is not subject to impartial third-party scrutiny.
E-voting is also not secure because you can hack the memory cards. Go to www.blackboxvoting.org if you want to see how to hack one with four dollars worth of hand tools and ten minutes.
However, we can make the memory cards more secure by having strict protocols in place for e-voting machines. The protocols already exist. Take the same protocols for a physical ballot box and apply them to the memory card and machine. Even Karl Rove knows you don’t break the seal on a ballot box until the polls are closed and then, only with witnesses present.
At the end of it, we could make e-voting secure, but we’re still missing the audit trail of paper.
The closest we’ve come is Mark-Sense, where the computer side of things is just a counter, based on the paper ballot. The programming is simple, the technology mature and the results are reasonably reliable. Second worst-case? You can re-run the paper ballots into another machine, if the current machine blows a headvalve or starts behaving oddly.
Or, worst-case, you can sit down with a calculator and tabulate off the paper ballots in an entirely manual process. This works, even in a power failure and is as accurate as humans counting pot shards can make it.
So far, until the e-voting machine people show us all the inner workings and have the code validated by several impartial, or even aggressively distrustful groups, I’m not prepared to sign on the line. I want a paper ballot.
Now the kicker: You cannot demand a paper ballot. You are required to use the technology set out for you, like it or not. Your right to vote in a secret ballot, accurately counted, has now been taken away.
Enjoy your democracy. Thank you for voting.
RoadDave 