From
Scientific American
February 2001
- Cyberview
No E(asy) Cure
Electronic Voting Won't Fix Butterfly Ballots, Dimpled Chads Or W.'S Presidency
The lengthy machinations of last November's election proved one thing: that the instruments we have for measuring the people's will are not precise. Ballot recounting largely amounts to delving into statistical noise.What probably astonished most people was the sheer range of voting systems in the U.S. ...
It took only a few days before war was declared on chad and people started talking about electronic and online voting systems as the answer to everything. By that time the experts were already heading them off at the pass. Electronic and online voting systems are not going to provide perfect systems ...
...
In a posting to the RISKS Forum (http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/) on Election Day, Douglas W. Jones, chair of the Iowa State Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems, pointed out that although Federal Election Commission guidelines require that custom-built software be reviewed by an independent third party, "industry standard components" are acceptable without such a review. Increasingly, he wrote, custom voting software is being replaced with off-the-shelf, proprietary software. In other words: Windows. And who knows what's going on in there? As Thomas went on to say, a dedicated individual out to fix an election--not now, perhaps, but in the future--might find himself a job within a relevant software company. He could seek to be assigned to the right group of programmers to allow him to modify code that when the right date came along could swing, say, 10 percent of the votes away from a specified party and distribute them in random amounts to other parties. In such a case, you wouldn't see anything as obvious as Palm Beach County's now famous anomalous blip for Pat Buchanan.
Doctored software isn't the only risk. There are also power failures, bugs, hacker attacks and uncertainty whether the software inside the voting machine is the same software that was approved by the state. In Internet voting, there's the political issue of shifting the burden of supplying and maintaining the voting infrastructure from election officials to individual voters. Not to mention the fact that not everyone has access to the Internet. Even the argument of lowered costs is specious, says Rebecca Mercuri in the November 2000 Communications of the ACM, ...
"All the experts agree on some things," says Lorrie Cranor, a researcher at AT&T Labs Research who has written extensively on voting systems. "For example, that Internet voting is a huge can of worms, that there is no perfect system--all technology solutions are going to have problems--and that punch-card ballots are the worst thing we could have. The place where the experts don't all agree is if you get rid of punch cards, what do you replace them with?"
One suggestion has been direct-recording electronic (DRE) devices. Such machines, which register votes directly into a computer, have no audit trail, ...
...
Overall, it seems unlikely that electronic voting would fix the kind of problem that happened in Florida, where the margin for error in the voting systems was greater than the margin of victory. Of course, e-voting would have spared all those dedicated poll workers from hours of ballot checking, ... But ... democracy is in part about perception and the reinforcement of trust. There is a comforting, ritual quality to that painstaking ballot counting and its close, bipartisan observance. In a narrow election decided wholly by electronic voting, there would be no comparable way to convince people that every vote really did count.
--WENDY M. GROSSMAN
WENDY M. GROSSMAN wrote From Anarchy to Power: The Net Comes of Age, due out this month from NYU Press.