Recount: A Magazine of Contemporary Politics

E-Voting: The End of the Recount?

By Erin Obourn | Oct 12, 2004 Print

In 2000 it was everywhere. Television and newspapers were saturated with it. Americans of a certain age were talking about it. When ballot-counting problems in Florida rendered officials unable to declare a winner in the Presidential election, the resulting uproar was so far-reaching that parents were chagrined to hear their pudgy-cheeked and wide-eyed children uttering their first words, “hanging chad.”

The Florida recount debacle in the 2000 Presidential election was a big deal. New parents, and Americans in general, for that matter, beware: Electronic voting machines, offering new technology that allows voters to register their preferences by touching a screen, may cause an even bigger uproar than the Florida punchcard chaos did four years ago. And according to some experts in the field, that may be what is needed to give the controversial new machines the public attention and scrutiny they warrant.

Despite the objections of e-voting critics and computer scientists over the inability to recount or audit election results with electronic voting systems, as well as their vulnerability to software and technical problems and hacking, plenty of Americans will vote on these machines on Nov. 2. According to Election Data Services, a consulting firm specializing in election administration, 29 percent of the electorate will cast its vote on electronic touch screens on Election Day, up 17 percent from 2000.

After the 2000 election, many counties rushed to replace what was perceived as antiquated voting systems with new technology they hoped would prevent future problems. The 2002 Help America Vote Act authorized $3.8 billion in federal spending for the purpose of replacing punch card and lever voting machines and making voting systems accessible to the disabled. Even with a long list of electronic voting machine failures, questionable acts by the machines’ manufacturers and the absence of a paper trail to verify results, there was a rush to implement the new technology.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the undergraduate program in Communication Studies at New York University, has studied and written about the drawbacks of electronic voting. “This is how it works in America, unfortunately. We order technology and ask questions later,” Vaidhyanathan said. “What it’s going to take is a lot of controversy this fall. States like Nevada, Florida, Wisconsin may come down to a couple hundred votes and people will want a recount, and with computers they won’t be able to have one.”

There must be something positive about these machines if they are being implemented at such a fast pace, right? According to Vaidhyanathan, there is. Touch screen voting has a high cost up front (machines can cost up to $4,000 a piece), but low costs in the long run, because they have no paper or moving parts and are easier and cheaper to fix. States get money from the federal government to buy these machines, and are trying to save money over time by doing so. Another perk of electronic voting machines is the benefits they provide people with disabilities, who can for the first time vote for themselves. Voice software can read ballots to the visually impaired, while laptop voting screens allow people confined to wheelchairs to vote on portable machines.

Electronic voting machines are also fast, but, says Vaidhyanathan, they come at the cost of being accurate. “Do we really need to know who won by 11 p.m.? The President isn’t sworn in until January,” he said. “It’s better to be right than fast, but that’s a very un-American idea.”

While the potential for these positive aspects to improve ballot systems exists, critics believe the software is just not ready, and machine manufacturers have not provided the proof necessary to convince them otherwise.

Diebold Inc., based in North Canton, Ohio, one of the most well-known and most criticized electronic voting machine manufacturers, has been under attack for creating equipment that is easily hacked into and for keeping its software source code a secret. Some insist Diebold and other manufacturers should follow an open-source strategy.

“In open-source strategy all the code is written out online so many more people can test it, empowering thousands of quality control individuals to test the software,” Vaidhyanathan said. “But private companies insist on keeping it private. Do we want private companies in charge of the most public activity, voting?”

A study released in July 2003 by academic security experts at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities found that Diebold software lacked the level of security needed to safeguard elections. While Diebold dismissed the findings, saying that the software researchers analyzed was old, Avi Rubin, co-author of the study and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, is very skeptical of the company’s honesty. According to Rubin, insiders could program the machine to alter election results without detection. Eyebrows were raised when Walden O’Dell, Diebold’s chief executive officer, wrote a letter to Republicans in August claiming he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year.”

“My two primary concerns are the inability to recount or audit the election and the ability of a manufacturer to rig the voting machines,” Rubin wrote in an email. “I believe e-voting was implemented too quickly. It could have been done much better with open source and paper trails. I am not fundamentally against e-voting. I’m against really bad e-voting developed in secret, which is what we have now.”

Other critics say we should forget the conspiracy theories, the problems with the technology itself are reason enough not to use them. Rebecca Mercuri, a computer security specialist and Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University, is among them.

According to Mercuri, failures of performance in actual elections have demonstrated the existence of major flaws in electronic voting systems. She urges election officials to refrain from implementing any system that does not provide a paper receipt that can be checked by the voter before deposit and used by the election board in the case of a recount.

“You’re going to take all those machines and in the most stressful election the U.S. may have ever seen and have them work well all day? The chances of that happening are zero,” Mercuri said. “There’s an image that’s being shoved down election officials’ throats that if you don’t have the latest technology you’re in the back woods. It may be the latest, but it’s not the greatest.”

While some states have implemented requirements for paper receipts with electronic machines, many voters will vote without them next month. Debate over the paper trail continues, with some local election officials arguing that paper receipts will create a whole slew of new problems. They cite paper jams, voter confusion, delays in the voting booth and a cumbersome length of paper for each ballot receipt among potential drawbacks.

Although there is no way to know for sure before Nov. 2, with many critics challenging the legitimacy of the process as a whole, Americans may be in for the Florida 2000 debacle sequel: This time it’s electronic.

“I hope we don’t have another debacle, but I think it’s very possible,” Rubin said. “Hopefully, we will have widespread demand for better voting methods in either case.” When asked if anything can be done to increase the security or reliability of these machines before Election Day, Rubin responded, “Very little. We missed the boat.”

Vaidhyanathan echoes the sentiment, telling voters, “It’s important to remember that punch cards are still around. It’s an awkward situation four years down the line. We have not rid ourselves of the worst voting method, and spent billions to implement another imperfect system.”

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