American\'s Voting System the Topic

American's Voting System

The topic of upgrading America's voting system is a hotly contested debate. Federally funding has been made available to counties and states to replace their punch-card and mechanical voting systems. However, not all electronic voting systems are created equal.

Following is a review of one of the most popular electronic voting systems, the iVotronic touchscreen system, that is already in use, and the trend in the adoption of electronic voting systems, of reduced faith in these new systems.

America's Voting System

The topic of upgrading America's voting system is a hotly contested debate. Federally funding has been made available to counties and states to replace their punch-card and mechanical voting systems. However, not all electronic voting systems are created equal.

Following is a review of one of the most popular electronic voting systems, the iVotronic touchscreen system, that is already in use, and the trend in the adoption of electronic voting systems, of reduced faith in these new systems.

Given the challenges Florida had with the 2000 presidential election, it is not surprising that Florida's Miami-Dade County quickly turned to an electronic voting system, in order to prevent future 'hanging chads'.

The county invested $25 million in a Election Systems & Software's (ES&S) iVotronic system (Songini, 2005). The iVotronic system is a touch screen voting system that is poll worker activated.

It is portable and multilingual system that records vote counts on internal flash memory.

Using a device called a Personal Electronic Ballot, the poll worker turns the machine on and enables voting. The voters than choose the language they'd like the ballot in and make their voting selections using a touchscreen. Poll workers than move the summary data from the machines onto the Personal Electronic Ballot, once polls are closed. These are then transported to election headquarters, via a computer network ("Electronic voting," 2004).

There have been several issues with the system since it has been put in place by not only Florida, but North Carolina and Texas as well.

In September 2002, a spot check of machines in Florida showed several Miami-Dade precincts as having one or no votes, when in reality hundreds of votes had been cast. In addition, there were differences noted between votes noted in the main tabulation system and the backup system.

In Texas, the next month, several dozen complaints were received when Democrat votes were cast for Republicans and vice versa.

In November, two early voting locations in North Carolina failed to record 436 ballots. The following May, 2003, a serious bug in the software made Florida's auditing, recounting, and certifying systems unusable. and, lastly, in January 2003, a special election for the State House District 91 showed that 134 votes were for no candidates, even though it was a single candidate election ("Electronic voting," 2004).

These challenges has slowed the current trend in adoption of electronic voting systems. States and counties around the country are now questioning the intelligence in spending tens of millions of dollars on a system that has proven to be unreliable at best. All of the glitches and voting anomalies that have come up over the recent years caused Americans, especially in geographic regions like Florida where the problems have occurred, to lose faith in these high-tech voting systems.

In fact, faith has dwindled so significantly, in February, some Broward County citizens, along with members from nine other Florida counties, banded together to create the first citizen exit poll in America. Nonprofessional data gatherers recorded votes as voters left the polls.

Approximately 20 people, including Democrats, Republicans, and at least one Green Party member, made up Project Vote Count and manned tables outside official polling places.

These tables were run just like an official election, with voters filling out 'affidavits' that were then placed into sealed boxes. Approximately 75% of voters in the five precincts that were targeted participated. The results were disturbingly dissimilar to those reported in the official poll. Whereas McCain received 50% of the Republican vote officially, only 21% voted for McCain in the exit poll. Clinton was touted as receiving 59.5% of the Democratic vote, officially, yet the exit poll results showed only 45% (Newton, 2008). Results, such as this, have further exacerbated America's dwindling faith in a change in systems that is being forced on.