Do Electronic Voting Machines Improve the Voting Process?

¶ … Things Fall Apart" Achebe before referencing

Electronic Voting Machines: Technology's failure to rehabilitate American's confidence in the voting process

Theoretically, counting votes should be easy. After all, surely it is simply the accumulation and the verifying of data? However, when America attempted to adopt touch-screen, electronic voting on a wide scale, the result was a fiasco. "There was a wonderful confluence of events. There was a vague product requirement coming from an agency that doesn't really understand technology (the U.S. Congress), foisting a system on other government agencies that may not have asked for it. There was a relatively small time frame for development and a lot of money. Finally, the government did not allow for even the notion of failure. By 2004, darn it, we'd all have touch screen voting" (Cringely, 2003). Congress expected to adopt touch-screen voting on a widespread basis in the next election, after the controversy over the results in the 2000 Florida presidential election demonstrated the need for reform of the punch card voting system. However, this sweeping decision neglected to take one crucial fact into consideration -- the new system was supposed to be based in unerring technology, unlike the inefficient paper systems of old. But only "28% of software projects were complete successes in 2000," meaning that there is a 72% rate of failure of software projects, give or take, on any given year (Cringely, 2003).

It did not matter -- the government was determined that touch-screen voting would be instated. After Florida, the U.S. government allocated $3.5 billion to modernize voting systems in all states. Diebold Systems, the company responsible for creating most of the automated teller systems in America purchased a smaller company that made voting machines to take advantage of the burgeoning market. Two other firms like Diebold who made ATMs, grocery self check-out systems and kiosk ticket systems threw their hats in the ring and accepted bids as well. Since information technology specializes in the storing and accumulating of vast amounts of data, computers seemed 'the way to go' to reform the voting process. Apparently, no one in Congress has ever had his or her computer system 'crash.'

The first and most obvious problem with the use of electronic voting is that there is 'paper trail.' In other words, "there doesn't seem to be any way in these systems to verify that the numbers coming out are the numbers that went in. There is no print-out from the machine, no receipt given to the voter, no way of auditing the election at all (Cringely, 2003). For a system that is supposed to alleviate voter's ethical concerns, this is problematic, to say the least, at best. The lack of a paper trail means that the machines cannot be 'audited' by an independent, nonpartisan authority.

The truly audacious aspect of this lack of a paper trail with touch-screen voting is that the other machines created by Diebold and their ilk DO have 'paper trails.' Ask yourself: would you use an ATM that didn't dispense a receipt informing you of your balance, so you could be made aware immediately of a bank computer error? Would you use your credit card at a store that did not give you a receipt, so you could check to see if you had been overcharged? Of course not -- you would shift to another bank or use another store. But this act of faith was exactly what Diebold was expected of American voters. And voters in states like Georgia that only use electronic voting cannot move their votes, like consumers can move their dollars, to a more reliable venue.

To be fair, not all members of Congress were equally confident in Diebold's efficacy and security. For example, Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, "introduced a bill requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their software be available for public inspection, but was told that this was unnecessary, as such systems "lacking these safeguards haven't caused problems" (Krugman, 2003: 1). In disbelief, he asked: "How do you know?" In other words, without a verifiable paper trail, how can anyone be sure that automotive voting is recording its data in an accurate fashion, and cannot be tampered with by outsiders, even if the results seem to be fair (Krugman 2003:1). Soon after Holt raised his objections one particularly egregious example arose in yes, Florida: "In a special election for House District 91, which includes parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties, the winner -- Ellyn Bogdanoff -- won by 12 votes. But electronic voting machines in Broward County recorded 134 'undervotes' (a person comes to vote but doesn't actually cast one -- not a likely scenario, since there was only the one contest on the ballot)" (Kantor, 2004). Under Florida law, a recount is required in such a situation. "Trouble was, the machines didn't create any kind of paper trail. It was impossible to recount. Oops" (Kantor, 2004).

Although all of the contractors that undertook the construction of automated voting machine had problems in their system, Diebold's system was found to be particularly ridden with problems. Diebold refused to make its software available for public inspection, on the grounds that it was proprietary, despite the fact that it was being employed by a federal authority, the U.S. government, to make a system that would record data that could affect millions of voter's lives. Yet this same software was discovered by an author writing a book about the company "on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it....The server was used by employees of Diebold Election Systems to update software on its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines both the information and the opportunity to do so" (Krugman 2003: 1).

Independent audits by nonpartisan Johns Hopkins and Rice University researchers said that the Diebold automated systems were faulty. Even a leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggested that corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and refused to perform routine tests that would have revealed these problems (Krugman 2003: 1). Furthermore, many of the problems with the Florida election, and other contested elections all over the U.S. during 2000 were not specific to punch-card voting. For example, there was a mysterious purge of all of the eligible Florida voters deemed to be felons -- who were not actually felons at all, but were mostly African-Americans, mostly from Democratic areas.