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The State of Electronic Voting in Georgia
An anonymous reader writes "The AJC is reporting on the current state of electronic voting in Georgia. The article discusses both sides of the debate and mentions Bev Harris and her work at Black Box Voting. Is touch screen voting the best solution available or is a conspiracy afoot?"
I've yet to hear a cogent statement of the problem that electronic voting will fix.
Many of the statements sound similar to the first comments about office automation. Computing was introduced into the office "just because", without a lot of thought going into which procedures should be automated vs. eliminated entirely vs. left alone.
A paper ballot (be it punch card, pencil fill in, or what have you) can't crash, is a permanent record (yeah yeah, they can be destroyed, but so can anything made up of atoms. I'll drop a stack of paper from 5' and you drop a touch screen from 5', we'll see which one survives), and can't be easily intercepted or altered without evidence of tampering.
What problem are electronic voting advocates trying to solve?
This is truly horrible... apparently Florida has decided that since it is not possible to do a recount for electronic voting machines, it is not necessary to attempt anything of the sort. Realize that the next election might be hacked, support Rush Holt's Voter Confidence bill, and don't forget to get the Diebold memos from the SCDC.
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One of the best arguments in the article is this:
"What we do know is that every condition needed for fraud did exist. The question is not whether it has happened. The question is whether it can happen."
Granted, there's no perfect security. But electronic voting companies seem to have a problem at least making an attempt to fix any possible vulnerabilities. When the Patriot Act passed 98-1 in the Senate, the lone dissenter (Russ Feingold of WI) said that it's not whether or not people have abused the law... it's that the potential exists. Sometimes it's really hard to teach someone the value of security until they've been victimized/directly affected by it. The problem, unfortunately, is proving that it happened.
With regard to Cox's response on a paper trail:
"It really adds nothing to the system, [and] the people who think it will don't understand the history of voter fraud we've had with paper."
Personally, I don't think removing one potential of fraud and replacing it with another really solves any problem. And suppose something does go wrong (massive failure, serious bug, fraud)? Is there anything to fall back on? And at least if you want to fix the elections, it makes it a bit more difficult.
The solution? "Lets use computers." Yet some how the assumption leaked in that the computers used to do the balloting had to be the same machines that tallied the votes as well. This is a paradigm that should be abollished as soon as possible. While we fix one problem (ballots not reflecting voter preferences properly), we introduce another (allowing increased access to the device doing the tallying).
The solution as the original comment said is to split the process. Use computers to create 'standardized' ballots, and to simplify/error check each voters choice making. And let the voter see a human readable ballot that they can confirm and turn in at a different part of the polling station.
Tallying can be done in a sepparate process, much the way scan-tron type ballots are counted today quickly and accurately.
Some thoughts / added benefits:
1. The paper trail. Voters see their votes correctly printed on paper. And the ballot machines can be used as a double check to make sure no ballots were destroyed. (added reassurance against tampering, since now it requires a coordinated attack both physical and electronic).
2. If you make the ballot human & computer readable (just like your account number on checks) you can verrify the ballot and not have to assume that the bar code the ballot machine produces matches the text.
3. If the ballot form is standardized then the voting equipment becomes commoditized. States / localities can choose the balloting and tallying equipment manufacturers to buy from independently and no one is tied to a given manufacturer for either device. They can even purchace from more than one vendor for the balloting devices. This will drive down prices, as well as letting the govornment take trustworthiness into account when purchacing equipment.
It would be great if legislatures could demand this type of system instead of letting each district try to 'roll your own' and get unknown results in terms of reliability / trustworthiness. It would also mean we wouldn't have to put anywhere near as much trust in the makers of the machines.
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Is touch screen voting the best solution available or is a conspiracy afoot?
This totally misses the point. The point is not whether voter fraud has been committed, the point is that there's no way to tell if it was or wasn't.
Diebold's system is completely proprietary; we can't examine it to see if there are any "loopholes" or not, and we can't check its security. We can't go back and audit to make sure nothing funny happened. Adding icing to the cake, the Diebold leadership is openly pro-Republican.
To summarize; by adopting Diebold's system here in GA, we've privatized the election by giving complete control over it to a private corporation that's biased in favor of a particular outcome. To say it smells fishy would be an understatement of monumental proportions.
Instead of focusing on whether fraud occurred or not, we need to be demanding an election system that is auditable and verifiable to the people. Open elections are key to democracy; Diebold's system is anything but open.
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