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E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence In Elections
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Techdirt columnist, Timothy Lee, hit the metaphoric nail on the head, claiming that e-Voting undermines the public perception of election fairness - even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing. 'In a well-designed voting system, voters shouldn't have to take anyone's actions on faith. The entire process should be simple and transparent, so that anyone can observe it and verify that it was carried out correctly. The complexity and opacity of e-voting machines makes effective public scrutiny impossible, and so it's a bad idea even in the absence of specific evidence of wrongdoing.' Add to this the possibility technical faults, conflicts of interest and evidence of tampering, how long before the US vote is viewed as an electronic pantomime?"
Another part of the problem is that most existing implementations are - frankly - crap. They offer minimal security, have frequently been reported as having errors such as non-zero counts, have poor reliability, provide minimal accountability and often provide no means of verification. This is wholly unacceptable. Nobody would accept that from a cash register in a supermarket, never mind a system that is mission-critical in a democracy.
Hand-counts can be reliable. For the longest time, the British system was entirely done by hand-counting, with very small error rates for a population of 60 million. The American system includes machine counts, statistical sampling, and other mechanisms for speeding up the returns, with different States using different methods. It is also worrying that the first returns are announced prior to the polls closing on the west coast, which will inevitably introduce bias and strategic voting. The British system isn't perfect, and has recently developed all kinds of flaws and fraudulant practices, but it can be used as a yardstick of what a democracy should minimally achieve.
Of course, a democracy has other dependencies. It's only meaningful if enough of the population votes for the votes to truly represent the population. The electoral college has the potential for distorting the consensus of the people and probably has. There is no ballot option to reject all candidates and re-open nominations. Media saturation and candidate funding warp awareness. The educational system isn't up to the standards needed to ensure the population have the breadth or depth of knowledge to understand the complexities of a nation or avoid the wiles of a skilled talker. If these flaws remain, then even a perfect voting system can never represent what the public actually want or need, which is what a democracy is about. Being heard has no meaning if you never learned how to talk.
To me, the question shouldn't merely be how we reliably count votes, but should also include how we reliably cast them. There may be no better solution than the one we have, I accept that, but I won't accept that this is known until it actually is.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm a scientist by education, training, and occupation, and I deal with statistics and measurement uncertainty on a daily basis. I have absolutely no faith in electronic voting precisely BECAUSE the lack of verifiability makes it inevitable that a systematic bias will be introduced by a corrupt individual. Random errors in counting should be nearly negligible, and should be able to be kept down to around a percent or so. Also, if random errors of that magnitude are significant, they should be able to be dealt with by recounting ballots which have been secured in a publicly observed chain of custody. (Multiple measurements, smaller uncertainty.)
But the systematic errors are the real threat, because they give undue influence to lone individuals. There IS a "right result" in an election, and it is the one obtained by adding all the votes that were legitimately cast by voters in the election. And this can be obtained by using observable procedures which ensure the counting process accurately reflects the votes that were cast without systematic error.
I think you are viewing the problem completely backwards when you say that a less transparent system makes it easier to "believe" in conspiracy theories. The actual problem is that a less transparent system makes it much easier to CONDUCT a conspiracy. You don't need the consent of poll workers and poll observers to steal an election if you are using an electronic machine with no paper trail to do it.
I am quite confident that if I were programming or configuring a voting machine with no paper trail, and I wanted to steal an election, I would have the technological know-how to do this. And if I can do it, countless others can. The fact that electronic voting machines can be easily and invisibly compromised has nothing to do with voter perception. It is simply an objective fact.
Hell, look at the Constitution. Even the *politicians* didn't have confidence in politics/government back then.