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?"

Comments

Scantron

[Psychofreak]

I personally like the little bubble sheets that get filled in. They are commonly called Scantron. Use a disposable paper mask that is pre-punched to match the sheet you mark on, and the voter takes it to the one or more machines for reading them in. Trackable, human readable after a fashion, simple technology that can be easily deployed for very large number of voters. Best part is one machine can service about 100 voting stations as cafeteria tables with dividers are all the voting stations are!

I prefer voting on those than the touch screen units. Especially when I have to wait 20-30 min to get my time to vote, and I am in a relatively small voting district now. When I was in a larger district it was a 1-5 min wait to get you ballot, and a 1-5 min wait to scan in at one of the two machines.

I also find that older folk are afraid of touch screen technology because they feel that it will break, or they are not comfortable with computers to start with.

Let me just sharpen my #2 pencil and vote!

Phil

Re:Let's extend that a bit

[l2718]

Moreover, a well-designed voting system should be 100% accurate in the counting of votes because of, not despite, the removal of humans from the counting process. The problem is that so far, no commercially available electronic voting system exists yet that has been well designed.

I think you are going a bit over the top. There is a trade-off between accuracy, flexibility, and openness here. There's no way to reach 100% accuracy in the counting of tens of millions of ballots, each containing selections for tens of races. If you allow yourself to also take into account the discrepancy between the voter's intent and the voter's markings on the ballot (I'm against it but many aren't) then "100% accuracy" is not even meaningful. What you should strive for is 1. maximum accuracy 2. known error rates. If you knew the error rate of the ballot-generating-and-counting system then you'd know at which point a thorough recount is warranted (assuming it had a lower error rate), and when you simply need to rerun the election (or draw cards). By the way, it's true that ATMs are more reliable than voting machines, and that the banking system is more reliable than the election system -- and yet even there the system is not 100% reliable. A bank "lost" $20K belonging to a friend of mine through bad record-keeping on their part. It took weeks to get her money back. Once in a while banks will record a transaction wrong -- and each bank has a controlled system that they design and implement. Elections are run in parallel by many independent local authorities under many conflicting criteria and need to be more flexible (do we allos for write-in candidates? for people who are voting provisionally?). Yes, there is an accuracy price to pay for that, but since almost all races are not close, and when the race is close we shouldn't really care who wins in the end, it's not too much of a price to pay.

Re:I would say

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true that less transparent systems make it easier for the voters to believe in conspiracy theories, but the underlying problem is lack of scientific thinking skills.

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.