December 2003
January 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Electronic Voting: Threatening or Enhancing Democracy?

Vivion Vinson is a freelance writer living in College Park, MD.

The debate about electronic voting is heating up fast. At stake are billions of dollars spent by local elections boards across the country - and fundamental confidence in the US electoral system. Why the sense of urgency? The disputed 2000 presidential election tallies in Florida proved to be a watershed, as the general public gained insight into not just the inherent weakness of punch card technology, but also into the problems with poorly designed ballots (of which the infamous "butterfly" ballot served as an example), and debates about voter registration database purges.

In response to the events in Florida, the House and Senate passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. It allocates funds to buy out punch card and lever machines, in order to help states upgrade their equipment and offer systems accessible to people with disabilities. The Act also stipulates that voting systems have a "manual audit capacity" with a "permanent paper record."

There are certainly benefits to having computerized voting systems, one of the most important of which is the enfranchisement of blind and disabled voters, for whom the technology now exists to vote secretly and without assistance. Optical scanning, the only other method that rivals electronic systems for efficiency, and which, according to a CalTech/MIT study from July of 2001, currently provides the highest degree of accuracy, cannot provide this service.

Disability advocates have taken notice. Just last year the District of Columbia settled a lawsuit brought by the Disability Rights Council of Greater Washington and the American Association of People with Disabilities. The plaintiffs claimed a violation of the Americans with Disabil-ities Act and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment when the city purchased optical scanning voting equipment. In response, the city decided to ensure that each voting location had at least one machine with audio and touch screen capability.

Concerns with Computerized Systems

Will electronic voting machines allow (1) a voter's verification of her or his choice, and (2) post-election auditing? Most of the current debate has swirled around the presence or absence of paper trails - some physical, printed scrap of evidence that a voter's selection is valid, and remains unchanged throughout its entire electronic life.

Why, you may ask, should there be any debate about a paper trail? After all, HAVA stipulated "manual audit capacity" and a "permanent paper record." It turns out that various electronic machine vendors have interpreted the phrase "permanent paper record" to mean printing out results after the election. These vendors claim that voter verification occurs at the time the voter is reviewing his or her selections on the touch screen, and that auditing can occur electronically. And some computer scientists agree, at least in theory.

But vendors that do offer paper ballot printing, and a growing number of influential computer scientists, argue that electronic voting machines must produce a printed paper ballot for bona fide voter verification, as well as a means for a valid recount in the event of a contested election.

Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and oft-cited expert witness on electronic voting, has developed a model called the Mercuri Method for secure electronic voting with a paper ballot. "We don't know how to prove that a computer program is correctly doing everything and not doing something we don't want it to do. There is no mathematical way of proving that a program is 100% correct," she said in a recent interview.

For this reason, a paper ballot is, she claims, the one way (given current technology) that permits a voter to evaluate whether his or her selection has been recorded correctly, and which also makes possible an independent audit to ensure the validity of the election - should the vote be contested on suspicion of fraud or technological mishap.

However, Dr. Ted Selker, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences of MIT, and member of the Cal Tech/MIT Voting Project, disagrees strongly. He has developed his own method for paperless, secure electronic voting, and believes that presenting the voter with two or more different formats - such as a display screen and a paper receipt - actually makes it harder and more complicated for that voter to verify the results. "Have you ever tried to compare two columns of numbers?" he asked, and then described some of the longer ballots he has seen with over a hundred entries.

When asked about the possibility of fraud, Dr. Selker responds with a number of points. There have been no documented cases of fraud, he says, whereas there have been documented cases of millions of votes lost because of poor ballot design, problems with registration, and polling place practices. This, he says, is where the focus needs to be in the immediate future - while securing against fraud is simply a lower priority for the moment. "No matter what technology you give me, I can cut failed votes in half by just changing the registration database implementation, ballot design, and polling place practices." Nonetheless, he concedes that at some point in the future, securing electronic votes will become a more important issue.

With regard to the use of paper ballots for recounts and election audits, Dr. Mercuri and Dr. Selker differ again - this time on the logistics of paper.

Says Dr. Mercuri: "I am not saying the paper ballot method is 100% correct; we have to rely on voters, people, equipment - and we do have to have other layers of accountability. But we do know how to deal with paper - with ATMs, point-of-sale terminals, etc. ...We have very good controls over paper."

Says Dr. Selker: "The problem I have with paper is that it can be torn, stolen, mangled, it's hard to read - even when they do optical scan readers, they need to use the same reader [to recount] because they might be calibrated differently.... Physically moving paper around is difficult."

After wading through all of the technical detail - too much to include in this article - the argument comes down to basic philosophies regarding what constitutes true and effective voter validation, and whether the addition of paper constitutes a help or a hindrance in the event of an election dispute.

What both computer scientists seem to agree on, however, is that the current technology leaves something to be desired, and neither sees her or his respective secure voting model - with or without paper - represented adequately by vendors.

Diebold Election Systems is the best-known in the US among suspect electronic voting machine vendors. In the first half of 2003, investigators downloaded proprietary data, files, and, ultimately, even the electronic voting software itself, from the company's private web site that should have been secured. In July, researchers from Johns Hopkins University, having obtained the software and analyzed it, published a devastating report regarding the security holes they had found. A subsequent report from Science Application International Corporation of San Diego, sponsored by the state of Maryland in response to the Johns Hopkins study, mitigated their results, but still reported "several high-risk vulnerabilities" in the system.

News reports have also emerged about irregularities with elections held with Diebold machines over the past few years. While it is unlikely that the company has actually committed fraud - a highly risky undertaking - even the most objective outside observer would have to wonder at their repeated security lapses.

Diebold claims they can't add a paper receipt to their voting systems, a curious claim for an ATM producer. In response to the criticism, Diebold has refused to allow their election results to be independently audited, claiming this would violate their proprietary code, and threatened to sue the owners of websites publishing, or even linking to, Diebold's self-incriminating documents (see www.scdc.emegaweb.net). Diebold did not respond to a request for an interview.

Reclaiming The Voting Process

So what is a conscientious citizen to do? The first step is to get more infor-mation. Almost everyone I spoke with mentioned VerifiedVoting.org, a site initiated by Dr. David Dill of Stanford University in July of 2003.

Additionally, the Cal Tech/MIT Voting Technology Project focuses not just on electronic voting, but on issues surrounding the voting process, such as registration, ballot design, and polling place procedures. Dr. Mercuri also maintains an extensive web site at www.notablesoftware.com.

The next step is to assess priorities egarding what one believes are the greatest and most immediate problems facing the voting process.

If you perceive the threat to be greatest from the prospect of electronic fraud, you may wish to support the pending Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (HR.2239), which demands a paper record for voters to check as part of the voting process. Next, you may want to find out what your local voting machine technology is, and voice your support for a technology you trust if your county or precinct is considering an upgrade. If your county has already upgraded to a technology you don't trust, you may want to raise questions in local venues about verifiability, and election processes that can be put in place to help mitigate potential problems. Finally, you may want to advocate for the faster adoption of national standards for electronic voting machines.

If, instead, you believe that voters are more vulnerable in the short term to poor polling place practices, irregularities in registration, and other issues related to the implementation of the voting process, as documented in the Cal Tech/MIT study, you may want to focus your energy on grassroots efforts to improve access, such as those initiated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the League of Women Voters. At the same time, you can advocate for systematic improvements over the long term, including effective voting machine technology and national standards.

In either case, attempts toward structural reform - whether in the form of improved technology standards or in the procedures and policies surrounding the voting process - promise to have more of a long-term effect than waging political battles over individual vendors. The voting process has been evolving since the inception of the Republic, and continues to do so. Bad technologies can hurt - whether they be punch cards or state-of-the art touch-screen machines - but even the perfect technology requires that people get involved in keeping the system open, transparent, and accountable.

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