After the Florida hanging chad debacle of 2000, the US Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. Among other things, the act provides money to help counties replace their old voting machines with newer, more foolproof models. This influx of federal cash has led to a surge in the use of electronic voting machines.
What are Electronic Voting Machines?
An electronic voting machine is like an ATM. Instead of marking or punching a paper ballot, the machine displays the candidates names on a touch screen. You vote for a candidate by touching the screen and selecting his name. It’s simple and fast.
Advantages of Electronic Voting
Electronic voting machines have significant advantages over other kinds of voting.
- An electronic voting machine never jams like a punch-card machine.
- You can’t accidentally spoil your ballot
- An electronic voting machine never runs out of ballots.
- The machine can be programmed in multiple languages, which is especially useful for counties where local law requires that ballots be printed in whatever language the voters need.
- An electronic machine can be quickly reprogrammed, which makes last-minute ballot changes possible. Reprinting paper ballots is expensive and takes time.
- Electronic machines produce fast, unambiguous vote counts. There is no need to examine a ballot and decide whether a hanging chad should count as a vote.
- Printed ballots are unnecessary. This saves money.
As you can see, the advantages are attractive. It’s no wonder that counties all over the United States are switching to electronic voting machines. What’s not to love?
Never Trust a Computer
Unfortunately, electronic voting machines have a fatal flaw. Each machine is essentially a computer with a fancy touch screen. As my college computer science professor repeatedly lectured me, “Never trust a computer. It will lie to you.” There is no way to know that when you vote on one of these machines, it is really counting your vote. With paper ballots it’s easy to discover fraud: hand recounts of randomly selected precincts makes sure that nobody is falsifying the vote totals. In close races, all ballots are hand-counted.
You can’t hand-count an electronic ballot. All you can do is ask the machine to print out the totals again. There is no way to verify that the machine correctly counted the votes. It may have miscounted by a programming mistake, or maybe someone purposely misprogrammed the machine to steal an election.
Paper Trail
One solution is to require that electronic voting machines produce a printed paper trail. You still vote on the touch screen, but then the machine prints out your paper ballot with your votes filled in. That paper ballot is considered the official ballot. You can review it to make sure the machine hasn’t changed your vote. It can be hand counted just like a regular paper ballot.
A paper trail solves most of the problems with electronic voting machines. Unfortunately, most electronic machines currently in use in the United States do not produce a paper trail. The paper trail also eliminates some of the advantages of the electronic machines: the printer can get jammed. The machine might run out of paper, or ink.
Is it Really That Bad?
OK, you say. There might be some problems. But we trust our money to machines all the time. ATMs are safe. Can’t we make voting machines safe?
No, we can’t. Electronic banking is safe because everything is recorded and logged and tracked. We can’t do that with voting, because voting is anonymous. There is no way to make anonymous electronic voting as safe as an ATM.
You should refuse to vote on an electronic machine that does not print a paper trail ballot. Most precincts can accommodate a request for a paper ballot. Call your local voting officials to find out. In some places, the only way to get a paper ballot is to request a mail-in ballot.
An Exercise for the Reader
With one change to voting laws, we can make electronic voting machines completely safe. What is that one change?
Editors note: attached is an excellent video from several Princeton University students who successfully hacked a voting machine. The video provides a fascinating study on just how simple it is to change elections if voting machines without individual paper-trails are employed.
Good article - differentiates between paper trail and paper ballot - very important, we need the latter, not the former.
I checked to see what voting machines my county uses. They have two kinds: a completely electronic machine, and a paper ballot optical scan model. The electronic machine does not produce a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) because Texas law has not certified the VVPAT attachment for use in Texas. The county has set aside money to upgrade when Texas gets around to certifying them.
In the meantime, the only safe option is to use the paper ballots, which are available on election day. (For early voting you must use the electronic machine.) But the neat part is, when you’re done voting, you feed the paper ballot into the optical scanner, and it does a pre-scan to detect any voting errors. So if you spoiled your ballot by overvoting or undervoting, it will give you back your ballot and you can correct the errors.
That solves most of the major problems. If a voter can’t accidentally spoil his ballot, we won’t ever have a debacle like happened in Florida with the hanging chad issue.
Interesting article, Kenneth. It seems like a paper trail is a good idea, but I can understand the headaches of having enought working printers, paper, ink available at each voting location.
I’ve used both types of voting machines that you mention in your comment above. I had an additional concern when I used the electronic machine for early voting. In our early voting set up, more than one precinct was voting at the same location. Each precinct’s ballots were slightly different, so it was up to the election worker to select the correct insertable electronic module to be put into the voter’s machine. It seemed to me that it would have been very easy for the harried workers to hand me the wrong module, thus allowing me to vote in some one else’s precinct. (Maybe they had some way of preventing that, but I couldn’t tell that they did.)
This is almost complete. A paper trail is not the answer, and not software independent from the same programming as the invisible, legal vote inside. It can be gamed, manipulated, and the voters don’t check them or catch the errors.
Since most everything is Microsoft based, and until we go to open source systems, the vendors control how far we can go in verifying the information. Not very far!
The biggest problem is that the trail is a placebo, because it isn’t used for any count the day of the election, and never for the recount, which rarely happens with an electronic election. Too much work, and with the Holt Bill, not mandated to solve its anomalies.
Anyway, after the TV decides a winner, that’s it.
Electronics for voting. To be used maybe, at the most, twice a year. Complicated, secretive, changeable, quickly obsolete, completely specialized, ungodly expensive to buy and then to store and maintain.
What is to recommend electronics for voting?
Can’t think of a thing.