Voting Machines
What is often not thought about, questioned during almost every election year, and is important enough to swing any modern presidential appointment? The voting process. Millions are excluded from voting because of the things it requires you to do – some of which are exceedingly difficult for a number of Americans. Even more are politically apathetic because they do not believe their vote counts. There are many factors involved in the voting process: Registration, accessibility for the disabled and language minorities, inadequate poll worker training, audits and recounts, and now, machine hacking and reliability errors – just to name a few. What I am asking is this, are voting machines the best method of voting, and are they secure enough to trust?
160 years ago we were using non-secret, hand-counted paper ballots to vote (Voting Technology). This has obvious flaws. Any counter could easily throw away a vote he did not like. Also, constituents had to provide their own paper and make a sometimes lengthy journey to a voting center. 119 years ago we adopted the Australian Secret Ballot method. With this method the government printed paper ballots with the name of each candidate and where they all stood on important issues (Voting Technology). These ballots were still counted by hand however, and could be easily tampered with. In 1892 we began using the lever counting machine (Voting Technology). This was an answer to the call of dishonesty. With this system, people pulled a lever over the person they wanted to vote for, and the machine would instantly add another tally to that candidate. Fraud was still an issue, so 45 years ago we made the transition to punchcards (Voting Technology). The new ballots had numbers (which corresponded to a separate booklet with all the candidates listed) and spaces next to them to punch a hole out. A computer tally machine would then count all votes for the numbered candidate.
While fraud cases decreased, voter uncertainty increased because it was very easy to make a mistake and mark the wrong number. Around this same time some states adopt an optical scanning system (Voting Technology). In 1974 the first Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting system was used (Voting Technology). As technology advanced, so did this preferred process – until we have today’s method. Voter uncertainty and fraud cases decrease, but because the latest technology is being used, many new and equally dangerous problems arise.
In 2002 the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed after numerous ballot recounts showed inaccuracy at the polls (Voting Systems). Optical scanning and DREs are now the most utilized of today’s voting methods (Voting Systems). HAVA was the main factor in this. New federal funds allowed states to purchase DREs and optical scanners, increasing by 17% the numbers of electronic voting machines, and decreasing other methods by 18% (Voting Systems). However, other manual systems such as punchcards, lever machines, and mixed (counties that use two or more voting methods) still comprise the other 40% (Voting Systems).
The downside. DREs have recorded the second highest residual vote rate (votes unable to be counted because of machine errors) in the 2000 election (Bermant). Additionally, information came out that Diebold executives (a major DRE manufacturer) are staunch republicans and give more funding to preferred candidates in counties which register as republican (Hart). This begs the question, since millions of Americans are only able to vote through DREs, is it fair for partisan manufacturers to help facilitate voting?
The idea of hacking also comes to mind. The Director of Secure Internet Programming at Princeton writes, “an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code [which] could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine (Feltman).”
Is it possible for a DRE to capture the intent of a voter (such was the problem in the 2000 election)? Since many DREs are touch screens, CEO of the Vote-PAD Company writes “The sensors in touch screen devices can be knocked out of alignment by shock and vibration that may occur during transport. Unless these sensors are realigned at the polling place prior to the start of voting, touch screen machines can misinterpret a voter's intent (Theisen).” With all other voting methods, when a recount is called for, poll workers can go back and manually interpret a punched ballot; but with a DRE, Tova Wang writes, “DRE machines do not provide an independent record of each individual ballot that can be used in a recount to check the machine for error or tampering. It is impossible to check if the voting machine records a vote in its memory different than the one the voter cast.”
Are DREs accessible to the blind and hearing impaired? Dawn Wilcox (qtd. in The San Jose Mercury News), president of the Silicon Valley Council of the Blind said, ”Among the criticisms provided by voters was poor sound quality, delayed response time and Braille that was positioned so awkwardly it could be read upside down.” In the case of Sam Chen, a blind man, the audio message on his DRE told him to press a yellow button (Ackerman). Like many others, he was unable to vote without assistance.
Personally, I can see many glaring issues with our modern voting machines. However, I have yet to come across a problem which can not be solved. Like all technology, it has its flaws, but it also helps to improve our current system. Through the creation of a voter review page and improved help for disabled citizens, we can increase accuracy at the polls. Also, to prevent the hijacking of a system, we can increase security at voting booths. Since it is necessary to gain internal access to the machines to hack them, strict screening processes should also be enforced on poll workers. With all of these combined measures and the constant advancement of technology, we should feel safe that our votes will be counted true and accurately. Of course, until these procedures are put in place…
Works Cited
Ackerman, Elise. “Blind Voters Rip E-Machines." 15 May 2004. http://www.mercurynews.com/.
Bermant, Arden. “Glossary of U.S. Voting Systems.” 26 April 2006. http://www.nist.gov/.
Felten, Edward. "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine." 13 September 2006. http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~felten/.
Hart, David. “Press release to announce the formation of the Election Technology Council.” 8 September 2004. http://www.electiontech.org/.
ProCon.org. "Historical Timeline of Electronic Voting Machines and Related Voting Technology.” 30 June 2008. http://votingmachines.procon.org/viewresource.asp?resourceID=273.
ProCon.org. “Voting Systems & Use in U.S. Presidential Elections since 1980.” 25 February 2008. http://votingmachines.procon.org/viewresource.asp?resourceID=274.
Theisen, Ellen. ”Myth Breakers: Facts About Electronic Elections.” 2005. http://www.vote-pad.us/.
Wang, Tova. “Understanding the Debate Over Electronic Voting Machines." 26 May 2004. http://www.reformelections.org/.
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