Justin Rood says, “Electronic voting machines mostly suck“. I’ve offered some thoughts here and there on this topic on this blog, but now it seems that the National Institute of Standards and Technology thinks paperless electronic voting machines are a problem, too:
Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country “cannot be made secure,” according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government’s premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.
In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine’s software. The recommendations endorse “optical-scan” systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.
The key word is ‘Paperless’. Actually, the idea of paper is just the notion of having some kind of traiI that can be verified at the time of voting and later during recount. I think the Diebold and other touch-screen systems could work if there was a secured paper trail along with the system: something of a locked, transparent container attached to the actual machine that printed off your vote when you made it (so you could see it and verify it before actually voting). If we’re going to keep using these systems, we need this now. Or else we’ll see more stories like this one coming out of Florida.
I can’t figure out what the resistance to a paper trail is. I wonder if people don’t realize how fragile our system is in some ways. I mean not just the potential for fraud, but the potential for large numbers of Americans to believe that the system is rigged. If people lose confidence in the political process as a means to participate they are left with very few options.
While I was waiting in line to vote last month, anxious to use the touch screen console for the first time ever, this is the [very loud] conversation that was taking place between a voter and an election worker:
Worker: “Would you like to use the touch-screen console or the optical scan ballot?
Voter: “How does the touch-screen one work?”
Worker: “I don’t know. I don’t trust it myself.”
Nice, I thought. Could it not be the case that this election worker could be seen as influencing the outcome of the election by casting dispersions on one of the methods?
I can’t figure it out either, Will. And your concern is one I share: trust in the basic institutions of our democracy is eroded if people do not think their votes are accurately measured. This seems like it could be an easy one to improve, without a cost that would exceed the benefit.
Its telling, NPH, that one of the workers wouldn’t even us it himself.
We don’t have a choice here, or if we do they aren’t overt about the matter.
I was tangentially involved in a similar conversation between a poll worker and the person in line ahead of me. MD had already had difficulties with the machines in our primaries, so I think the election worker was afraid we’d be the next FL 2000.
Locally, elections went how I expected, so I have no reason to distrust the machine’s results this time — but not having an audit trail still concerns me.