Paul Krugman has a good article in tody’s NY Times about those questionable electronic voting machines made by Diebold Inc.
It is heartening to see that people are paying attention to this threat to our democracy. This is especially the case when you read the article’s opening quote by Diebold president, Walden O’Neal:
“I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
Now, of course, O’Neal wasn’t talking about his business operations. Oh hell no.
Anyway, if you want to read Krugman’s column, go to…
What I don’t understand is why we can’t have these systems leave an unambiguous paper trail. Why not print two ballots after voting, one for the voter and one for the record so that should there be questions, there is a paper trail?
(Kidding. I suspect that the real reason probably has something to do with the fact that if there had been no paper trail, there would have been no Florida recount. And the point of these machines is theoretically to avoid a repeat of what happened in Florida.)
The difference is that we could now have a ballot print out who was voted for. No chads would be involved and unlike the chad ballots, these would be in human readable form. Why don’t we want this. Recounts are important, no system is foolproof.
I certainly would want it as an essential requirement of using the Diebold machine or any other electronic voting machine. But I suspect that there are many who would prefer that recounting be cut off. Or any form of auditing that the machine is actually doing what it’s supposed to do.
In Indiana, electronic voting machines provided by MicroVote (IIRC) counted 144,000 votes in a precinct with 19,000 registered voters. These votes were originally certified as correct by the precinct personnel and submitted to the county office and displayed on a public vote tally board before someone realized there was an error. The error was “corrected” (news reports do not indicate how) before the county results were certified.
That result was clearly absurd, as was the result from one precinct in 2000 that showed Al Gore with negative twenty thousand votes. However, not all errors result in clearly absurd results. In one election this year, machines rejected about one out of every one hundred votes for one specific candidate (but only that candidate). This was discovered by voters during the election (who noticed that their selections, after being made, disappeared from the screen) and confirmed by election staffers after the polls had closed. This sort of error might easily have been overlooked, and might (in a close race) throw the election.
Why are we putting our public trust in systems that have proven themselves to unreliable, and whose manufacturers not only refuse to admit that they are unreliable but resist all efforts to inspections and safeguards that would serve both to force them to be more reliable and provide a fallback for those instances where they fail to work reliably?
Print two paper ballots; give one to the voter as a receipt, and store the other one as an paper audit trail that can be used for a recount. Any other system endangers the validity of our elections. The electronic recording system can only be trusted after (a) it has proven accurate in repeated testing by unbiased impartial testers and (b) its code has been audited by unbiased impartial experts to confirm that it works as advertised.
No existing electronic voting system meets these requirements. And, according to federal law, we have to use these systems in all federal elections beginning in 2007 – unless someone convinces a court that these systems “deny due process of law” (which they clearly do).
jeevmon, recounts from paper ballots are now illegal in Nebraska. Whoever the voting machines say won is the winner; there can be no challenge. Interestingly enough, one of Nebraska’s U.S. Senators (Chuck Hagel) has a substantial interest in a company (Election Systems & Software) that makes voting machines (although he attempted to structure his ownership in a way that may evade reporting laws, a matter which is currently under investigation by the FEC). It is an open question whether this denies due process; it certainly raises serious concerns.