Fight over e-voting leaves election plans as casualties

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Black Boxes

I actually thought a good deal about how verifiable touch-screen voting machines were before I actually had to use one back in March (it was a Diebold, BTW). I personally was not impressed and was not at all surprised to learn later in the day how much trouble poll workers had getting them going.

Out of fairness to the touch-screen vendors, I should say that there's a similar problem with mechanical voting machines of the sort used in Fairfax County, VA, when I lived there in the 80's. I learned later that they tend to fail silently and not register votes recorded with them.

Back when everyone was using old-fashioned paper ballots, the votes were generally hand-counted publicly right there at the polling place before the results were reported. This ritual was tedious, but did give people some confidence that there was no trickery going on. There are ways to do that with a computer program (assuming the code is written cleanly and there is a way for impartial witnesses to verify that the exec comes from the code), but that can be even more tedious than hand-counting ballots. In general, the harder it is to understand the process and for impartial observers to see what's going on, the harder it is to catch mistakes and the easier it is to cheat; even if I think the vendors are honest (and that's less true than it was when I was a child), honest mistakes can't be ruled out if there's no easy way to tell.

I seem to recall that one of the touch-screen vendors actually released its code for public inspection, only to get comments back that it was indecipherable spaghetti. Definitely doesn't inspire my confidence. On the whole, I think I like optical scanning better, if we're going to do computerized voting at all.

John L. Ries

Posted by: John L. Ries   Posted on: 05/21/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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