Ever since the Florida debacle of 2000 and the subsequent drive for improved voting methods, I have been highly suspicious of the push for electronic voting. I may not be a fully qualified computer geek, but I have enough experience around the inner workings of getting systems up and running to be quite skeptical of the claims being made by companies selling such systems. In the January issue of Wired magazine, Paul O’Donnell has an article called “Broken Machine Politics” that has an interesting paragraph in it (p. 147 of the print issue). I quote (note—DREs are the devices used to record electronic votes): “In Southern California’s Riverside County in 2000—the state’s first use of touchscreen DREs—a Sequoia server unaccountably froze, then began counting backward. In the central coast community of San Luis Obispo in 2002, a machine spontaneously began reporting totals with five hours left in the election. In Louisiana, humidity and overheating caused constant crashes. Last November, in Indiana, DREs reported more than 144,000 votes cast in Boone County, which has fewer than 19,000 registered voters.”
It’s not that there are bugs and crashes—frankly, that’s to be expected, and anyone who doesn’t expect that is a fool. There needs to be a backup system in place, and the idea I hear most often is that when a voter has completed her voting, a hard copy is printed out that she then visually verifies. Once she’s confirmed it, she slips it into a lockbox, where it’s held in case of problems and hand counts of actual ballots are required. For heaven’s sakes, what if there’s a big storm and a power stations goes down, or a surge of electricity shorts out the computers? I am astonished that some people don’t think there’s a need for built-in redundancy with something as important as this.
Posted by elizabeth at February 10, 2004 01:40 AM