http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2003/pulpit_20031204_000794.html
December 4, 2003
The Pulpit
No Confidence Vote: Why the Current Touch Screen Voting
Fiasco Was Pretty Much Inevitable
By Robert X. Cringely
bob@cringely.com
If you spend any time on the Internet in the U.S., it is
almost impossible not to know about the scandal involving touch screen voting
machines. I mentioned it a few months ago, and my goal at that time was to goad
the big newspapers into looking at the story, with the idea that if there was
any truth to it, the New York Times and Washington Post ought to be on the
story. Well, now they are, especially the Times, which this week ran an op-ed
piece by Paul Krugman that ought to make a lot of politicians very
uncomfortable. Depending on whom you read, either computerized voting is being
used to help American voters or to hurt them. The American Civil Liberties
Union said in California that certain counties in the recent recall election
were disenfranchised by not having touch screen voting, while other
organizations suggest that touch screens were used to steal elections in
Georgia. I don't know about any of this, but I do know about Information
Technology, so I suggest we look at this issue in a way that nobody else seems
to be -- as an IT problem.
Voting is nothing more than gathering and validating data on
a huge scale, which these days is almost entirely the province of IT. And like
many other really big IT projects, this touch screen voting thing came about as
a knee-jerk reaction to some earlier problem, in this case the 2000 Florida
election with its hanging chads and controversial outcome. Punch card voting
was too unreliable, it was decided, so we needed something more complex and
expensive because the response to any IT problem is to spend more money making
things more complex.
So the U.S. government threw $3.5 billion on the table to
pay for modernizing voting throughout the land, which is to say making it more
expensive and more complicated. That's a lot of money and it attracted a lot of
interest. One company in particular, Diebold Systems, went so far as to buy a
smaller company that made voting machines just to get into the market. Diebold
thought that being in the automated teller business was a good starting point
for changing the way America votes.
You can read in many other places about the trials of
Diebold as it attempted to build its touch screen voting system. I'm not here
to write about FTP sites or whether voting machines can or can't be messed with
over the Internet. We're looking at this as an IT project, remember? This isn't
politics (at least not in this particular column) it's engineering. And one
thing engineers of great big IT systems know is that they are never on time,
never on budget, and sometimes don't work at all.
Software development projects fail all the time, no matter
what their size. The Standish Group, an IT-research firm in West Yarmouth,
Mass., has been keeping track of this phenomenon since 1994, and the good news
is that we are doing much better at completing projects than we used to. The
bad news is that in 2000, only 28 percent of software projects could be classed
as complete successes (meaning they were executed on time and on budget), while
23 percent failed outright (meaning that they were abandoned). Those numbers
are improvements over a 16 percent success rate and a 31 percent failure rate
when the first study was done in 1994.
I can't imagine too many business owners liking those odds,
but the picture does get darker. If 28 percent of software projects were
complete successes in 2000, then 72 percent were at least partial failures. And
in software, even partial failure generally means getting absolutely nothing
for your money.
According to the Standish Group, more than $275 billion will
be spent on software development this year, covering about 250,000 projects.
That means that if the recent success and failure percentages apply, $63
billion in development costs will go down the toilet in 2003 alone.
What does this have to do with voting machines? It says that
this whole idea of changing by 2004 the way every American votes was probably
doomed from the beginning. Whether political motivations were involved or not,
the odds were always against this thing coming in on schedule or on budget.
Then why do we do it this way? The "it" in this
case doesn't mean just this voting project. Why do we undertake these massive
IT projects that almost inevitably fail?
The answer is simple -- because there is lots of money to be
made whether the darned thing works or not, and not much of a penalty if it
doesn't work.Two hundred and seventy-five billion is a lot of money to spend on
software development, especially if 72 percent of that money will be either
wasted completely or used to develop something that doesn't work intended.
Does that begin to sound like the current state of this
voting fiasco?
So we were stupid to expect this thing to work as planned.
Except that as far as I can tell, there wasn't really a plan. Here's what I
think happened. This is, unfortunately, far too common in the IT world. After
the last presidential election, there was a government outcry for an electronic
voting system. Firms like Diebold who make ATMs, check out systems and kiosk
systems said, "Hey, we can make a voting machine out of one of our
products." That was probably the total extent of thinking and requirements
put together by the government agencies and the vendors.
In the case of this voting fiasco, there was a wonderful
confluence of events. There was a vague product requirement coming from an
agency that doesn't really understand technology (the U.S. Congress), foisting
a system on other government agencies that may not have asked for it. There was
a relatively small time frame for development and a lot of money. Finally, the
government did not allow for even the notion of failure. By 2004, darn it, we'd
all have touch screen voting.
Oh, and there are only three vendors, all of whom have
precisely the same motivation (to make as much money as possible) and
understanding (that Congress would buy its way out of technical trouble if it
had to). This gave the vendors every reason to put their third string people on
the project because doing so would mean more profit, not less.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and
over again, somehow expecting a different outcome. In this instance, the issue
isn't whether Diebold and the other vendors were insane (they aren't), but
whether the government is.
Now against this backdrop of failure, I can't help but make
one technical observation that I think has been missed by most of the other
people covering this story. One of the key issues in touch screen voting is the
presence or absence of a so-called paper trail. There doesn't seem to be any
way in these systems to verify that the numbers coming out are the numbers that
went in. There is no print-out from the machine, no receipt given to the voter,
no way of auditing the election at all. This is what bugs the conspiracy
theorists, that we just have to trust the voting machine developers -- folks
whose actions strongly suggest that they haven't been worthy of our trust.
So who decided that these voting machines wouldn't create a
paper trail and so couldn't be audited? Did the U.S. Elections Commission or
some other government agency specifically require that the machines NOT be
auditable? Or did the vendors come up with that wrinkle all by themselves? The
answer to this question is crucial, so crucial that I am eager for one of my
readers to enlighten me. If you know the answer for a fact, please get in
touch.
Having the voting machines not be auditable seems to have
been a bad move on somebody's part, whoever that somebody is.
Now here's the really interesting part. Forgetting for a
moment Diebold's voting machines, let's look at the other equipment they make.
Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for
trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service
scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with
magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in
closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that
involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine.
But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines
-- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have
it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These
machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can't be audited they
can't be trusted. If they can't be trusted they won't be used.
Now back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of
machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to
include such a capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are
doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn't it be logical
to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every
other kind of transaction device?
This confuses me. I'd love to know who said to leave the
feature out and why?
Next week: the answer.
© 1997-2008 Public Broadcasting Service. All rights reserved.