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Thursday, January 22, 2004

From The Economist print edition

Voting machines

Good intentions, bad technology

High-tech voting machines are making things worse, not better

ANOTHER election year, another recount fiasco in Florida. On January 6th, a local election was held for a seat covering parts of Broward and Palm Beach Counties. A total of 10,844 votes were cast, and Ellyn Bogdanoff won by a margin of just 12 votes. There were also 137 undervotes, in which voters' choices failed to register. Under state law, there must be a manual recount of all undervotes and overvotes (ballots marked more than once) in any election where the winning margin is less than 0.25%. But no recount is possible, because the votes were cast using touch-screen voting machines whose only paper output is the final tally.

The machines can be asked to print out the same result again, of course. But as Robert Wexler, a Democratic congressman, likes to point out, “a reprint is not a recount”. He has just filed a suit arguing that the machines violate state law, and asking a judge to order that they be equipped with printers, so that voters can verify their decisions on paper. The paper copies would then be placed in a ballot box, for recounting if necessary.

This case has highlighted a growing debate about the merits of high-tech voting machines. Touch-screen machines are particularly controversial, since they generally do not produce paper output, cause confusion among voters, and seem to go wrong rather often. It is (just) possible that the 137 undervotes in the Florida case were all cast by voters who deliberately chose to go to the polls, stepped up to the machines, and then decided to abstain. It seems more likely that they pressed the wrong button, or that the machine failed to register their votes properly. But without a paper trail, it is impossible to say.

Machines that do not produce bits of paper verified by voters are also open to the charge that their software is full of bugs, or has been rigged to favour a particular candidate. Stories abound of voting machines producing dodgy results. In one case in Indiana, 5,352 voters somehow cast 144,000 votes. In Virginia, machines subtracted votes rather than adding them to a candidate's total in some cases. Machines have broken down and been taken away, only to reappear with their seals broken; memory cards (on which votes are recorded) have gone missing.

Conspiracy theories have been fuelled by damning memos leaked from Diebold, one of the leading makers of touch-screen voting machines. The firm's voting-machine software, which also leaked on to the internet, was found to contain numerous security flaws.

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002 in the wake of the Florida fiasco of 2000, was supposed to sort things out by replacing old-fashioned punch-card machines (and their infamous “hanging chads”) with more modern voting equipment. But HAVA has only served to confuse matters further.

The federal government, for good reason, is not allowed to tell the states how to run their elections. Instead HAVA offered $3.8 billion, which the states could apply for in order to purchase HAVA-compliant voting machinery. But the technical committee that is supposed to decide on the HAVA standard has not even been appointed. In the meantime, the money is being doled out to the states anyway. Some of the new equipment purchased meets only the now-obsolete 1990 standard; other machines meet the 2002 standard, which experts also regard as flawed. The result is a mess. Even the regulations surrounding gambling machines are tighter.

Yet there is surely a simple answer: new voting machines should be required to produce a paper output that voters can check. Any funny business, whether accidental or deliberate, could then be exposed by a hand recount if necessary. In November, California became the first state to require that all voting machines must produce a paper trail by 2006. But the debate is far from over.

To begin with, some electoral officials oppose the idea of paper trails on the basis that printers will be too expensive, or they might jam. This strikes Rebecca Mercuri, an electronic-voting expert at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, as an odd argument: after all Diebold and other voting-machine manufacturers also make cash registers and ATMs, and they seem to work.

Another objection is that voters might walk off with the paper ballots. Dr Mercuri's preferred solution is that voters should be able to see the paper ballot under glass to verify it, after which it drops into the ballot box. Another option would be to use paper forms that voters place under optical readers, which would confirm their choice before the form is placed in the ballot box. The counting is automated, in other words, but not the voting.

It is hardly rocket science. But it is too late to sort out the mess before November, when perhaps 20% of the votes will be cast using paperless touch-screen machines. Worries over their reliability and security, and the lack of a common standard, mean the new machines may have made a Florida-like fiasco more rather than less likely. “We're going to have digital hanging chads,” says Dr Mercuri.

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