Joshuah Bearman: Diebold With A Vengeance

Oct 23, 2004

Diebold With A Vengeance

Voting_machine

I can't decide if I'm terrified of the touch-screen voting machines. I voted on one in Pasadena at an early polling station, and when I asked the poll worker if these machines had a paper record, he responded hastily and with an air of annoyance, "Yeah man, they're fine — ballots don't have a paper record either."

"Except the ballot," I said, looking at the guy like he was crazy, which he was for suggesting such a thing.

The point of a printed record isn't so you can take home a receipt and pin it to your wall; it's the paper trail left in the hands of election officials for manual recounts, which as we saw in 2000, have taken center stage even in national elections. That may have been an aberration, but the fact is the polls are just as close again in more than one swing state — and election law often REQUIRES a manual recount if the result is within a certain thin margin. But with these machines — and they're in place in the 15 most Democratic counties in Florida — a manual recount is not possible. You can print out audits after the fact, but they don't show what happened when the voter touched the screen, which is to say that they can't give any clues as to voter intent. With paper ballots, confused voters often punch two holes, or don't punch hard enough, or pull the thing out and circle the name they want. I talked to an election official who said she'd seen smiley faces next to names on paper ballots. The whole recount business in 2000 surrounded the interpretation of this "voter intent." And, incidentally, depending on how strictly that intent was interpreted, the election could have swung either way. That's how close it was.

And that means, ultimately that the outcome in Florida really was a statistical tie. The tolerance of the process of counting votes was simply not precise enough to say one way or the other. Had there been a manual recount in all 67 counties, the result still would have been unsatisfying. And had they repeated such a recount a dozen times, even with the same interpretation, there would have been a dozen different results. That's just the imperfection of counting by hand.

In that regard, the electronic machines just transfer the intrinsic imprecision of voting to another stage of the process: from the counting to the casting of the vote itself. Because what happens with the machines is that none of the voter intent is recorded. If a voter gets confused standing at the screen and hits the wrong button, or if the image map on the screen is calibrated wrong and accidental votes are cast, we'll never know. On paper, such confusion may have wound up as a smiley face. With touch-screens, it becomes invisible.

And I don't have so much of a problem with that, provided the machines are working properly. Voting is human, and humans are not perfect. But the larger concern to me, despite that it's more conspiratorial and I mostly shy away from conspiracy theories, is the potential for hacking or an electronic thumb on the scales. The machines are not networked, and there are fail-safes, and the manufacturers don't control the code once the counties put them in place — but still. All the failsafes in the world don't mean jack if some unanticipated weakness is exploited. We've all seen War Games. Enterprising teens have found security holes in fucking NORAD and corporate networks that IT and cryptography specialists spend hundreds of millions of dollars devising. Code is code: it's invisible and can be re-arranged without anyone knowing. If everyone hasn't seen the background from Computer Science professor Avi Rubin about the security flaws in electronic voting machines, they're worth checking out.

And, once again, here's Jon Stewart weighing in on the subject.

Oct 23, 2004 | Permalink

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Oct 23, 2004

Diebold With A Vengeance

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