image credit: Composite image by Cujo359"I will get them off my hands, one way or the other” - Florida Secretary of State Kurt S. Browning
That quote, from a New York Times article on electronic voting, signals a radical shift by one of the country's largest states on the question of what methods will be used to count our votes in future elections.
Florida is the biggest state to reject touch screens so sweepingly, and its deadline for removing them, July 1, 2008, is the most imminent. For the 15 counties that must dump their expensive systems, buy new optical-scan machines and retrain thousands of poll workers, hurdles abound.
Six counties still owe a combined $33 million on their touch-screen machines, which most bought hurriedly to comply with a new federal law banning punch-card and lever voting systems after the recount. Miami-Dade County alone must cast aside 7,200 touch-screen machines, for which it paid $24.5 million and still owes $15 million.
Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache
Thanks to efforts folks like Bev Harris and Brad Friedman, who have done a great job of documenting the problems with the design and use of electronic touch-screen voting systems, voters are suspicious enough of the systems to reject their use despite some rather large amounts of money that have already been sunk into the systems.
As a technocrat, my opinion is that some of those machines are so flawed and badly verified that they should not have been bought in the first place. In principle, there is no reason voting machines can't be as secure and reliable as paper ballots. All it takes is time, money, and citizen involvement. The problem, I think, is that while the latter was available, there wasn't enough interest in spending the time and money required. There are many examples of computer systems that function reliably under adverse conditions. They are considerably more expensive than the voting machines Florida is now scrapping.
Nevertheless, Florida's actions are the right one, at least in the short term:
Under the state’s new election law, disabled voters can keep voting by touch screen — akin to using an A.T.M. — until 2012. But everyone else will use them only twice more, for the presidential primaries on Jan. 29 and municipal elections next spring. With optical scanning, voters use pens to mark paper ballots that are then read by scanning machines, leaving a paper record for recounts.
Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache
Right now, paper ballots that are counted electronically seem to represent the best compromise between reliability, speed of counting, and expense. If true open-source electronic voting machine designs are implemented, and sufficient interest in them exists, they may be a better way to go in the future. For now, though, the current generation of touch screens aren't worth the expense to record the votes of the average voter.
2 comments:
While optical scan machines don't completely negate the possibility of error, they are by far the best alternative to mail-in paper ballots. They work pretty well for us in WA. Of course, we are going to be switching over to all-mail balloting very soon. That's not 100% safe either (husbands voting for their wives, etc. was reported in a few cases in 2004) but paper ballots are the best option of all. I don't want an ATM-type receipt, because the electronic vote itself can be messed with. I don't want a "paper trail". I want paper ballots. Both mail-in votes and optical scan provide that.
Good for Florida. They'll have to get their financial act together, but it's about time they settled on a legitimate system.
Now we've got to make sure the Ohio vote system can be trusted!
Hi shoephone. Haven' "seen" you in a while.
Vote counts based on paper ballots can be corrupted, too. The only thing required is for the voting process to be ignored by or out of sight of its citizens. Regardless of the technology or the basic method, it can be done.
In my years in the defense business I've worked with machines that were meant to be secure even when they're in a lab full of a hostile country's best scientists and engineers. It's possible to make things that secure, if people are willing to spend the money. Making them that way involves a considerable amount of design review and testing. That's one of the reasons I think any e-voting machine design needs to be open source - a great deal of the review process can be done online by people who understand and use the technology and want to see it work.
I think going to e-voting machines of some sort is a good idea in the long run. It will help many handicapped people vote, and will make it easier for citizens who don't speak English as a first language. But there's a lot of road between where we are now and an e-voting system that we can rely on.
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