Voting Technologies — The Issues Go Beyond Punch Card Ballots and Lever Machines

by Terry Costlow

The recent court decisions regarding the California gubernatorial recall underscored the key role technology will play in the future of American voting. In California and the rest of the country, registrars still grappling with potential punch card ballot and lever machine fraud are being asked to move to digital systems at a time when that technology is being criticized as compromising security.

The Help America Vote Act passed last year is prompting many governments to adopt electronic voting and registration technologies, in an attempt to avoid problems like those experienced in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. Those problems and issues are large enough to warrant concern, but a U.S. Department of Defense program that will use the Internet to let 1,000 military personnel file absentee ballots raises even greater questions about the long-term future of American voting.

“Electronic equipment that’s being introduced now is likely to be transitional as we move to Internet voting,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and head of the CalTech-MIT Voting Technology Project.

But first things first. Ansolabehere said 10 percent of U.S. counties still hand-count paper ballots, and New York and Illinois still use lever machines and punch card ballots, respectively. So widespread Internet balloting is well out in the future.

Digital techniques, commonly called direct recording electronic technologies, are being adopted quickly, however. Poll watchers predict that optical scanners will read roughly half of the ballots cast in the 2004 presidential election, while touch-screen voting machines will record about 20 percent. Some jurisdictions have used optical scanners for several years, but one of the biggest objections to this technology is that blind people can’t use the scanners without assistance, raising significant ballot secrecy questions.

The use of touch screens is prompting many to debate the potential for miscounts, whether accidental or fraudulent. Software glitches can occur, and studies conducted by the Johns Hopkins University and others have raised concern about the security of touch-screen software. Many observers have questioned whether it would be possible to alter the software to miscount ballots. Maryland, in fact, has considered canceling a major purchase of touch-screen voting machines because of the Johns Hopkins study, and other states have discussed altering their purchase and implementation plans.

“My position as a computer scientist is that you can’t depend on (touch-screen technology) being 100 percent bug-free and 100 percent secure,” said David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University and founder of the watchdog group, VerifiedVoting.org. Dill suggests that one way to avoid potential problems is to create a way for voters to confirm their selections, since recounts are unreliable if the only tally is the one kept in the system’s memory or storage. For example, printing a paper document would meet that goal, while also providing a way to make a recount possible.

“When someone enters a vote, it’s recorded inside the machine and there’s no way to be sure the machine recorded that vote correctly,” Dill said. “The only way you can do a recount is to push a button on the machine, and it’s going to give you the same number.”

Military to Test Internet Voting

While technologists and political scientists are figuring out ways to make voting easier without sacrificing secrecy, integrity and reliability, the concept of Internet voting is moving forward, albeit slowly. The Defense Department conducted a test with fewer than 100 ballots during the 2000 election and deemed it a success. In the 2004 presidential election, the Defense Department will expand the project to include more than 1,000 ballots.

“Ramping up on a small scale is a smart way to do it,” Ansolabehere said. However, observers note that the potential for fraud is far higher online, since hackers can tap in from anywhere. With touch screens and other techniques, voting systems aren’t networked, so anyone attempting to tamper with the ballots must work on individual systems.

Registering and Verification Concerns Loom As Well

While voting machine technologies and techniques carry with them huge issues in and of themselves, the processes used to register voters and then authenticate them on election day are equally vexing. Most registration and authentication is still done by the paper-and-pencil method, Ansolabehere said. But states are moving toward the government's goal and implementing digital technologies to replace the traditional methods.

This change is not occurring without problems, however. Michigan, for example, was one of the first states to shift to electronic registration. When it did, more than one million people were found to live at addresses other than those listed in the voting records, Ansolabehere explained. Most of the mismatches occurred simply because people had moved, but even so, this glitch raises concerns about duplicate or fraudulent voters. “As we move forward with Internet voting, that’s something that’s got to be fixed,” Ansolabehere said.

 

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Terry Costlow has written about the electronics industry for more than 20 years, covering a wide range of technologies and topics.