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December 23, 2005
Bring Back The Paper Ballot!
After noting the continuing problems with Diebold Election Systems' electronic voting machines, Glenn Reynolds once again makes the case for a return to paper ballots. From a 2002 TCS article:
Paper ballots are surprisingly resistant to fraud. Actually, it shouldn't be that surprising. A paper ballot encodes lots of useful information besides the obvious. Not only is the information about the vote contained in the form, but also information about the voter. Different colors of ink, different styles of handwriting, etc., make each ballot different. Erasing the original votes is likely to leave a detectable residue. Creating all new ballots with fraudulent votes requires substantial variation among them or the fakery is much more obvious; that's hard work. And destroying the original ballots in order to replace them with fraudulent ones isn't that easy - there's a lot of paper to be disposed of, and shredding it, or burning it, or hiding it is comparatively easy to detect. (Protecting the ballots before counting doesn't require fancy encryption, either: just a steel box with a lock, a slot on the top, and a seal.) What's more, because people are familiar with paper documents, fraud is easy to understand when it occurs. Paper ballots are both robust (resistant to fraud) and transparent (easy to understand).
Compare this sophisticated voting technology to that of voting machines. A voting machine captures only the information regarding the vote. Once it has done so, one vote looks like another. There's no handwriting, no style, no ink, just a simple notation of which candidate was favored. Most voting machines store votes electronically, meaning that if they're changed, there's no troubling paper residue for fraud-perpetrators to dispose of. And because voting machines are complicated - and because their actual workings are unseen, and often kept secret - it's much harder for voters, members of the press, and others to identify or understand fraud. Electronic ballots, in other words, are neither robust nor transparent.
The fact is, if you could come up with a new technology as simple and resistant to fraud as the paper ballot, people would be pretty impressed. So why do we use machines?
Why indeed? Glenn notes one obvious reason: our hyperventilated news cycles require instant information. A common idea is that we're all conditioned now to expect our election results before midnight--God forbid we should have to go to bed without knowing who won. But I wonder if that's really true? The quite justifiable backlash against the major networks for calling Florida too early in the 2000 election indicates that we might be willing to wait a little longer to get it right. And as Glenn notes, the trend with electronic machines is that results are taking longer because of the inevitable challenges and uncertainty that accompanies their use in a close election.
Wired News has more on the successful hacking of a Diebold machine in a test set up by Florida election officials:
Hugh Thompson, an adjunct computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology who helped devise last week's test [...] and Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer scientist, were able to change votes on the Diebold machine without leaving a trace. Hursti conducted the same test for the California secretary of state's office Tuesday. The office did not return several calls for comment. [...]
The hack Thompson and Hursti performed involves a memory card that's inserted in the Diebold machines to record votes as officials scan ballots. According to Thompson, data on the cards isn't encrypted or secured with passwords. Anyone with programming skills and access to the cards -- such as a county elections technical administrator, a savvy poll worker or a voting company employee -- can alter the data using a laptop and card reader.
There are many worrisome threads here--maybe the worst is the problems of complexity. I'm fairly computer literate, but by no means a hacker, and the general knowledge level of the average user is probably less than mine. And it would take me weeks or months of study just to understand the basics of how to hack one of these machines--but that's knowledge that quite a few (especially young) people do have. In other words, it's very scary that the very complexity of these machines could hide the fraud from the understanding of the average voter.
I don't think we need the purported advantages of these machines, and I don't think we can afford to tolerate their potential for abuse. I'm with Glenn: bring back the paper ballot.
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