Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
New touch-screen voting machines may look spiffy, but some experts say they can't be trusted.
Nov 5, 2002 | In mid-September, a few days after yet another problem-ridden election in Florida, Rebecca Mercuri got a phone call from Janet Reno. Mercuri, a computer science professor at Bryn Mawr, wasn't very surprised to hear from the former attorney general; Reno had already been declared the unofficial loser in Florida's Democratic gubernatorial primary, and Mercuri, who during the past two years has become the country's fiercest critic of electronic voting machines, has recently found herself indispensable to losers.
A fast-talking, fact-toting woman who can recount dozens of stories of voting machines going disastrously haywire, Mercuri goes into a region whose election has been held up and proceeds to hold forth. Mercuri tells everyone she can, from election judges to county supervisors to the local media, that the supposedly "state-of-the-art" machines they've all been sold are nothing but a "a bill of goods."
So far, Mercuri has had little success in convincing local leaders to slow down their drive to purchase new voting machines. By late evening on Election Day 2002, though, people other than electoral losers may start to see some sense in Mercuri's arguments.
In the two years since Florida's first bungled election, dozens of local municipalities -- and the entire state of Georgia -- have thrown out their antiquated voting machines in favor of touch-screen, "ATM-style" systems. According to some reports, more than 20 percent of voters will use such machines this year, and that number is poised to increase during the next decade. In October, without the slightest nod to the irony of the situation, President Bush signed into law a sweeping new bill that promises to end the voting problems that some say helped nudge him into office. The new law, called the Help America Vote Act, will provide almost $4 billion to states to allow them to purchase new machines.
But as Florida's Sept. 10 primary illustrated, the new systems are not a panacea -- and, according to Mercuri and a growing number of tech-savvy critics, the electronic systems are actually worse than their much-maligned punch-card cousins. Mercuri's chief complaint with the touch-screen system is that its inner workings are often a complete secret. When a voter touches the screen to make a choice, there is no confirmation that the machine has actually registered the correct selection. In the old punch-card and fill-in-the-circle paper systems, voters can see their choice marked on paper. And in the event of a recount, election officials can, as a last resort, manually count those slips of paper. Since the new electronic systems leave no paper trail, there's no chance of a recount.
"You can't recount a database," says Jason Kitcat, a computer scientist who spent many years trying to develop an open-source Internet voting system. "You can't audit electrons."
Despite these problems, local election officials -- the people who risk the most embarrassment when an election goes awry -- are stampeding to buy the new machines, often on terms that would not seem to be in their best interest. Many officials agree to sign provisions with manufacturers that protect the machines' inner workings as "trade secrets"; last March, in a municipal election in Palm Beach County, Fla., the trade-secrets rules prevented a candidate for the city council from inspecting machines that he believed had malfunctioned during an election.
Why are the mechanics of the systems that are so critical to democracy being kept hidden from public view? That's one of Rebecca Mercuri's main questions. She argues for more transparency in procurement procedures, and for the chance to have experts evaluate machines in the event that the systems appear to misfire during an election. Perhaps if touch-screen machines have problems on Tuesday, election officials will insist on those procedures. (In some cases, though, it's possible that the machines will malfunction and we may never find out about it.)
But Mercuri and other technologists also offer some harder-to-follow advice to election officials: Don't buy new touch-screen machines at all, they say, unless the machines produce some sort of auditable paper trail. When a voter casts a ballot on a touch-screen machine, says Mercuri, the machine should spit out a paper version of the selections, and this paper version should be the "official" ballot, the one counted and used to determine the outcome of the election.
