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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Representatives of the computer vote-counting industry are unfairly dominating the standard-setting process, say critics.
Sep 29, 2003 | When the IEEE, the world's leading professional society of engineers, decided in the summer of 2001 to create a technical standard for electronic voting machines, most everyone concerned with the elections business thought it was a grand idea.
For the most part, the IEEE operates just as you'd expect a bunch of engineers to behave -- the group is rigorous, open-minded, dispassionate, and reluctant to embark upon any major endeavor unless everyone with an opinion has had an opportunity to hold forth. "Consensus" is the IEEE's main buzzword; and while that ethic can lead to some frustration, it also explains why so many industries and government agencies ask the IEEE to draw up technical standards for new technologies. People trust the IEEE's open process, and when it sets down certain specifications -- governing everything from aircraft gyros to wireless networks -- the specs are widely respected by technologists.
And by the summer of 2001, a standard for voting machines was clearly needed. After the hobbled 2000 presidential election, officials across the nation were rushing to purchase new equipment to replace their maligned punch-card systems. Elections vendors were heavily promoting fully electronic, ATM-style touch-screen voting machines, but many computer scientists warned -- and are warning still -- of critical security flaws in such systems. The key players in the debate over electronic voting saw the IEEE as a good place to resolve concerns people had with the new systems; they hoped that after hearing all sides, the vaunted body could create respected technical guidelines for the machinery of modern democracy.
Two years later, however, the IEEE group charged with drafting a voting machine standard is paralyzed by bitter infighting. Members of the body can't agree on the substance of a proposed standard for voting machines, nor can they even come to a consensus on a fair process for determining such a standard.
The parties involved are arguing about big things -- about whether, for instance, electronic voting machines should be required to produce a "voter-verifiable" audit trail, which many security experts say is the only way to guarantee security in electronic systems -- and tiny things, such as the order in which topics are discussed in the meetings they hold. To hear members of the committee tell it, the whole process has become a circus -- a circus that illustrates how difficult it might be to eventually create a national standard for voting systems.
Advocates of the audit-trail requirement claim that the IEEE standards group has been hijacked by a "cabal" representing the voting equipment industry; this industry coalition has systematically attempted to "disenfranchise" its critics by abusing technicalities in the meeting bylaws, these activists charge.
"I think they do want to prevent stronger security methods from going into the standard," says David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford who is one of the leading advocates of verifiable ballots in electronic systems. "I feel that we are being deliberately shut out of the process."
Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist and a research fellow at Harvard who has long questioned the security in electronic voting systems, says that the entire standards process has been shrouded in secrecy. "It's not just the fact that they have all these rules," she says. "We could live with the rules. But when someone asks for a clarification of the rules, they change the rules to suit their purposes."
Is the voting equipment industry trying to silence its opponents in a standards group that has traditionally been committed to openness? That's hard to say definitively; none of the industry officials on the voting-machine group -- including Herb Deutsch, who is the chair of the committee charged with drafting the standard and an employee of Elections Systems & Software, the world's largest voting company -- responded to Salon's requests for comment. But in interviews, several members of the committee who have called for tough security in voting systems pointed to specific "irregularities" in the standards process: People have been given conflicting and confusing instructions on how to join the group; some members appear to have been accorded preferential treatment; the committee's leaders have used some technically legal but not very nice parliamentary procedures to prevent opponents from expressing their views; and when critics of the industry have managed to make comments, they appear to have been summarily ignored.
