Just a few weeks after Florida's 2002 primary, when Salon first reported on the flawed machines and on some computer experts' concerns about the security and accuracy of electronic voting systems, just about everyone we spoke to in the election community told us not to worry. What happened in Florida's primary was caused by ill-prepared poll workers, not buggy machines, elections officials and voting companies said, and they maintained (and still maintain) that no votes were lost. It was said that computer scientists who fretted about electronic voting machines that aren't backed up by a "paper trail" were naive, and they didn't understand the rigorous security procedures that occur in real elections; people who suggested that we shouldn't trust our democracy to private firms were scoffed at, labeled conspiracy theorists.

Over the course of a couple of years, though, calls by elections officials and voting companies for us to remain unworried became almost comically blind to the problems at hand. There have been enough voting machine failures, scandals and exposés in that time to make any concerned citizen weep. These days, nobody can seriously call the critics of such systems naive conspiracy theorists. Thanks to their efforts, we now know that at voting firms such as Diebold, employees don't seem to take security very seriously, as internal documents from the firm seem to suggest; that executives at some companies have suspiciously close relationships with elected officials; and that despite assurances from elections officials, when you vote on an electronic machine, you might never know what the system has done with your choice.

No longer are the activists considered kooks and paranoids, and their fears, backed up by numerous studies pointing out flaws in some electronic voting machines, have thoroughly permeated the mainstream media. Magazines as diverse as the Nation, Vanity Fair and Hustler have devoted considerable space to the issue. In January, the New York Times inaugurated a special editorial page section aimed at "Making Votes Count," and Paul Krugman routinely uses his column to warn of the dangers of paperless electronic voting. When Rodriguez-Taseff's Miami-Dade Reform Coalition recently discovered that the county had lost all of its electronic records from the 2002 election, the news didn't break online, in a techie blog or underground discussion site, as it might have a year or two ago. Instead, the story landed on the front page of the Times.

The coverage has certainly helped convince the public, as well as elections officials, of the dangers of electronic systems. Officials in California, for instance, have mandated that electronic systems include verifiable paper ballots by 2006, and Congress is mulling over legislation to require such machines nationally. David Dill, the Stanford computer scientist who's done much to line up technologists against paperless electronic voting systems, says that he's exceedingly pleased with what critics of electronic voting machines have accomplished so far. When, in early 2003, Dill began asking computer scientists to sign a petition calling for verifiable voting systems -- that is, systems that produce some kind of human-readable physical evidence of a person's vote -- he didn't think he'd be able to convince entire states to change their rules.

But in the face of so much anti-e-voting rhetoric, are voters becoming unreasonably scared or suspicious of elections? They might be. While it's undeniable that Dill and other critics of electronic voting systems have sparked much-needed discussion and action to fix some of the glaring problems with electronic machines, experts like Selker worry the hype is unnecessarily scaring voters. Selker points out that in 2000, most of the votes that were lost because of equipment malfunction were caused by faulty ballot design (remember the "butterfly ballot"?), not faulty machines, and that by far the largest number of votes (several million) lost could be blamed on bad voter registration procedures. These problems should be fixed before we spend money on paper trails for touch-screen machines, Selker says.

While he understands people's trepidation about voting on a system that doesn't have a paper trail, Selker insists that rigorous testing can detect malicious code in paperless voting systems. He recommends, for instance, that elections officials conduct "parallel testing" on voting machines -- on Election Day, they would randomly visit precincts and pull certain machines out of service for the day, then subject those machines to a battery of tests. If those randomly selected machines are found to record and tabulate votes accurately, you can be reasonably sure that the other machines are doing the same thing. (Officials in California are expected to conduct parallel testing on Election Day, as will some officials in electronic voting counties scattered all over the nation. In Maryland, where the choice to go to Diebold machines has sparked several security reviews and a lawsuit calling on a court to prevent the state from using the system, officials are considering using the parallel testing, said Linda Lamone, the administrator of Maryland's Board of Elections.) With such measures in place, Selker says, people can be confident that the electronic machines are working properly. "It'd be terrible if the reason we didn't have a great election is because Americans acted like voters in a Third World country" and didn't trust what happened at the polling place, he says.

David Dill, for his part, insists that it was never his intention to cause people to stay away from the polls, and he says he always tries to let people know that the problems with voting machines are no excuse not to vote. "People have to vote," he says. "I'm not sure how to get that message across. I wouldn't be going to all this trouble to make sure we have a trustworthy election system if I didn't respect the importance of voting." He also emphasized that "we're not talking about a proven conspiracy to steal the election with electronic voting. I'm sure that there'll be some people saying such things, but what I've been saying all along is we should pick the best technology we have available and use that."

There is something of an inconsistency to what Dill says, however. On the one hand, he's insisting that elections can't be trusted unless they're conducted on equipment that produces some kind of verifiable paper trail. At the same time, he's telling voters that they should probably go ahead and vote on machines that don't produce such a trail, machines that he says can't be trusted. Now, most people will probably disregard this inconsistency and, even if they agree with Dill that the machines are flawed, they'll still go ahead and vote. As Dill says, this year's election is far too important to miss out on. But there are probably a fair number of people who are on the fence about voting to begin with -- young people, say, or certain minorities, or members of other groups that tend to vote in low numbers, possibly because they don't think voting will make any real difference to their lives. Dill's suggestion that the voting system is not trustworthy just adds another reason for them to doubt the importance of voting -- and for how many people will it be the deciding factor, the final straw keeping them home on Election Day?

Recent Stories