Electronic Voting Machines

The election is just two days away and I've been following the use of electronic voting machines since the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed in 2002. I'm getting more and more nervous about these machines.

Here in Northampton we use optical scanning machines, which at least have a paper ballot that the voter fills out and then is read by the machine. So if there were regular audits required (which I don't think there are but should be), at least the machine results could be checked against the paper ballots filled out by voters to keep tabs on their accuracy. I believe now the paper ballots are only hand counted in close elections or when requested and paid for by someone or some group.

But the DRE's - the electronic voting machines where the voter touches the screen - usually have no paper trail. It amazes me that one can go to the ATM machine and come out with a paper receipt if one wishes. But with most of these voting machines, the voter does not have that option. I think the voting system we have now is even less reliable than what we had before HAVA and more easily manipulated. I think people need to have the option of paper ballots available at their polling sites. And not just provisional ballots, because I have read that in 2004, many of these were thrown out and never counted. There are lawsuits still in the courts about this issue and others voting issues from 2000, 2004 and 2006.

Besides the difficulty in auditing these machines, there's also the issue of who owns these machines and who has access to the source codes. Private companies own the machines and the public does not have access to the source codes. In this technology class, I've learned a little about what proprietary means - enough to be nervous that private companies are the only ones to have access to the code. Mark Crispin Miller, the author of Fooled Again and a professor who was on Bill Moyers show recently, has said that it is crucial that the software be open and publicly available for anyone's scrutiny. He believes that no private companies should be involved in counting our votes.

Now I'm reading and hearing about vote flipping happening in some of the early voting states that have touch screen machines - in W Virginia and Tennessee specifically. Patricia Earnhardt in Davidson County, Tennessee saw her vote flip from D to R before her eyes on the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen system. Voters in Putnam and Jackson counties in W Virginia using the same kind of machine reported vote flipping also. These are just a small sampling of the problems being reported by BradBlog (Brad Friedman) and other bloggers, newspapers, etc. (Besides ES&S already mentioned, the companies making electronic voting machines that I hear about the most are Sequoia Voting Systems, and Premier Election Solutions, which used to be Diebold Election Sytems - this information from Wikipedia.)

I'm all for returning to paper ballots and hand counting like they do in Canada and other countries until we can get all these problems with computerized voting ironed out. Voting is too important. I believe it should be in the public's hands, not privately owned with secret source codes and software. I want to see the public have the ability for recount, accountability, and be able to trust that every vote will count. We're just not getting this now.