A Slice of Fresh Blog

In recent years voting has evolved towards an electronically-based system, as opposed to the traditional paper-based arrangement.  There are many new challenges and issues which are brought up by this change, and which make its adoption as the norm a challenging one.  In this paper I will outline the main criticisms of the new touch-screen voting technologies, as well as state my thoughts on what could be done to neutralize these problems and make for a successful implementation of what will one day soon be the future of voting as we know it.

First off, a touch-screen voting system is operated as such: “a voter receives a card and inserts it into an ATM-like machine and touches the screen to record choices.  The card is sent to the supervisor of elections, where the choices are downloaded and counted”, however, due to this system storing all of its data electronically, “no tangible record exists” (Bousquet, 2007).  This lack of a paper trail is one of the main problems with electronic voting.  Florida governor Charlie Crist proposes to solve this problem by switching from touch-screen voting technology back to paper ballots, he proposes by 2008 (Bousquet, 2007).  To do this, Crist is asking for $30 million to make the gradual switch from the touch-screens to a system based on optical scanning.  This system “allows a voter to mark an oval next to a candidate’s name before slipping a ballot into an electronic reader”; much the same way as many high school and college tests are still administrated (Bousquet, 2007).  The problem with this switch is that many counties in Florida already rely heavily on touch-screen technology to tally their elections.  According to Steve Bousquet, in Pinellas County alone there are some 3,400 touch-screen machines.  The Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Nancy Whitlock said: “if touch screens were replaced with optical scanners, vote counting would take much longer” (Bousquet, 2007).  Additionally, new regulations in place due to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) outline that all polling places in the United States must have a touch-screen voting system in order to serve those who are in some way physically handicapped, such as the blind.  On top of these inconveniences, Pinellas County spent some $14 million just to buy their electronic voting system; if they are unable to sell them to another district they will take huge losses in their budget, especially including the $30 million stated above would need to be spent in order to make the switch in voting technology in Pinellas and surrounding counties (Bousquet, 2007).  This budget is a good chunk for Florida state’s proposed $150 million budget for new voting technology.  This sum is derived from the new HAVA statutes which give $150 million to each state in federal money, $3.9 billion overall according to John Wildermuth, for new voting technology, known as direct recording electronic machines, and for training elections officials in how to use the machines (McFeatters, 2003) (Wildermuth, 2004).

Training of election officials is another hurdle which must be scaled in order to provide voters with a safe, accurate, and effective touch-screen voting system in the future.  In September of 2006, the new voting system in Cuyahoga County, Ohio was defeated by poor training of poll workers.  Due to the workers’ poor training there “were discrepancies between the new paper-ballot backups and the votes recorded by the machines” (Fessler, 2006).  This election in Ohio was one of the first studies into the possibility of electronic voting being supplemented by a paper-backed system.  This option is “often seen as an answer to concerns about touch-screen voting” (Fessler, 2006).  As Fessler states, in Ohio about 10% of the paper ballots sampled by the Election Science Institute (ESI) were uncountable, which leads to a big problem in the event that a recount be needed, as the paper ballots are the means by which the recount must occur as per Ohio state law.  California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley also has proposed that paper backups be utilized as an addition to electronic voting.  In 2003 he called for all counties in California which are using touch-screen ballots to “provide voters with paper receipts so they can confirm their choices” by 2006 (Wildermuth, 2004).  Back in Ohio, poor training also led to other mistakes in their election.  Amongst these were “thermal paper [being] fed into the [voting] machine backwards”, and “paper jam[ing], creating areas in which votes were written over one another” (Fessler, 2006).  Ohio plans on spending $700,000 on more on thorough training of future poll workers (Fessler, 2006).  Diebold Election Systems, the manufacturer of the touch-screen machines used in the Ohio elections, has dismissed the report from the ESI as ‘severely flawed’ (Fessler, 2006).

Diebold Election Systems has come under a lot of scrutiny however.  Their election machines have been proven to be inaccurate, as well as very subceptible to hacking, amongst other problems.  In an Alaskan election, “Diebold touchscreen machines in Southeast Alaska, the Interior and near Nome did not upload their votes into the Division of Elections’ central computing system” (Volz, 2006).  This problem was attributed to problems in the machines’ modems, but the result was that “election officials [had] to hand count and manually upload vote totals from several precincts across the state”, which of course greatly slowed down the election results (Volz, 2006).  This whole ordeal caused Alaskan legislature to pass a new law in 2005 requiring the mandatory hand counting of ballots in one randomly selected precinct during every election (Volz, 2006).

The inaccuracy of the Diebold machines can be seen in many places. To begin with, a January special election for a state house seat in Broward County, Florida had 134 votes taken on a touch-screen system not recorded towards the election; the election was won by 12 votes  (Wildermuth, 2004).  Another example can be seen in North Carolina where during a 2002 election some 436 votes cast on touch-screen machines were lost (Wildermuth, 2004).  Other casses of inaccuracies have surfaced in California, namely during the March, 2004 elections where “computer problems fouled up and delayed operations at hundreds of polling places in Alameda and San Diego counties.  In Orange County, thousands of voters were given wrong electronic ballots, allowing them to vote where they didn’t live” (Wildermuth, 2004).  In San Diego, a thousand votes cast towards John Kerry were ascribed as having been case to Dick Gephardt, a candidate who had already dropped out of the Democratic presidential contests (Wildermuth, 2004).  Yet another case in San Diego occurred where during an October 2004 recall election, “a software problem shifted thousands of absentee votes for Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to a Socialist candidate from Southern California” (Wildermuth, 2004).  John Wildermuth goes on to state in his article that “the companies that sell voting systems argue that problems with the new technology are overblown and that security concerns are overstated”.  A statement by voting machine maker Diebold conforms to this account saying that their voting machines “are secure when elections officials follow proper procedures” (Volz, 2006).  However, Diebold’s machines continue to be criticized, which is in fact hurting all touch-screen machine manufacturers.  Charles from Sequoia Systems says: “voters can’t tell you the model and the company of the voting machine they use.  A problem with any machine hurts everyone’s confidence in the voting system” (Wildermuth, 2004).  This is bad news for areas such as California and Florida where hispanic voters are a major part of the election scene.  These electronic systems provide the much needed ability of an election ballot to be instantly displayed in multiple languages for non-English speakers, as well as allowing blind voters to use earpieces in order to have the ballot options read to them in a private setting for the first time (Wildermuth, 2004).  These problems of vote counting accuracy must be resolved soon if the public is expected to begin imparting their trust over to electronic means of vote counting such as touch-screen machines.

Of interest is how Diebold’s machines are not the only ones which have suffered from accuracy problems.  Other electronic vote tallying machines from Sequoia Voting Systems, as well as Election Systems & Software, have been shown to be prone to inaccurate vote counting.  These inaccuracies were found during a statistical analysis conducted by University of California, Berkley graduate students and their professor (Zetter, 2004).  According to this group, voting machines in Florida may have awarded George Bush around 260,000 more votes than he was supposed to receive.  In another 15 counties using the touch-screen systems, results were found to also have been vastly exagerated.  This is in contrast to counties whose voting systems were not touch-screen based, their results lined up “perfectly with what the variables would have predicted for those counties” (Zetter, 2004).  This shows that the software being used in msot new voting computers must contain some flaw, and it is this flaw which is preventing the American people from wholeheartedly adopting this new technology.  Even more of a concern is the hacking of the touch-screen voting machines.  If these inaccuracies could throw off elections, then the deliberate damage which would be incurred by a hacker would truly be devastating.

The criticism directed towards the alarmingly intermediate amount of skill required for the hacking of electronic touch-screen voting machines has been mostly directed towards manufacturer Diebold Election Systems.  In states which are now fully dependent on electronic voting, such as Maryland, the problem of hacking is more serious than ever.  In a January, 2004 test of Maryland’s voting machines a test team showed that “it was possible for hackers to guess the password needed to access the voting machines, break into the results transmitted from the election site and even fiddle with the software so that a vote for one candidate was recorded as a vote for another” (Wildermuth, 2004).  A newer study in 2006 conducted by Princeton University professor Edward W. Felten has “confirmed the concerns often expressed by computer scientists and security experts, as well as election integrity activists, that electronic voting – and indeed our elections – may now be exceedingly vulnerable to the malicious whims of a single individual” (Friedman, 2006).  The Princeton study utilized the Diebold AccuVote DRE system, which is in use in Maryland, Florida, and Georgia, among many other states. (Friedman, 2006).

The study found that a computer virus could be implanted onto an electronic voting machine, therefore allowing the hacker to transfer votes between candidates as he wished.  This approach would be untraceable as the total tally of votes cast would still equal the expected amount, and with no paper trail of the sabotage it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to detect the tampering of the voting machine.  Friedman writes that “the virus could also be written to spread from one machnie to the next and the malfeasance would likely never be discovered”.  Of equal concern is how the virus could be written to “modify its own tracks and remain virtually undetectable by elections officials.  It wouldn’t be found in the standard tests performed either before or after an election” (Friedman, 2006).  All of this damage perpetrated during the study was able to be done “with just one or two minutes of unsupervised access to either the voting machine or [its] memory card” (Friedman, 2006).  This created an uproar in California, as during their June election in 2006 some already programmed, and election-ready, Diebold voting machines had been sent home overnight with the poll workers which were to operate them in the coming election, some days and weeks before the actual polling (Friedman, 2006).  Of note is Johns Hopkins computer scientist and elections-security expert Aviel Rubin, who was one of the first to speak out about the security threats which Diebold’s machines were subceptible to (Friedman, 2006).  Upon analysing source code from some of the voting machines, which was left by Diebold on an unsecured public internet site, he told Newsweek: ‘If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it’ (Friedman, 2006).  The Princeton study also found that voter access cards, which were used on the Diebold voting system to grant a single vote to a registered voter, could be “created inexpensively on a personal laptop computer, allowing people to vote as many times as they wish” (Friedman, 2006).

These security threats, inaccuracies and hacking, are of great importance to all voters, including Pennsylvanians.  According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “A newer version of the Diebold machine is being used by 16 Pennsylvania counties, including Armstrong, Clarion, Somerset, Warren and Washington” (Sherman, 2006).  This is of course due to the Help America Vote Act mentioned earlier, which states that all counties must have at least one touch-screen voting machine in order to allow disabled and non-English speakers to be able to vote (Bousquet, 2007).  To help in the fight against electronic voting machine inaccuracies and hacking Representative Rush Hold, a Democrat from New Jersey, proposed an extension of the HAVA (Sherman, 2006).  This extension would “require the use of machines with paper trails and a routine audit of those trails” (Sherman, 2006).  This would of course make most of the newly purchased machines in many counties across the country obsolete, thereby squandering billions of dollars in federal aid that the counties have already spent for the upgrade to touch-screen voting machines (Sherman, 2006).

Overall, the current future for electronic voting looks bleak, this is not to say however that a solution to the above problems cannot, or will not, be found.  I myself believe that once solid software is written for the voting machines, possibly even a standardized operating system, that electronic voting will be more viable to full acceptance by the U.S. population.  The biggest concern is of course the possible hacking of these systems.  This can be prevented by keeping the machines under lockdown at all times, and having especially tight security measures weeks prior to an election.  Such is the case in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania where its 4,600 iVotronic voting machines are stored in a secure warehouse in the North Side of Pittsburgh (Sherman, 2006).  In my research I also found minor mentions of the generally unfriendly and sometimes confusing menus found while navigating the voting machines.  This is a simple problem, and quite frankly, a ridiculous one to have.  It is very simple to make an easily legible and understandable menu system for the voting machines; manufacturers simply need to get the message that their current efforts are not sufficient.  I believe that after these issues are resolved there will be widespread, and trusted, use of electronic touch-screen voting machines.

Works Cited

Bousquet, S. (2007, January 31). Crist wants touch-screen voting machines gone. Retrieved April 19, 2007, from St. Petersburg Times: http://www.sptimes.com/2007/01/31/State/Crist_wants_touch_scr.shtml

Fessler, P. (2006, September 13). Election 2006- Problems Found in Ohio Computer Voting. Retrieved April 19, 2007, from National Public Radio: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6069712

Friedman, B. (2006, September 14). Hack the vote? No problem. Retrieved April 19, 2007, from Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/09/13/diebold

McFeatters, A. (2003, August 7). U.S. News- Computer voting viewed skeptically. Retrieved April 19, 2007, from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03219/209386.stm

Sherman, J. L. (2006, September 26). Professor shows flaws in touch-screen voting. Retrieved April 19, 2007, from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06272/726096-84.stm

Volz, M. (2006, August 23). Problems with touchscreen machines slow vote count. Retrieved April 19, 2007, from Anchorage Daily News: http://www.adn.com/news/politics/elections/story/8113627p-8006175c.html

Wildermuth, J. (2004, April 26). ‘Touch’ voting a worry/Hazards haunt new high-tech machines. Retrieved April 19, 2007, from San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/26/MNGQS6B1K81.DTL

Zetter, K. (2004, November 18). Researchers: Florida Vote Fishy. Retrieved April 19, 2007, from Wired Magazine: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2004/11/65757