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August 19, 2004
Grumping about Hysterical Coverage of Voting Machines
I’ve seen a lot of hysterical stuff around about how the Bush administration is going to “steal your vote” unless the populace insists on having paper records…
Which just bugs me. Paper in itself is not going to prove that a voters vote has been correctly recorded. A computer can display one thing, print a second thing, and record a third.
While paper is invaluable in testing, it becomes a more complex issue in actual voting, because now you have 60,000,000 pieces of paper to deal with. Which means machine counting of those pieces of paper, which brings us back to square one…
It turns out that voting is a very complex problem. Voting has to be:
- Secret
- Anonymous
- Verified.
- Easy.
Out of 1, 2, and 3, any two of these would be easy, but doing all 3 is pretty complex. #4 is important because we don’t want to disenfranchise people who are slightly computerphobic, or just elderly. Right now, the EAC (Electoral Action Commission) is concentrating on #4, while they are relying on an IEEE commission to deal with 1-3.
Now verification is a new requirement, that we never had before. If you think about it, no one at any previous polling place gave you any garuntees that your vote was recorded. You just trusted the polling place workers to do their job. With electronic voting, some sort of verification seems necessary, but insisting on paper isn’t going to help solve the real problems with electronic voting, and it won’t ensure that votes get verified.
I think the new voting systems deserve a lot of attention, but they require someone to dig in and really understand the issues involved, not just report hysterically about votes being stolen. Once you dig in, you’ll find that voting is actually a pretty complex process, and anytime you add computers to a complex process, things get complicated quickly.
Adding verification to the mix makes it even more complicated. You want people to be able to double check that their vote was correctly recorded, but you also want to ensure that they can’t then turn around and use that to prove that they voted for so-and-so, or people can buy votes.
My take on this whole issue is that people are thinking too simplistically. For example, if I went to vote, if that vote was transmitted a third party like the ACLU, and I had someway to confirm that, I’d be happy with that. Once I left the voting place, the ACLU would then refuse any confirmation requests for me, which would preserve the secrecy requirement. Of course, each vote would be transmitted to multiple people, like the Democratic and Republican parties, CNN, etc.
Perhaps I could even confirm it over my cell phone, laptop computer, whatever. There would be lots of different ways.
And none of that would involve paper.
Posted by the at August 19, 2004 2:19 PM
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