I’ve seen a lot of hysterical stuff around about how the Bush administration is going to “steal your vote” using “black box voting” unless the populace insists on having paper records.
Which just bugs me. Paper in itself is not going to prove that a 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…machines we might not trust.
It turns out that voting is a very complex problem. We would like voting to be:
Easy: You shouldn’t need a computer science degree to be able to vote. We especially don’t want to disenfranchise people who don’t speak English well, are slightly computer-phobic, or who are just elderly.
Secret: There can’t be any way for an outsider to tell which candidate you voted for, so you can’t be forced to vote for any particular candidate. Nor can there be any way for you to “sell” your vote.
Secure: We want voting to be secure so that the ballot box (real or computerized) can’t be “stuffed”.
Verified/Accurate: Since the debacle in 2000, many voters would like to be able to verify that their vote has been recorded. This is especially important most feel with computerized voting.
Doing any three of these is easy, but doing all 4 is a pretty complex problem.
I find it interesting that verification is a new requirement that we never had before. If you think about it, no one at any polling place has ever given you any guarantees 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.
After the debacle in Florida in 2000, Congress and the Bush administration created the Electoral Action Commission (www.eac.gov). This has to some extent fed the paranoia, because all of them are Bush appointees. However, this sort of bi-partisan commission is very typical in government. The President as head of the executive branch chooses the people, but Congress has final say and verifies that the commission is suitably bipartisan. The EAC is also completely advisory, because per the Constitution, its up to each states how to run their elections.
The EAC, having looked at the problem, has broken it into two pieces. The EAC has taken on the Easy part of the problem, in that they are running tests to verify that the machines are easy to use. The second piece, the (Secret, Secure, and Verified) part of the problem, they’ve turned over to the IEEE. The IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, i.e. “the Computer Geeks”. This is probably a good choice, because frankly, the government is really bad at understanding complex engineering problem. However, the Geeks tend to be really bad at realizing how hard a computer can be to use for a novice. So that’s a good division of labor. The EAC also deal with the people issues involved in voting (setting up the election board, how to administrate the election). In short, the Geeks are doing the computer stuff, the EAC is doing the people stuff.
So those are the people working on the problem. So far so good.
However, they haven’t solved the problem yet. Nor will they in time for this election, because as I said it’s a tough problem. Perhaps by 2008 we might see some real action on this front.
But it’s a very important problem, because it effects not just how we conduct elections in the US, but how people across the world conduct elections
Recently, they had a recall election in Venezuela. Because of the long history of cheating in Venezuelan elections, Chavez asked Jimmy Carter and his merry crew of election monitors to certify that the election was valid. He did so, and Chavez remains in power.
Except Thursday it was reported in the Wall Street Journal that Carter got hoodwinked.
So it’s not just the United States that needs better voting, it’s the entire world. If we can put our heads together to produce a truly secure and foolproof system, it will improve the cause of liberty all over the world.
So these 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.
That said, at the moment, I think the Geeks are thinking too simplistically.
I voted on Tuesday, and yes, there was a paper trail (Flagstaff now uses optical scan ballots). That doesn’t reassure me though, because how do I know the ballot boxes didn’t get stuffed? I don’t, I’m relying on the faith and trust of the people in the polling place. Now in Flagstaff, I’m quite confident that the recent election was honest. In Venezuela, not so much…
What I’d like to see something I call Objective Witnessing. When you vote, your vote should be immediately transmitted to a number of third parties over the Internet. Lets use three Objective Witnesses as an example:
• The Republican Party
• The Democratic Party
• The League of Women Voters
Now personally, I would trust their acknowledgment a lot more then any paper receipt. I can much more easily trust the two political parties to fight tooth and nail for every vote, so no matter who I choose, I can be very sure that they’ll record my vote. Of course, I myself am a computer geek, so I know that the physical presence of a piece of paper, while it seems more “real” then some pixels on the computer screen, it’s only an illusion. An additional challenge in solving the voting problem will also be convincing people that its better then the illusion of paper.
That’s going to be tough.
Most of us only have one job in our government, to vote, but sometimes I think it’s the most important job in government. While we should watch the people developing voting machines, we also need to keep an open mind. If we can provide truly secure elections, it can change elections not just in the US, but in the entire world.
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