Today’s Washington Post reports that both Maryland and Virginia are looking to ditch the electronic voting systems they rolled out only a few years ago:
Goodbye, electronic voting. Farewell, fancy touch screen. Maryland and Virginia are going old school after Tuesday’s election.
Maryland will scrap its $65 million electronic system and go back to paper ballots in time for the 2010 midterm elections — and will still be paying for the abandoned system until 2014. In Virginia, localities are moving to paper after the General Assembly voted last year to phase out electronic voting machines as they wear out.
It was just a few years ago that electronic voting machines were heralded as a computerized panacea to the hanging chad, a state-of-the-art system immune to the kinds of hijinks and confusion that some say make paper ballots vulnerable. But now, after concern that the electronic voting machines could crash or be hacked, the two states are swinging away from the systems, saying paper ballots filled out by hand are more reliable, especially in a recount.
The trend reflects a national movement away from electronic voting machines. About a third of all voters will use them Tuesday, down from a peak of almost 40 percent in 2006, according to Election Data Services, a Manassas-based consulting firm specializing in election administration. Every jurisdiction that has changed election systems since 2006 has gone to paper ballots read by optical scan machines, said Kimball Brace, the firm’s president. And for the first time in the country’s history, fewer jurisdictions will be using electronic machines than in the previous election, he said.
“The battle for the hearts and minds of voters on whether electronic systems are good or bad has been lost,” Brace said. The academics and computer scientists who said they were unreliable “have won that battle.”
The systems, it seems, have fallen victim to a battle for public opinion that has characterized computer-based voting systems as subject to abuse and manipulation. This assertion, though, ignores the fact that elections were stolen and manipulated a long time before Diebold ever came into existence and that paper ballot systems are, potentially, far easier to manipulate than a truly secure electronic system would be. Moreover, the example of a “stolen” election that is cited most often — the 2000 Presidential Election in Palm Beach County, Florida — occurred under a paper ballot system.
More importantly, electronic systems — especially the touch screen system that’s been in use in Northern Virginia over the past decade or so — are far easier to use than those sometimes confusing paper ballots.
Rather than shunning technology completely, or relying upon paper ballots and optical readers, which have their own flaws, wouldn’t the better solution be to design an electronic voting system that is both secure and easy to use ?
I wouldn’t consider myself a luddite since I’ve worked in IT for over 11 years and have a degree in computer information systems, but I do agree that electronic voting (at least in it’s current incarnation) needs to go away.
The only way that I would support e-voting efforts is if a few changes were made.
1: A hard “receipt” should be created so that voters can be certain their vote was recorded correctly. Those receipts should then be stored at least until the vote is certified.
2: The code should not be proprietary. There is no way that people can be sure their vote is being properly counted if it’s handled by a “black box” that no one is privy to examining. Allowing a company to say that their code is protected intellectual property in this instance is a horrible idea.
I’m sure there are more concerns but those are the two that are chief in my mind. Can anyone else come up with more?
I think touch screens are great. They are the easiest voting method I have encountered (from an end user perspective). However I think Derrick is correct. They should print a “ballot” that is both human and machine readable. Once the voter verifies the correct options have been selected they would then feed the ballot into the ballot box where it can be read and stored if a human hand count becomes necessary.