Tim Lee

E-voting and the Revolving Door

The New York Times has a story on voting reform that suggests an explanation for something that’s puzzled me for a while. One of the consistent patterns you’ll find in the e-voting debate is that state election officials tend to side with e-voting vendors rather than with security experts. This always struck me as a little bit puzzling, because the case against e-voting isn’t that hard to understand, and people who work with these technologies every day, of all people, should be able to understand them.

One explanation is that once a state has chosen a particular voting technology, they get egg on their face if they subsequently have to admit that the technology in question is a disaster. But some voting officials’ vehemence, especially as documented by Avi Rubin, seemed too strong to be explained purely as not wanting to admit you own mistakes.

Things make more sense if there’s a revolving door between state election officials and voting equipment vendors. You don’t even have to imagine explicit corruption. If many of your friends and former colleagues work for e-voting vendors, you’re more likely to believe them than some Ivory Tower security researcher you’ve never heard of.

I also think this is another reason that touch-screen voting machines are a bad idea—even with paper trails, audits, and the rest. Voting machine vendors have an incentive to make their products as complicated as possible so that they can charge the state more money for them. Making a touch-screen machine more secure means buying more hardware—fancier printers and diagnostic and auditing tools. On the other hand, making paper balloting more secure mostly means investing more in human inputs—hiring more election observers, giving election judges more training, conducting more hand recounts. Those aren’t things for which voting equipment vendors can charge a premium.

A voting machine with a paper trail is still a lot better than a voting machine without one. So I hope the Holt bill passes. But it would be much happier if Congress passed a law simply outlawing the use of touch-screen voting machines. (perhaps with an exception for disabled voters) Such a bill would be a lot shorter and less intrusive, because it wouldn’t include all these extra provisions aimed at papering over the weaknesses of DRE+printer combinations.

August 1, 2007 | Comments |

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    Let's face it the only way to free our voting system from vendor control and influence is to go for all paper ballots, made out by the voter himself and then counted in the precinct where the voting takes place.

    Without electronic technology, the system can be 100% transparent to any human, geek or not. No high level government certification needed.

    The nearly four billion dollars behind HAVA could have bought us a lot of human labor in ballot counting.

    Holt will only cement the acceptability of computers in elections, and for the first time give the Feds say over how we conduct elections. It should not pass.
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    Arlene, I agree that using paper ballots is the best policy. However, I don't think the Holt bill is necessarily going to cement the acceptability of computers in elections. Nothing in the Holt bill prevents states from ditching touch-screen voting machines entirely, which I hope that many states will choose to do. I would rather have legislation that flatly prohibits the use of touch-screen machines, but I don't see that on the horizon.

    I'm also sensitive to federalism concerns, but I don't think those are a serious problem here. The bill leaves almost all of the implementation details up to states, and only requires that states certify to the federal government that their election processes meet certain requirements. I'm not wild about these provisions, but the only states that will be seriously burdened are those states that have adopted paperless touch-screen voting systems, and those states need to be burdened.

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