November 3rd, 2008
Will e-voting machines tilt the election?
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past 24 months, you should be well aware that tomorrow millions of Americans will be going to the polls to select their representative, one-third of their senators, and the next president. In general, Americans have become wary of the election process ever since the litigation that follows the 2000 election. There are many variables in the process that can cause legal challenges including but not limited to provisional ballots from voter’s with improper registrations, delayed military ballots from overseas and allegations of voter intimidation. I am in information security, not political science, so I am going to focus on what the e-voting story looks like this year.
Early voters have already been reporting difficulties with touch screen voting systems, as votes for Mr. McCain have been registered for Mr. Obama in Tennessee and Democrat votes were registered for Republicans in West Virginia. It looks like both situations were caused by touch screen calibration issues, that, while not an unknown systemic flaw, do impact the system’s reputation as being able to accurately record a vote. The concern is severe enough that Maryland and Virgina are planning on trading their electronic voting systems within the next cycle because of diminishing public faith in its operation.
I don’t believe that e-voting will compromise the quality of the election for several reasons. For example, the average voter has been primed by the media to expect the machines to fail, and will be far less hesitant to report problems to poll workers than in the past. Also, if the errors like touch screen calibration are truly random in nature, then the number of votes miscounted for either party should come out as a wash.
If a clean e-voting outing proves impossible to achieve, with any luck, the margins in the swing states will be large enough such that litigation is not an option for determining the next president. For people to have faith in their voting system, electronic or not, they need to feel that it was the electorate, and not lawyers, that decided the outcome of the election.
On a personal note, I have yet to see a touch screen voting system. I have voted using three methods in two municipalities. My home town of Philadelphia used large mechanical machines which were replaced by an electronic system with a similar UI but vote reporting issues. Here in San Francisco we use paper and pen ballots with an electronic scanner, a technique that is viewed by security experts as one of the most secure means of recording a vote. I am curious to hear what those of you who choose to exercise their right to vote faced on the big day.
Adam J. O'Donnell, Ph.D. is an R&D engineer who has focused on computer security since 2000. He currently is the Director of Emerging Technologies at Cloudmark, a messaging security company located in San Francisco. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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