Imagine this: You, Joe or Jane Citizen, walk into a voting booth this November, ready to exercise your solemn responsibility and participate in the democratic process. You cast your vote for your favorite candidate (or more likely, the lesser of two or more evils) on a touch-screen a la Jetson. Knowing you’ve fulfilled your civic duty, you leave the booth aglow from a job well done.
But the computer has different plans. By malice or mistake, the machine doesn’t record the vote. Because the system doesn’t keep a voter-verifiable paper trail of votes, your vote is lost forever in a black hole of undemocratic illegitimacy.
During March’s presidential primary election, one of Sequoia Voting Systems’ Optech system electronic voting machines in Napa County, Calif., failed to transcribe votes on paper ballots because of a problem with ink calibration, necessitating a re-scan of some 11,000 ballots.
In early voting during the November 2002 general election, six electronic voting machines in Wake and Jackson counties, N.C., lost at least 436 ballots. When poll workers entered absentee votes on the Election Systems & Software iVotronic touch-screen machines, the computers falsely detected that their memories were full and didn’t record the votes.
Last year, California officials discovered that Diebold, another electronic voting machine manufacturer, had installed
uncertified software on the machines in several counties; the subsequent statewide audit revealed that the company had “upgraded” without certification the software in all 17 counties using its touch-screen and optical-scan machines.
The introduction of high technology into the voting process is, in theory, a very good one. Well-operated and programmed machines reduce the chances of human error, failures that can be critical in tight races. But when votes are lost or miscounted — usually without notifying voters or officials — the integrity of the democratic process is directly threatened.
In recent years, officials have phased out punchcard-style machines, which are susceptible to operating problems of their own. But replacing unreliable machines with newer unreliable machines which don’t leave a paper trail is irresponsible, and begs for another electoral mess of the kind Florida saw in 2000.
Fortunately, Congress has begun to take notice. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., introduced House Bill 2239, titled The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003. Along with its companion Senate bill, S.B. 1980 (introduced by Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla.), HR 2239 requires that voting systems produce a paper trail, a powerful fail-safe method that makes any necessary recounts feasible and democratically meaningful.
Better still, the act would ban undisclosed software in voting machines, leaving the guts of the machine open to public and expert scrutiny.
Voters have also seen problems in Broward County, Fla., where 134 voters’ ballots were lost, and unrecoverable because there was no paper trail. Machines in Hinds County, Miss., overheated, interfering with the election so badly the state legislature called for a new election; and in Fairfax County, Va., some voters saw votes they cast given to their candidates’ opponents.
For the sake of fairness in the electoral system — the keystone of representative democracy — contact your representative and senators (Rep. Peter DeFazio, D, and Sens. Gordon Smith, R, and Ron Wyden, D, if you live in Eugene), and urge them to support the above bills.