Electronic Voting
July 6, 2008 · by Scott Fradkin
Electronic Voting rears its ugly head yet again.
From just that one sentence it should be relatively easy to tell where I stand on the issue. Technology does a lot of great things for us, but sometimes technology is completely unnecessary. Electronic voting seems to suffer from the elephant gun syndrome. Although it would be easier to collect and tabulate votes for an election electronically, using paper and pencil is a tried and true mechanism for correctly identifying and counting votes.
I know that I wouldn’t want my vote to be counted by a machine that is built by a company like Diebold.
Bruce Schneier has a blog post [1] that points to another blog entry [2] written by a guy named Dan Wallach who is an associate professor in the Comp. Sci. department at Rice University. His specialty is electronic voting security. He’s been called on numerous times to testify in front of the Texas House Committee on Elections about the topic.
It seems that the various companies that build electronic voting machines are bending over backward (think crazy Matrix bullet time Neo moves) to twist the results of some studies that have been done on the security of these voting machines to convince states that the machines are safe to use. It’s not exactly easy to corrupt or change results on these machines, but it’s not impossible. Downright scary is what I think. Voters that have to use these machines to vote cannot be assured that their votes will be tabulated correctly. Municipalities cannot necessarily detect that the results are corrupt according to Mr. Wallach.
Voting is too important a thing to be left entrusted to companies developing these machines behind closed doors. Mr. Schneier is consistent in saying that security by obscurity just doesn’t work. I’m still not sure I’d want to use any electronic voting machine even if it’s completely open source and been vetted by numerous third parties. Pen and paper any day for me. I won’t mind if it takes a week to figure out who won a particular election as long as I know that all the votes have been counted correctly.
No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, if you work with computers and technology on a daily basis, this should scare you. It’s necessary to get people talking about the issues with their governmental representatives to ensure that everyone’s vote will count.
[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/dan_wallach_on.html
[2]http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1304
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