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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Why paper over machines? It's an odd thing to hear in the Internet age, but these technologists insist that marking data on dead trees, rather than suspending choices in silicon, is the best way to ensure America's democracy. Paper is bug-free, it can be made tamper-resistant, and it's readable by most humans. It has a proven record. Mercuri, who, after all, has a day job that requires her to be bullish on computers, says that electronic systems simply aren't up to the job of voting. "The only thing the computer is good for," she says, "is as a fancy ballot printer."
A good example of this blunt diagnosis was the situation that prompted Janet Reno to call Mercuri in September. A few precincts in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, both of which were using touch-screen machines purchased from Election System & Software, an Omaha company that is the world's largest provider of election equipment, were showing that nobody voted for the governor's race, even though hundreds had turned out at the polls.
"She called me because they saw the numbers rolling out of the machines, and they figured something was screwy," Mercuri says. "You would have places where there were over 1,300 votes and there would be like one vote for governor. It's like, Hello!?"
ES&S, which did not return Salon's calls for comment, moved quickly to see what was wrong. According to press reports, the company said that its machines had functioned properly, and that it was the workers at the polls who'd had problems. Poll workers had apparently been instructed to insert cartridges into the machines to collect votes at the end of the night, but they did not do so, ES&S said, so it appeared that nobody had voted.
"I don't know what happened in every case. I just know [poll workers] had procedures and didn't follow them," Willie Weslie, an ES&S program manager told the Associated Press in September.
ES&S was able to get the votes from inside the machines, and it was during this process that Reno's people called Mercuri. "ES&S does this thing called 'data extraction,' where apparently it takes like a couple of hours to get the information from each machine," Mercuri said. "And Reno was asking me, 'What does this mean?' And, 'Can we get more data out, and more?'"
Reno's question wasn't really as opportunistic as it may sound. Even if ES&S's procedure to recover lost votes was on the up-and-up, it had the sheen of impropriety: A polling place initially records no votes, and then a technician comes in, fiddles with the machine, and all of a sudden there are some votes.
"Basically ES&S comes in and they've got some sort of tool they stick in some part of the machine and they pull some data out of it," Mercuri said. "How can you trust that?" What evidence is there to support the conclusion that the second count, and not the first, is to be believed? Only the word of the voting company. And Reno was (probably justifiably) not satisfied with that.
Reno eventually conceded the primary election to Bill McBride, who, according to the official tally, won by less than 5,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast. But Mercuri remains suspicious of what really happened in Florida. "We'll never know, will we?" she says.
It's a good question: If the result of an important election using touch-screen machines ever comes into doubt -- as it could this year -- how will we bring ourselves to believe in the results?
After Florida's 2000 election held up the presidential race, dozens of news organizations spent months and millions of dollars to try to determine whom the state had really chosen to be president. The investigators pored over those famous dimpled chads and butterfly ballots in an attempt to determine "voter intent." The results of this scrutiny, released a year later, showed that Bush had probably won, though Al Gore might have had a chance had he pressed for a statewide recount of ballots. Since the news was released after Sept. 11, it did not seem to make much of a political difference, but the study did at least provide a semi-official end to a lingering controversy.
With an electronic system, such a tally may not even be possible. When you vote on a touch-screen machine, the data is usually stored on several different systems inside the machine -- a hard disk, a "smart card" and perhaps other storage devices. The different systems serve to ensure that the data cannot be lost, so that organizations seeking to do a recount could possibly re-tally those devices. But those recounts won't get at a more basic problem with electronic systems -- their accuracy. When you press the button for Gore, how do you know that the smart card hidden deep inside the machine is indeed increasing the count for Gore, and not for Bush?
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