Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Will fears about the new voting machines keep voters away from the polls? And what's going on in Florida, anyway?
Aug 24, 2004 | Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a corporate lawyer and a former president of the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, vividly remembers the moment she became an election reform activist. It was on Sept. 10, 2002, when she saw yet another election in South Florida go unfathomably awry -- this time a primary election, the first vote in which her county, Miami-Dade, and several neighboring counties would use electronic voting machines at the polls.
"It was jarring," she recalls. The poll workers didn't know how to run the new touch-screen machines. The voters didn't know how to vote on the machines. Some of the systems didn't work at all; they displayed incorrect selections, froze up, acted generally odd. "What moved me to action was seeing all these people -- elderly black folks standing in line for hours without being able to vote, fanning themselves in the hot sun, waiting for the machines to start working so they could get their chance," Rodriguez-Taseff says. "And then, seeing the people coming out of the polls with their eyes dazed over, shocked and amazed by what had happened. They couldn't understand why when they pressed a button next to one candidate, the machine brought up another candidate's name."
Accounts of the perils of electronic voting systems are nothing new. In the last couple of years, it seems we've all heard stories like Rodriguez-Taseff's -- tales of machines breaking down during elections, of systems displaying erroneous selections, of machines behaving badly. When computer security experts have examined some of the voting machines now widely in use, they've discovered enormous security problems. In January, for instance, a team at RABA Technologies, a computer consulting firm in Maryland, managed to devise a half-dozen ways of compromising the votes in touch-screen machines manufactured by Diebold, which produces the systems to be used in Maryland and Georgia this year. (A PDF file of their report can be found here.) And who hasn't heard that voting machine firms may have close relationships with certain politicians? Diebold's CEO is famous online for declaring, in his role as a major Bush-Cheney fundraiser, that he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
According to the political consulting firm Election Data Services, on Election Day this year about 29 percent of the registered voters in the nation -- more than 45 million people -- will find electronic touch-screen systems at their polling places. To computer scientists, the only way to secure these machines is to have them print out "verifiable" paper ballots -- a paper ballot that a voter accepts or rejects as his accurate vote, and which is then counted in the case of a contested election. Such a system will only be available this year for the one-half of 1 percent of voters in Nevada. The rest of us will cast our electronic votes with a kind of leap of faith. We'll have no way of knowing what the machine has actually recorded, and we'll be forced to trust that the system (the officials, the voting company, the procedures, everyone and everything involved in the race) has done everything fairly. We have no choice, really, but to trust the system.
Still, two years after witnessing that Florida debacle, Rodriguez-Taseff, who founded and now heads the Miami-Dade Reform Coalition, a nonpartisan citizen's group dedicated to fixing elections in a county where elections seem eternally unfixable, remains deeply worried about the electronic systems that will be used at her polls this year. But she says that it's too late, too costly and probably not even technically feasible to configure voting machines to print the kind of verifiable ballots that computer scientists have called for, at least for this election. That kind of system, untested and unproven in any real race, "lives in outer space," Rodriguez-Taseff says bluntly.
What worries Rodriguez-Taseff are the far more pragmatic questions of voting procedures and voting practices we'll have to deal with in electronic polling places this year. She fears that polls won't open on time, and that voters won't know how to use the machines, and that officials won't know how to help voters when the machines (inevitably) screw up. She's also concerned that in the event of irregularities, elections laws in Florida won't allow a thorough examination of the machines to see what's gone wrong. The machines in her state are capable of printing out paper "ballot images" of each vote after the election; these ballot images aren't quite the same thing as the voter-verified paper trail that computer scientists have been calling for, but they would constitute some kind of paper record of every voter's choices, and Rodriguez-Taseff believes they could prove useful if there are questions about an election's accuracy. Florida's election rules, however, specifically prohibit manually recounting these ballot images, a situation that Rodriguez-Taseff says will cast even more doubt on election results.
She is also concerned that voters who've heard about the problems with electronic voting machines will disenfranchise themselves. In a recent poll of Florida voters conducted by Quinnipiac University, more than half of the people surveyed reported being less than fully confident that their votes would be counted at all during the upcoming election. The numbers were higher when broken out for minorities and Democrats in the state. About 16 percent of those surveyed said they planned to vote by absentee ballot, and half of them said they were choosing the absentee route because they didn't trust the voting machines.
Rodriguez-Taseff blames political parties -- specifically Democrats trying to court minority voters in Florida -- for this skepticism. She says the parties aren't doing enough to educate voters about what they'll see at the polls this year. Instead of being honest with voters about both the advantages and disadvantages of electronic voting, politicians are trying to paper over the problems, or to urge a quick-fix, not especially good alternative -- absentee voting.
But other voting experts charge that it's not the Democrats' or the Republicans' fault that people don't trust the election system -- it is, instead, the fault of activists who've been constantly criticizing the voting machines for the past two years. "The conversation the way they've been framing it is all going to make people believe that they shouldn't vote," says Ted Selker, a professor at MIT who co-directs the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which produced a landmark study examining how voting technology performed in the 2000 election. He says that electronic voting critics have forced the electorate to become much more cynical and jaded about elections and especially about the integrity of elections officials.
And in an election this tight, is such skepticism something that political parties -- especially Democrats -- want or need? Most touch-screen machines in South Florida were introduced, after all, by Democratic officials who were horrified at the rate of disenfranchisement of minorities in the 2000 presidential vote; the machines were supposed to make voters come back to the polls, not keep them away. Clearly, though, either the machines, or the controversy surrounding the machines, is making people scared.
What if all the activism only succeeds in keeping people away from the polls on Election Day?
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