The United States is in the midst of an unprecedented transformation of its election system. A critical component of that transformation is the retirement of paper-based voting equipment like the notorious hanging chad punch-card that mired the 2000 presidential elections in lengthy controversy.
As Siva Vaidhyanathan explains, many jurisdictions hope eventually to make the switch from punch-cards to more user-friendly electronic voting equipment. Electronic voting results in fewer lost votes than punch-cards and provides especially great advantages for traditionally disenfranchised voters: for example, racial minorities, people with disabilities, and non-English speakers.
In 2000, approximately 10% of citizens nationwide voted electronically, without any evidence of fraud; it was instead the paper-based voting systems used in Florida and many other states that caused serious problems, including the massive undercounting of votes and, many believe, a president who was not legitimately elected.
But a fuller transition to electronic voting will not be completed in time for the US presidential election on 2 November 2004. Ironically, security concerns over electronic voting and the call by citizens groups to require a paper replica of the electronic ballot that Sam Howard-Spink describes have caused many states to keep unreliable punch-card voting machines in operation. In fact, most voters in this years election will use the same equipment as in 2000.
Most disturbingly, several key swing states will deploy the very punch-card machines that resulted in so many problems in Florida. In Ohio, for example, approximately 70% of voters will continue to vote by punch-card in 2004. Thats especially troubling in light of the fact that Ohio is the seventh most populous state in the country and is projected by both major parties to be critical to victory in November. The states failure to upgrade its voting technology makes it quite possible that Ohio could become the Florida of the 2004 election.
Civil rights and voting technology
How can it be that the United States is still using the same defective voting equipment? Its a question that puzzles many election experts.
From a civil-rights perspective, there are four principal problems with the punch-card voting equipment still used in many parts of the US:
- it has an inequitable impact on racial minorities
- it is more difficult for non-English speaking voters to use without assistance
- it doesnt allow people with disabilities to cast a secret and independent ballot
- it doesnt allow for the correction of errors, causing many voters to make inadvertent mistakes.
In the wake of the 2000 election fiasco, numerous studies on the American voting system were conducted which uniformly found serious technical problems: of the around 4-6 million votes that went uncounted, at least 1.5 million were lost due to problems with voting equipment.
Moreover, punch-cards resulted in many more lost votes than any other type of equipment, due to hanging chads and general technical difficulties using the system. Studies repeatedly indicate that punch-cards and some other paper-based systems have an especially harmful impact on racial minorities. In effect, these systems function as a sort of technological literacy test, disproportionately affecting voters with lower educational levels.
The publicity generated by the 2000 election hasnt been followed by an attempt to solve these problems. Punch-cards performed poorly in the October 2003 California recall election where Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected, resulting in approximately 170,000 lost votes across the state. It was only the large margin by which the recall succeeded that saved the state from a Florida-like catastrophe.
The electronic voting solution
How can these problems be addressed? The evidence suggests that touchscreen voting, successfully implemented in numerous jurisdictions over the past two decades, can do better in each of the four civil rights areas set forth above:
- the racial gap disappears almost entirely when counties switch to touchscreen technology
- the system can easily be adapted to the multiple languages spoken in the United States including Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian, and Chinese; this allows voters who are not proficient in English to cast their votes independently even if there is no poll worker who speaks their language available to offer assistance
- electronic voting machines are the only type of certified equipment that effectively allows people with disabilities to cast secret ballots. Their audio capacity enables visually impaired citizens to vote without assistance, most of them for the first time in their lives. At least one federal court has held that the failure to provide accessible voting equipment violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990); this landmark law requires equal access to various aspects of public life, including access to the vote
- it ensures that all citizens votes are accurately counted; for example, in the 2000 presidential election, the touchscreen voting system used in Riverside County, California had less than 25% of the uncounted votes of neighbouring Los Angeles Countys punch-card system.
But racial and language minorities, and people with disabilities, are not the only ones who stand to benefit from electronic voting. In fact, all citizens would benefit from the replacement of antiquated paper-based voting systems which can entail lost, stolen, or miscounted paper ballots or with the punch-card system.
Touchscreens automatically prevent mistaken overvotes (casting more votes than is allowed for a single office). They also allow voters to check their work, with a verification screen to confirm their choices.
The paper trail debate
While no voting technology is impervious to potential problems of fraud and error, much of the fear surrounding touchscreen voting rests on misinformation. For example, touchscreen voting units are not hooked up to the internet, as Siva Vaidhyanathan says; they are, rather, stand-alone units, with redundant internal backups. Speculation that a clever hacker could somehow infiltrate the system on election-day is the stuff of conspiracy theories.
Even in the event of a power loss, votes cast on touchscreen machines can be preserved and counted through internal backups. Touchscreen voting sceptics nevertheless speculate that malicious code could be inserted in the systems software before election-day.
Although theres no evidence that this has actually happened in any election, some electronic voting sceptics insist that a contemporaneous paper replica (CPR) of the electronically cast vote, euphemistically known as the voter verifiable paper audit trail, is the one and only solution to this hypothetical problem.
But this paper trail already required by federal law for use in recounts be used for recounts by 2006 would not, contrary to some reports, be a receipt, since the voter would not actually take the paper ballot home. Instead, under the most commonly discussed model, the CPR would print out behind a transparent screen so it cannot be touched. This is necessary to preserve the integrity of the paper audit trail and to prevent the paper copies of the electronic ballot from being removed by voters and used in vote-buying schemes.
While there is general agreement that its not feasible to implement the CPR nationally in the 2004 election, it has largely escaped notice that the CPR has yet to be successfully implemented in an election of significant scale and has caused serious problems in the few jurisdictions that have tried it. In Sacramento, California, the chief election official reported that printer jams had to be dislodged with such creative devices as a windshield-wiper and a backscratcher. And in Wilton, Connecticut, the user-interface problems with the CPR were deemed appalling. The state of Nevadas CPR system is reported to have performed better in a 2004 election, although turnout was low and it is not clear whether voters actually checked the paper records.
The one appellate court to have addressed the matter emphatically rejected the claim that a contemporaneous paper replica is necessary to ensure safe electronic voting. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded there was no evidence to show that electronic voting is inherently less accurate or less verifiable than other equipment.
What to do in 2004?
The handful of glitches that have occurred in the implementation of touchscreen voting are a reminder that no electronic system is trouble-free, especially if planning and preparation is faulty. But what has been lost in the current debate is that a contemporaneous paper replica would not solve these problems. Even more important, it must be remembered that voting equipment is only one part of the election system. A CalTech/MIT report found that an even greater number of votes was lost because of registration and polling-place inefficiencies than through technological problems.
The past four years in the United States have been filled with the slogan every vote should count. The reality is that not everyones vote was counted in 2000, and not every vote will be counted in 2004. But to minimise the number of lost votes in November, the need is to focus on improving the registration system, testing voting machines, and training poll workers. Such improved procedures unglamorous as they may seem are the best way of making sure that the US election system in 2004 does not, once again, become the laughing-stock of the democratic world.
