Voting Realities: Faith-Based E-Voting

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com>
Date: November 6, 2004 1:10:03 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Voting Realities: Faith-Based E-Voting

Dave,

It's time for a serious reality check.  The grand pronouncements of 
voting officials and electronic voting machine manufacturers 
notwithstanding, the fact that there "weren't major problems" or that 
"everything went smoothly" with e-voting during an election says 
absolutely *nothing* about the integrity or accuracy of the process. 
And I might add that "voter verified paper trails" -- unless the 
human-readable form of the "receipt" is routinely used to derive the 
official count -- are only an incremental improvement to a still 
disastrous situation.

While I appreciate India's special needs given literacy levels among 
significant numbers of the population, their "smooth election" could 
have included millions of incorrectly recorded votes, and there'd be no 
way to know for sure.

Voter-verified paper trails that are not actually used for the official 
count do not necessary correlate with the votes tabulated within 
e-voting machines.  Any number of purposeful or accidental failures 
could result in a paper receipt that said one thing while the tallied 
votes within the machine were deleted, lost, or altered. 
Machine-readable codings on paper receipts may also be subject to the 
same problems.  Since paper receipts will only typically be counted 
when some problem is already suspected, vote alterations -- even on a 
massive scale -- can still silently occur totally under the radar.

It's critical to understand that electronic voting is not like using an 
ATM or purchasing items over the Internet.  Financial transactions have 
built-in checks to flag errors (checking account statements, credit 
card bills, etc.)  But the counted electronic votes vanish into 
anonymous black holes -- a wholly different situation.

It doesn't take rocket science, or even computer science, to understand 
that unless the actual official vote count is derived from a physical 
"one per vote" medium that can be physically recounted as an individual 
vote, we have surrendered our electoral process to the equivalent of 
"faith-based voting" -- while so many of our everyday experiences 
continue to demonstrate the fallibility of computer-based systems.

In my own opinion, the currently optimal system that should be mandated 
across the U.S. is mark/sense optical scan.  The individual votes are 
kept discrete for recounts and can be visually observed.  The error 
rate is very low.  They can be used both at polling places and by 
absentee voters.  The counting process is relatively fast.  Of course, 
there's a lot less money to made with this technology than with 
e-voting systems.

Our current path with e-voting, and even more so calls for 
Internet-based voting, are nothing short of madness.  We are replacing 
common sense and technological realities with mechanisms that are 
grossly inferior even at the theoretical level, even before specific 
implementation issues are considered.

With e-voting as it exists today, meaningful recounts are impossible, 
most errors and illicit vote manipulations become invisible, and the 
electoral process is degraded to little more than a travesty.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren () pfir org or lauren () vortex com or lauren () privacyforum org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility - 
http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, Fact Squad - http://www.factsquad.org
Co-Founder, URIICA - Union for Representative International Internet
                     Cooperation and Analysis - http://www.uriica.org
Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://www.vortex.com/lauren-blog
Global Domination Through Voting Manipulation: 
http://www.vortex.com/reality/2004-04-16


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