The Baltimore Sun
Dec. 10, 2005
Jeffry D. Mueller
Eldersburg

The Sun's editorial "Every vote counts" (Dec. 4) laments that America's electronic voting machines are "still not safe and reliable," and that their manufacturers have refused to provide their program's "source code" for examination. They may, in fact, never be sufficiently safe and reliable.

A program's source code is a set of terse instructions written by the programmer in an arcane "language," which the computer then converts into "object code," the commands that the computer actually executes.

After spending a dozen years providing software support for large database systems, I can tell you that examining 1,000 lines of source code, even when you already know what error it produced, is like arriving at a crime scene.

The evidence might not be obvious or readily detectable and might not be detectable at all.

But the underlying problem goes deeper than all this.

When machines were unable to read ambiguously marked punch-card ballots, cast using badly designed equipment in the notorious Florida Bush vs. Gore contest, the nation panicked and fled in exactly the wrong direction - toward more-complex machinery (which can fail in more-complex ways, sometimes invisibly), instead of toward simpler, more-reliable equipment that can be understood, operated and monitored by nonspecialists.

A ballot box with a padlock would be a better solution.

It's an inert object that cannot cause error and that, under continuous bipartisan monitoring, would be absolutely tamper-proof.

That approach involves no votes unrecorded because of a malfunction or power outage. And all of the original votes, not duplicates, are available for as many recounts as are required.

The only voting machine that comes close to that approach, and the only one I ever trusted, is the "old" optical scanner system. It uses a ballot with unambiguous, wide black marks, which is inserted into a scanner in the open and stored securely for possible recount - and the "paper trail" is the stack of original ballots.

There is no better solution.

So let's stop throwing good money after bad, ditch the Diebold machines and bring back the scanners.