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We can't see as votes get counted in a black box |
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The Baltimore Sun
Mike Himowitz
Originally published Feb 23, 2006
Most computer-savvy people I know would never entrust something as
important as picking the next president or governor to gadgets as
unreliable as computers. Especially with no paper backup.
Still, I was amused when our governor denounced Maryland's $55 million,
Diebold electronic voting system as too flaky and unreliable to count
the votes in his 2006 re-election campaign.
Cynics might call Bob Ehrlich's last-minute conversion a political
ploy. After all, he's trailing in the polls and needs a convenient
scapegoat for losing the election - or for contesting the results.
Cynics might also note the departure of Diebold's longtime chairman, Wally O'Dell, in December.
O'Dell is an outspoken Republican fundraiser with close ties to
President Bush. While he was running Diebold, Republican pols were
reluctant to attack it.
With O'Dell gone, some say it's open season on the company.
But I'm not that cynical. I'm just glad that another prominent voice
has joined the campaign against a voting system whose very design
leaves it open to charges of tampering and mismanagement.
The question is, what do we do now?
One possibility is legislation that would add a so-called "paper trail"
of printed ballot receipts to Diebold's all-electronic, touchscreen
voting machines.
But a task force at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County told
the elections board that none of the add-ons currently available for
Diebold machines was guaranteed to be reliable - and certainly not in
time for the 2006 election.
But here's the real reason why Diebold's system and others of its ilk
aren't safe and never will be: No one can see inside them. No one can
watch them count votes, literally or figuratively.
Remember the old days of paper ballots? Election judges (Republican and
Democrat, side by side) looked at each one and marked down the results.
Both parties had observers. If a ballot counter tried to record a Smith
vote in Jones' column, someone would be there to catch it. In case of a
dispute, the ballots were available for a recount.
The voting system used by Baltimore County and many other jurisdictions
before Diebold was an electronic variant of the original paper system.
It used paper ballots but scanned them electronically to produce
instant tallies on election night.
If a dispute arose or a scanner broke down, the originals were
available to be rescanned or counted by hand. A study by Yale
University - one of the first serious efforts to rank different systems
of counting votes - found that this hybrid system produced the most
accurate results.
The problem is that scanners were too cheap, too simple and too readily
available when Congress dumped billions of federal dollars on state
governments to upgrade systems after the 2000 presidential election
fiasco.
There was enormous pressure to spend that money on something more
expensive and allegedly more advanced - Direct Recording Electronic
systems, or DREs.
Besides the gee-whiz factor, all-electronic systems fulfilled every
election administrator's dream - they eliminated paper ballots.
Administrators hate paper ballots. They're expensive to print and
store, and in boxes they're too heavy for elderly voting judges to
handle.
But for the public, they're also the best guarantee of a fair, honest and accurate vote count.
I don't have space here to go into the security issues and
controversies that all-electronic voting machines have generated in
other states. But the ultimate problem is that all counting in DRE
systems is done by software - a set of instructions that tell the
system how to record every vote cast. Diebold uses "proprietary"
software, a buzzword meaning "secret." The source code belongs to
Diebold. You and I can't examine it.
That software could easily record every 99th Democratic vote for a
Republican, or vice versa. It would be nudged just enough to skew a
close race without detection. Remember that Maryland's 1994
gubernatorial election was decided by less than half a percentage point.
Computer glitches like this can be the result of tampering, a hardware
malfunction or just plain bad programming. But the way things stand,
you and I will never know.
In fact, the revolt against Diebold and other electronic voting vendors
occurred because employees left Diebold's source code on an unsecured
Web site, where a bunch of security experts from the Johns Hopkins
University got hold of it and exposed its flaws.
Without access to that code, all we have is a black box. There is no
original voting record - just a handful of electronic 1's and 0's that
are supposed to represent the buttons we pushed. As things stand,
there's also no paper trail of any kind - a longtime issue with critics
of electronic voting.
Here's another issue: With every jurisdiction in Maryland now using the
same system, all it takes to ruin an entire statewide election is a
single glitch in a single line of that secret code.
In the systems business, this is known as a computer monoculture. It's
a term borrowed from agriculture to describe a large area planted in a
single crop - and hence vulnerable to devastating damage from a single
source. Maryland is completely planted with Diebold's electronic cotton
- all it needs for disaster is one electronic boll weevil.
To all of this criticism, Linda H. Lamone, the state election administrator has had one response: "Trust us."
Well, I don't and you shouldn't. Elections aren't based on trust.
They're based on verifiable results. You can't throw technology at a
problem and throw common sense out the window. There's no way to fix
this system. I don't care how much we've spent on it.
So let's bite the bullet and use Diebold, very gingerly in 2006,
because we'll only make a bigger mess if we try to rush changes before
the election. But let's start shopping right now for a better system.
There are updated, reliable paper scanning systems available, and we'll
soon see new generations of DREs that provide paper backups and better
verification.
This won't be cheap, but Maryland has a billion-dollar surplus this
year, and we can use a tiny fraction of it to buy a good election
system - one that uses open source code that everyone can see (and
test), plus a workable paper backup.
It's a small price for a generation of elections we can believe in. |
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