Deja Vu Blues
posted by Danielle Citron
The saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same” is an unfortunate truth when it comes to our voting machines. In 2000, optical scanning machines in certain New Mexican counties counted a straight-party vote without distributing the votes to each of the individual party candidates. For instance, if a voter filled in the oval for a a straight-party Democrat, the scanner would record the ballot as cast but would not allocate votes to Presidential candidate Al Gore and the other Democratic candidates. Fast-forward to 2008: election officials in Sante Fe, New Mexico report that testing of their optical scanning machines revealed that a glitch in the memory cards prevented the tabulating machine from counting the votes in the Presidential, Senate, and House races when a voters marked their ballots indicating that they wanted to vote a straight-party ticket. Had the error not been caught, all of the county’s tabulating machines would have been affected. Although the memory cards have been re-burned and fixed in these counties, concerns about the rest of the country’s optical scanning machines remain. As e-voting and information security expert Peter Neumann noted during his presentation for Columbia University’s Computer Science Distinguished Lecture series held this Monday, we should worry about the accuracy and security of the upcoming elections as it is the computer scientists who say that computers are unsuitable for voting.
October 8, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Posted in: Administrative Law, Technology
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Responses (2)
Brett Bellmore - October 9, 2008 at 7:37 am
But at least with optical scan ballots, the original physical ballots exist, and record the voters’ actual choices. With the purely electronic systems, you’d be totally screwed.
Perhaps it’s my paranoia speaking, but I can’t help but suspect that the reason you can’t get incumbent politicians to really care about the insecurity of electronic voting, is that they expect it to work in their own favor.
Danielle Citron - October 10, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Brett,
Political entrenchment is a serious concern and may very well animate partisan election officials’ decisions. And it is true–optical scan ballots may indeed be the best of the machines, all in, both for their low residual rates and the presence of a paper trail.
Danielle Citron
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