Auf Wiedersehen E-Voting Machines
posted by Danielle Citron
It appears that Germany is saying goodbye to its computerized voting machines, at least for now. Germany’s highest court declared unconstitutional the country’s use of e-voting machines in the 2005 elections, the country’s first large-scale deployment of the technology. According to Constitutional judge Andreas Vosskuhle, the judgment did not rule out digital voting in the future, but instead made clear that the equipment used four years ago had problems that warranted the ruling. The court nonetheless upheld the result of that election because plaintiffs had no direct proof that the machines produced errors. In September, Germany will return to a paper-and-pencil election.
The suit that promted the ruling was brought by political scientist Joachim Wiesner and his son, physicist Ulrich Wiesner. The father-and-son team argued that e-voting machines’ opacity prevented voters from seeing what actually happened to their votes inside the computers, rendering it unconstitutional to put “blind faith” in the technology. They also emphasized the security risks that inhere in e-voting systems.
Germany joins the Dutch government in abolishing e-voting. In 2008, the Dutch government went a bit further, decertifying the existing paperless systems and rejecting a proposal to develop a new generation of voting computers. In the United States, while a plethora of well-regarded technologists decry the use of touchscreen e-voting systems, both for their risk of inaccuracy and for their lack of security, many states remain firmly committed to our e-voting systems. This move might ask us to consider whether other countries have a higher regard for the accuracy and security of voting than we do.
March 3, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Posted in: Administrative Law, International & Comparative Law, Technology
Print This Post
Responses (3)
jt - March 3, 2009 at 6:55 pm
I believe that European ballots are much simpler than US ballots. They may include only a single contest (a seat in the legislative branch). Counting one issue on paper is easy.
I have been present and watched people try to count lengthy US paper ballots. Simply put, it doesn’t work. You might test it yourself by having 4 or more retirees work from 6:30 a.m. until, say, 8:00 p.m. and then try to count, say, 500 ballots, each with 40 or 50 questions to be counted. They get the tallies to agree by agreeing that the tallies agree. The error rate dwarfs that of any mechanical device.
Stealing votes is a lot less technically complex for those counting ballots: a piece of graphite under the fingernail and the ballots rejected for over-votes pile up, to note just one of many tricks.
Danielle Citron - March 4, 2009 at 11:20 am
JT, A paper approach would be daunting in the US and equally subject to fraud (missing or switch boxes anyone?). But listening to the calls by Peter Neumann for optical scanning machines which leave a paper trail may be worthwhile.
JT - March 4, 2009 at 4:12 pm
I’m a fan of optical scan. It is very user-friendly for technophobes like me. There are problems, however. I don’t know that the accessible attachment works that well on optical scan machines, and having separate accessible machines creates lots of problems with practial availability, privacy, etc. They also present problems with bilingual or multilingual ballots, where they can run into space issues and invite separate ballots for the various languages, which invites discrimination.
Actually, all paper ballots run into space issues in places where there are multiple verbose referenda etc. on the ballot. You end up having 2 or more ballot pages for each voter and things go downhill very quickly
And optical scan machines are, after all, electronic. The public cannot see the counting process inside the machine, and the counting system can be rigged just like on a DRE.
Leave a Reply