Newswise — This November, in what's likely to be one of the closest U.S. elections ever, more than a quarter of U.S. ballots will be cast using equipment that directly records votes only on electronic media, such as chips, cartridges, or disks, with no tangible form of backup. That's nearly triple the number of electronic votes in 2000. Twenty-five years in the making, electronic voting is finally being widely adopted in the United States and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, recent evidence suggests that although we may be ready for electronic voting, the technology is not ready for us. True, these electronic systems eliminate many of the problems with paper-based ballots--Florida's hanging chads and poorly aligned print layouts being the most notorious. But in their hurry to eliminate paper and avoid another Florida-style fiasco, some equipment vendors and election officials are rushing to deploy systems that have known flaws or that have been poorly tested--or not tested at all. Much the same story is playing out not only in the United States but also in Australia, Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, and elsewhere. People using these direct-recording systems will have no assurance that their ballots were cast at all, let alone as intended.
Why has such a seemingly straightforward design challenge proved so elusive? The causes are several--running an honest election isn't as simple as it appears. In the United States, one major complication is that elections are run individually by the 50 states. Another is the misplaced trust of the state and local bureaucrats responsible for choosing and deploying election equipment; they have been insufficiently skeptical of the claims made by equipment manufacturers, while in some instances rejecting the advice of outside engineers and specialists. Then there's the way the profit-driven vendors themselves rushed some of their machines to market. Finally, there is the system design challenge itself, which for voting machines is much more difficult than most people realize.
Whatever the reasons, if the record of recent local and other elections is any guide, it's likely that some machines will err, perhaps in battlegrounds like Florida, where a few thousand votes might decide the state--and even the national--outcome.
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