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From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@private>
Date: November 6, 2004 1:10:03 PM EST
To: dave@private
Subject: Voting Realities: Faith-Based E-Voting
Dave,
It's time for a serious reality check. The grand pronouncements of
voting officials and electronic voting machine manufacturers
notwithstanding, the fact that there "weren't major problems" or that
"everything went smoothly" with e-voting during an election says
absolutely *nothing* about the integrity or accuracy of the process.
And I might add that "voter verified paper trails" -- unless the
human-readable form of the "receipt" is routinely used to derive the
official count -- are only an incremental improvement to a still
disastrous situation.
While I appreciate India's special needs given literacy levels among
significant numbers of the population, their "smooth election" could
have included millions of incorrectly recorded votes, and there'd be no
way to know for sure.
Voter-verified paper trails that are not actually used for the official
count do not necessary correlate with the votes tabulated within
e-voting machines. Any number of purposeful or accidental failures
could result in a paper receipt that said one thing while the tallied
votes within the machine were deleted, lost, or altered.
Machine-readable codings on paper receipts may also be subject to the
same problems. Since paper receipts will only typically be counted
when some problem is already suspected, vote alterations -- even on a
massive scale -- can still silently occur totally under the radar.
It's critical to understand that electronic voting is not like using an
ATM or purchasing items over the Internet. Financial transactions have
built-in checks to flag errors (checking account statements, credit
card bills, etc.) But the counted electronic votes vanish into
anonymous black holes -- a wholly different situation.
It doesn't take rocket science, or even computer science, to understand
that unless the actual official vote count is derived from a physical
"one per vote" medium that can be physically recounted as an individual
vote, we have surrendered our electoral process to the equivalent of
"faith-based voting" -- while so many of our everyday experiences
continue to demonstrate the fallibility of computer-based systems.
In my own opinion, the currently optimal system that should be mandated
across the U.S. is mark/sense optical scan. The individual votes are
kept discrete for recounts and can be visually observed. The error
rate is very low. They can be used both at polling places and by
absentee voters. The counting process is relatively fast. Of course,
there's a lot less money to made with this technology than with
e-voting systems.
Our current path with e-voting, and even more so calls for
Internet-based voting, are nothing short of madness. We are replacing
common sense and technological realities with mechanisms that are
grossly inferior even at the theoretical level, even before specific
implementation issues are considered.
With e-voting as it exists today, meaningful recounts are impossible,
most errors and illicit vote manipulations become invisible, and the
electoral process is degraded to little more than a travesty.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@private or lauren@private or lauren@private
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility -
http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, Fact Squad - http://www.factsquad.org
Co-Founder, URIICA - Union for Representative International Internet
Cooperation and Analysis - http://www.uriica.org
Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://www.vortex.com/lauren-blog
Global Domination Through Voting Manipulation:
http://www.vortex.com/reality/2004-04-16
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