Electronic Voting

Our discussion last week was on electronic voting; very fitting, considering the historic election taking place that day. It quickly became clear that electronic voting introduces as many problems as it solves and will require many creative solutions to adequately address its shortcomings.

The advantages of voting electronically are many. Fewer people are needed to count or process ballots while making results available almost instantaneously. In addition, it can reduce the level of human error, and can drastically reduce the amount of paper used. At this point, it is hard to deny that electronic voting sounds pretty great. Who doesn't want cheaper, faster and better for the environment?

Unfortunately, what initially look like advantages bring many implications which need to be addressed, the largest and most difficult of which is security. Electronic voting is full of security holes that all need to be filled if people are ever going to trust it. It is also worth considering that such an important event deserves whatever time and resources are necessary for an effective election, whether that comes in dollars (and paper to print ballots).

Let's start from the beginning and work our way through the process.

- Software: All electronic voting machines depend on software for their accuracy and reliability. Someone has to write that software and we need to make sure that votes are not, through maliciousness or incompetence, reported incorrectly.

- Physical security: The voting machines have to get from the factory to the polling place and as the article illustrated, give someone with malicious intent even a couple of minutes alone with one and then can destroy the integrity of every vote entered on that machine.

- Identity verification: How do you verify that people are not voting multiple times? Smart cards can be faked. Having to voter enter personal information could compromise the secrecy of their vote.

- Data collection: Assuming that the software is sound, the machines haven't been tampered with, and each person has only voted once, how do you collect the vote totals? Do you transmit it over a network? Save it on encrypted hard drives?

We discussed several potential solutions to these issues, including open source software, background checks for programmers and technicians, non-partisan inspectors (or inspectors from multiple parties), and printing out paper ballots that can be verified by the voter or even used to cast the actual vote.

In the end, however, it may not be necessary to develop a perfectly secure, fool-proof electronic voting system. Paper ballots have many of the same security risks and can be very prone to error, but at the same time provide a physical record of each vote for future auditing. We closed the discussion wondering whether we could improve upon current paper voting methods, perhaps by using technology to produce easy to use and accurately readable paper ballots.