With each passing year, technology plays an increasingly transformative role in our lives. We use the Internet (often through mobile applications), to purchase everything from taxi rides and airplane flights, to food and retail goods, as well as access an array of professional services, including home cleaning, personal banking, and legal advice.
Tools like Whatsapp and Viber allow inexpensive, simple personal communication across the planet, while Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram allow us to share, comment and connect, with an innumerable array of people, places and ideas.
Simultaneously, artificial intelligence is revolutionizing everything from automobile transportation to cancer treatment, while virtual reality helps alter how we understand and perceive the world around us.
Yet, there are some endeavors which are best left untouched by technological advancement, and instead, ought to be conducted using a more traditional approach. Voting is one such activity. Over the past few decades, we have witnessed the rise of electronic voting machines, eliminating the need for traditional paper ballots. However, because of serious issues surrounding the accuracy, security, and verifiability of votes case using these devices, American elections ought to make use of paper ballots, filled in by pencil, as is done in Canada.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC), first offered standards for electronic voting in 1990, when much of today’s voting technology was in it’s infancy. In 1996, Ross Perot’s Reform Party took the groundbreaking step of selecting a presidential nominee through an online election, with more than 2000 voters participating. Technology-driven voting was making steady progress, it seemed, from dream to reality.
Then, the 2000 presidential election happened. The disputed Florida vote brought us the saga of hanging chads, recounts, and a “Brooks Brothers riot”, capped by a pitched legal battle, which was ultimately resolved by the Supreme Court, in favor of George W. Bush. Florida was hardly the only blot on America’s electoral portrait that year. A joint study by researchers at MIT and Caltech found that as many as 4 to 6 million ballots (out of 100 million cast) went uncounted, due to a range of problems, including malfunctioning voting equipment, and, due to unclear and ambiguous ballots, voter error.
In response to these events, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), signed into law by President Bush in October of that year. HAVA contains a variety of far-reaching provisions, which lawmakers argued would improve the operation of federal elections.
Most relevant to this discussion is a clause which provides funds for states to improve, modify or replace existing voting systems used in federal elections, more specifically “punch card voting systems or lever voting systems,” with those which meet certain alternate requirements, designed to protect vote integrity.
These new voting methods must allow each voter to verify, “in a private and independent manner,” any vote cast (this is commonly referred to as “verified voting”), and make it possible to correct any errors which might have occurred. Such ballots must also notify the voter if he or she has accidentally selected more than one candidate for a single office, and warn of the consequences of such a vote.
In order to ensure that each vote cast can be verified, a voting system must also produce a physical paper, which can be manually audited, and serves as an official record of votes, in the event of a recount. HAVA explicitly provides that a state is not required to implement any particular type of voting system, or to replace existing procedures, as long as whichever voting methodology is eventually selected, complies with HAVA provisions. More than $3.5 billion has been allocated in grants for states to implement various HAVA requirements, including purchases of new voting machines. As a result,dozens of states across the nation have begun using electronic voting devices.
At first glance, such provisions seem to be reasonable measures, designed to make voting simpler, and ensure that each vote is in fact counted. Yet, despite such good intentions, a deeper examination of electronic voting, reveals numerous instances of major technical malfunctions, a lack of verified voting, as well as considerable potential for vote tampering and fraud.
Electronic voting machines have a well-documented history of failure and error. During the March 2004 primaries, Diebold electronic voting machines in San Diego and several other California counties malfunctioned, disenfranchising numerous voters, and resulting in a ban on this particular model, as well as a lawsuit (eventually settled) against the company. During that same California election, electronic voting device errors in Napa County caused more than 6,000 absentee ballots to go uncounted.
These issues persisted into the November 2004 presidential election, most notably in the North Carolina county of Carteret, where electronic voting machine crashes caused more than 4,000 ballots to be lost, throwing a close race for state agricultural commissioner into disarray (a revote for this office was held eventually). Similar technical malfunctions were seen in the 2006,2008, and 2010 election cycles, as digital voting machines failed repeatedly, leading to possible thousands of uncounted votes, and casting doubt on the accuracy of election outcomes, in localities across the nation.
What’s more, despite HAVA requirements, many of today’s electronic voting systems don’t actually provide for verified voting. The Verified Voting Foundation, which advocates for vote accuracy in American elections, recently published a map of voting practices by state. In at least 14 states, there is no Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) whatsoever, that is, no physical paper printout of a voter’s candidate/ballot initiative selection, which would allow voters to be certain of whom their vote was cast for, and also, to facilitate potential recounts in the event of any uncertainty regarding electoral outcomes.
In these states, if a vote were somehow incorrectly cast, altered or deleted, there would be no way to actually know about, let alone correct, any errors which might have transpired. Simply put, voters can only hope that their efforts at democratic participation aren’t for naught. Such non-verifiability casts doubt on the stated outcomes of not only local and statewide elections, but, in aggregate, each and every American presidential election.
Adding to these concerns, a growing body of research makes it clear that many voting machines are easily hacked and tampered with. In 2015, a report published by the Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA) found that the AVS WinVote machines, used in Virginia and elsewhere, were highly vulnerable to simple, untraceable outside attacks. The situation was so dire that computer security expert Jeremy Epstein, who was part of an earlier Virginia investigation of voting machines, graded the WinVote devices an “F-Minus” for security. Just a few years earlier, in 2012, Roger Johnston, a security expert at Argonne National Laboratory, demonstrated that it was possible to hack the Diebold Accuvote-TSX and Sequoia AVC voting machines in just a few minutes; at the time, these machines were in use in 24 states.
One needn’t be a wide-eyed conspiracy theorist to worry about such vulnerabilities. In an era where banks, retailers, and government agencies have all been victims of large-scale security breaches, it certainly isn’t farfetched to think that voting systems might be subject to swift, untraceable attacks which add, eliminate or alter votes, carrying massive consequences for American democracy.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution to these problems: paper ballots, filled out using only pencils. For evidence of how effective this approach is, look no further than Canada, which offers only secret paper ballot voting in federal elections (although Internet voting is available for some local elections). Why are only paper ballots in use? According to Diane Benson, a spokesperson for Elections Canada (the nation’s electoral oversight body), alternative methods (specifically Internet voting) have been proposed, but ultimately scrapped due to concerns around “integrity, verifiability and secrecy.” Canada’s minimalist approach to voting seems to be working quite well, as the nation has enjoyed smooth, transparent federal elections, facing few of the aforementioned problems which have plagued American voting in recent years.
Technology improves our lives in myriad ways. At the same time, in some undertakings, a simple, tried and true approach is far better. It is time to follow the lead of our neighbors to the north, eliminate the use of electronic voting machines, and conduct perhaps the most important activity in American public life, using a method which has stood the test of time: The paper, pencil, and the secret ballot.
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