In Brief

E-Voting: Show Me the Paper Trail

After midcentury voting technology in Florida showed its limitations in the 2000 presidential election, lawmakers on Capitol Hill vowed to fix it.

By Paul Roberts

November 01, 2004 — CSO — E-VOTING After midcentury voting technology in Florida showed its limitations in the 2000 presidential election, lawmakers on Capitol Hill vowed to fix it. They allocated billions of dollars to the voting technology problem with the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, also known as HAVA.

But four years later, voting technology upgrades have fueled a new controversy over the reliability and quality of electronic voting kiosks. With some 30 percent of the public likely to cast their votes in November using direct recording electronic (DRE) systems, academics and technology experts are clamoring for a voter verifiable paper trail.

Critics of DRE technology cite a damning July 2003 analysis of leaked DRE code from Diebold Election Systems by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. They insist that a paper trail (meaning paper records to accompany every digitally cast vote if electronic voting machines fail) is the only way to ensure that the machines work properly.

"After the 2000 elections, many people said, 'If paper is bad, what is not paper must be good,' which is not the right deduction," says Pam Smith, nationwide coordinator of the Verified Voting Foundation in San Francisco.

The current generation of voting technology deserves a grade no higher than a C, she says.

To fix what it perceives to be reliability problems with electronic voting systems, the Verified Voting Foundation supports voter verifiable paper ballots for all electronic voting machines. The organization also supports technology such as precinct-based Optical Scan systems, which combine digital readers with paper ballots and offer voters a second chance to make corrections before casting their ballot, Smith says.

The group also believes that voting system source code should be open source so that governments and the public can review it.

Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, concedes that there are some problems with what he terms the processsuch as training poll workers to use the new DRE machines and securing access to the machines before polling begins. However, he thinks that electronic voting machines are far harder to tamper with than the paper ballots they replace.

Despite the controversy raging around this year's election, even e-voting critics such as Smith think it's only a matter of time before vendors and public officials get it right with the backing of Congress or state legislatures.