Paper Or Touch Screen?

Laura Donnelly

October 07, 2004

You're registered, you've educated yourself about the issues, and you know where your polling place is located. You're set to make your voice heard on November 2, right? For too many voters, the answer will be "Yes, as long as the machine works." Thirty-five million of us will cast our ballots using electronic voting machines, but the machines are far from foolproof. It's more than a technical problem, says TomPaine.com assistant editor Laura Donnelly. It's an issue of trust.

Laura Donnelly is assistant editor at TomPaine.com.

The 2004 elections started for me last month when I voted in the Washington, D.C., primary. I showed up at the polling place, presented my voter registration card, signed the form and was asked to choose my ballot: Paper or touch screen?  I chose paper, completed the ballot and fed it into the ballot machine myself. I wasn’t alone. Most of the other people at the polling place were also using paper ballots. In fact, the touch-screen voting station was empty.

These folks at my polling place choosing paper over electronic voting weren’t unusual. As it turns out, they were reflecting the results of a recent survey  conducted by the legal website FindLaw . The survey found that 42 percent of adults are concerned about the possibility of tampering with electronic voting machines on November 2.

Forty-two percent. That’s getting darn near close to half. Consider that, in the United States—which regularly sends delegations of election observers to other nations—something approaching half of the population doesn’t have confidence that their votes will be counted?

The FindLaw survey turned up more interesting information.  Those who were concerned about touch-screen tampering tended to be young, minority and lower income. In fact, the majority of survey respondents who made less than $25,000 per year were concerned about vote tampering, and half of all minorities surveyed were worried about vote tampering. Considering how many minority voters were disenfranchised in the 2000 presidential election, this isn't surprising. In addition to the tampering issue, 38 percent of all survey respondents were worried about inaccuracy in vote counts. These numbers add up to a lot of people whose concerns might cause them to forego voting entirely—something that could have sweeping consequences in a close election like this one.

Electronic voting machines have received a lot of news coverage this election season—especially because they are being installed in important swing states, including Ohio and Florida. There are essentially two main concerns about electronic voting and touch-screen machines. The first is technical malfunctions. The machines can freeze, crash, display incorrect information and incorrectly tally votes. They’re also susceptible to bugs and viruses, just like any other computer. The second concern involves malicious activity by hackers or others intending to change voting outcome. Because the machines’ codes in many cases lack the encryption to keep them secure, a hacker could manipulate the machine to corrupt or delete certain votes.

The benefits that touch-screen voting offers—that’s it accessible for voters with disabilities, that it can accommodate non-English speaking voters, that it removes the hanging-pregnant-dimpled chad problem—simply aren’t big enough to outweigh the risks. Electronic voting machines don’t remove the possibilities that a Florida-like scenario will play out again. They simply transfer vote-counting problems from the low-tech hanging-chad variety to a higher-tech electronic variety. But in the case of another recount, the problems would be essentially the same. Electronic voting machines store data on electronic cartridges. If a recount was needed, all officials could do is review the electronic data—without being able to tell where it was wrong. And a recount of corrupted data is meaningless.

The good news is that there’s one immediate fix for both the technical malfunction concerns and the tampering concerns. It’s a printer. That’s right, a printer. Electronic voting machines are computers, and they can be retrofitted with printers for about $500 per machine. The printer prints a receipt that allows voters to verify that the name they touched on the screen is the same one that shows up on the paper. Election officials retain the receipts in case there’s a recount. If that happens, the paper receipts are compared to the electronic data cartridges to see if the counts match. In case they don’t, the paper receipts are considered accurate, since the voters verified them.

There’s a growing camp getting behind the printer idea. These include knowledgeable techies, like the members of Computer Professionals For Social Responsibility, numerous Democratic senators and representatives, and former presidential candidate Howard Dean. And organizations like the Verified Voting Foundation, aware of the risks posed by electronic voting, are recruiting technology experts to verify voting on Nov. 2 in polling locations around the country.  But some election officials—after spending significant amounts of money to ensure that the butterfly ballot fiasco of Florida in 2000 wouldn’t happen to them—are reluctant to even consider that the electronic voting machines aren’t the right fix. Nevada is the only state the will require touch-screen machines to have printers on November 2, and a number of other states will require printers by 2006. But until both election officials and our elected representatives take that 42 percent of voters’ concerns seriously, widespread action is unlikely.
 
All of this fundamentally boils down to trust. It’s a vital ingredient in American elections—in any election. If voters can’t trust that their votes are being counted accurately, that the machinery they vote with works as it’s supposed to, that there’s no way for a malicious party to change their vote, then holding an election is essentially meaningless. Election officials and elected leaders need to take the trust issue seriously, and do everything that can be done to ensure voters can vote confidently. That means offering the choice of paper ballots (as I had); retrofitting voting machines with printers; and passing legislation that mandates such measures for the future. It means giving voters the luxury to think more about the candidate they’ll choose than whether their vote will actually count.