New Backup Voting System May Pose Problems
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WASHINGTON - Call it the law of unintended consequences. A new national backup system meant to ensure that millions of eligible voters are not mistakenly turned away from the polls this year, as happened in 2000, could wind up causing Election Day problems as infamous as Florida's hanging chads...
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The 100,000 electronic voting machines in use in Tuesday's election have a big downside: Candidates who dispute the results won't have a way to conduct a meaningful recount. Analysis by Kim Zetter.
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As the primary season continues, observers of the electronic-voting scene ask whether it's possible to tally the ballots efficiently while restoring Americans' faith in the process. Random, mandatory audits of cast ballots show promise, but even after demonstrated successes, not everyone's on board.
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Voters worried that an electronic voting machine might accidentally eat their vote on Nov. 2 would be better off pointing the finger of blame at clueless poll workers than at shiny new touchscreen machines, according to information released by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA).ADVERTISEMENTSBC Case Study: Crate & BarrelWhat sold them on improving their network? A system that could cut management costs from the get-go. Find out more.
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Almost three-quarters of likely voters think electronic voting systems should produce a paper record the voter can verify, according to a new poll. But that's not likely to happen for many of them in November. By Laila Weir.
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International election observers predicted problems with new rules and technology for Tuesday&#39;s US presidential election that were designed to avoid a repeat of Florida&#39;s counting fiasco four years ago.
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Critics say random post-election audits could alleviate the sort of concerns about voting accuracy that arose last week in N.H. This week it's Michigan's turn -- and once again, optical-scan machines are a major election presence. But the Secretary of State there says it's not going to be a problem.
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More weaknesses appear in the Diebold electronic voting system that activists say could be used to rig the November election. The company says auditing procedures would catch any vote fraud. By Kim Zetter.
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As officials investigated the human errors that disrupted Maryland's primary election, there were renewed fears yesterday that electronic malfunctions could cause even greater problems in November.
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A new national backup system meant to ensure that millions of eligible voters are not mistakenly turned away from the polls this year, as happened in 2000, could wind up causing Election Day problems as infamous as Florida&#39;s hanging chads.
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(InfoWorld) - Requiring print-outs as a back-up to electronic voting machines would not improve security but would increase costs of U.S. voting systems, according to a report released Tuesday. Tech-focused think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) said so-called voter-verified paper trail ballots used in conjunction with e-voting machines would "prevent the use of innovative voting technology that offers voters more security, transparency, and reliability" than paper-only balloting systems. The U.S. House of Representatives has before it a bill that would require paper-trail ballots to be used with direct recording electronic voting machines. But a paper trail would create several problems, said report author Daniel Castro, an ITIF senior analyst. Paper audit trails would create an "even bigger dispute" than past elections with missing electronic votes, Castro said. "People wouldn't know which record was accurate -- the paper or the electronic record," he said. Paper-trail ballots would also increase the cost of elections, Castro said. Printers will fail on election days, and counting machines will malfunction, he said. "When you manually count it, you have problems with the human element," he added. U.S. residents trust computers to run many other "critical applications" in banking, medicine, and aviation, the report said. Supporters of paper-trail audits disputed the report's findings. "The argument that people trust computers in other places is specious -- safety-critical systems have been developed in other contexts using rigorous standards that are not applied to voting machines," said Eugene Spafford, chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM's) U.S. policy committee. ACM has not called for e-voting machines to be scrapped, but instead for the machines to go through two levels of audit, paper trails and random machine audits, said Spafford, executive director of the Purdue University Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. While the report discounts claims that e-voting machines can be hacked and elections reversed, malicious hacking isn't the only problem with e-voting machines, Spafford added. "Errors, bugs and accidents can also result in problems unless there is an independent, durable audit trail," he said. "Under several guises [the authors] trot out the canard that 'if fraud is so possible, how come it hasn't been proven yet?' This is so obviously wrong that I'm not sure it even deserves a response." Pamela Smith, president of VerifiedVoting.org, suggested readers of the report "consider the source." "This is an industry body that has come out with this screed to support the industry," Smith said. Smith disputed the report's suggestion that a "growing technophobic movement believes that no computer can be trusted for electronic voting." Several prominent computer security experts have called for paper-trail audits, she said. "The harshest critics of e-voting -- in particular paperless e-voting -- are computer technologists who are the literal opposite of technophobic," she said. "What they claim is that in order to have secure elections, they must be auditable and recountable." Instead of printouts, lawmakers should look to the next generation of e-voting machines, the report said. One such technology provides a small receipt that voters can take with them and use to check online whether their ballots have been counted. The receipt would give voters more assurance than a typical paper-trail ballot, which they cannot take with them, Castro said. But Spafford said most newer technologies are unproven, and many aren't transparent to typical voters. "It is important that the mechanism is understandable and trusted by the population as well as correct and auditable by experts," he said. "Systems based on ... cryptographic methods are not understandable to the lay person -- and especially not to technophobic ones. Paper is well understood."
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Delaying the January vote would raise new dangers. So will going ahead
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Unreliable electronic voting systems could undermine UK democracy warns a report
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When Americans go to the polls in November, they will confront a voting system beset by many of the same problems that produced the bitterly disputed outcome four years ago.
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Pentagon efforts to fix absentee voting problems among U.S. troops that marred the 2000 election have run into trouble as plans to use the Internet crumbled and a fax or e-mail balloting system draws fire.
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Punch card voting machines that caused chaos in the 2000 presidential election have been replaced by high-tech touch screen balloting in some places, but critics warn the new technology could cause even greater mayhem.
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Flaw-proof election machines. Easy-to-read ballots. Registration systems that catch double-voters or dead voters still on the rolls.