Dimpled Chips

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.thecrimson.com/today/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=504331>


The Harvard Crimson Online :: Print Article

 Originally published on Monday, November 08, 2004 in the Opinion section
of The Harvard Crimson.


Dimpled Chips
By MATTHEW A. GLINE
MATTHEW A. GLINE



 It seems perfectly reasonable that election officials in Palm Beach
County, Fla. would have wanted a change in their voting equipment after the
2000 election. And touchscreen voting machines seemed like an obvious
choice: Confusing butterfly ballots that had made the state a national
laughing-stock were replaced by clear, well-labeled, brightly colored
buttons; the machines were backed by the latest developments in counting
technology (a field which has, somewhat counter-intuitively, apparently
seen a fair bit of action in recent years); and most importantly of all,
the nearest Chad would now be the one in North Africa.

What the election officials were probably not expecting, however, was the
experience of one particular Palm Springs voter, who after patiently
tapping through screen after screen of national and local officials
fulfilling her civic duty was presented with an unsatisfying message of all
too familiar a form: "Vote save error #1," the machine said, "use back-up
voting procedure."

Voteprotect.org is a website run by a handful of nonprofit organizations
including VerifiedVoting.org and the Electronic Frontier Foundation which
collected and organized reports of voting irregularities during last
Tuesday's election. A cursory look at their data on problems related to the
voting machines themselves reveals some interesting trends. The entire
state of Massachusetts, where votes are recorded in large part by older
optical scanning equipment, reported a total of 7 such incidents out of
nearly 3 million ballots-one for every 500,000 or so votes cast. Palm Beach
County had 27 machine related incidents out of their 550,000 votes-each
voter there was roughly three times more likely to report trouble with
their equipment than a voter was here.

These incidents ran the severity gamut. In Georgia, where all voting is
done on touchscreen machines, voters complained of long lines due to
malfunctioning machines or machines with dead batteries. There were
complaints of slow machines, and machines which at first refused to accept
the "smart cards" each voter used to identify themselves. Some machines
crashed or went blank while they were being used.

 Some machines, however, had bigger issues: "Voter's machine defaulted to
Republican candidate each time she voted for a Democrat," one report from
Cobb County, Georgia reads. "She told the precinct supervisor about the
problem. It continued to happen 7 times." Similar incidents occurred in
reasonably large numbers-some voters tried to push a button for Kerry or
Bush and found that the X would appear next to the name of the other
candidate.

 These problems were probably not due to a vast right-wing conspiracy in
the voting machine industry. (Though it's not entirely clear that such a
conspiracy doesn't exist-a board member of Diebold Election Systems, the
company which makes most of the touchscreen voting systems that have been
deployed, did at one point guarantee he would deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004.
The promise sounds even more ominous in hindsight.) Rather, most of the
issues surrounded poor "calibration" of the touchscreen inputs-the machines
would register taps on one part of the screen as if they had been taps at
some slightly different point. There were technicians on hand who could
recalibrate the machines, and this tended to fix the problems for
subsequent voters.

Still, as a result these machines relied on voters' being sufficiently
astute to notice when the confirmation said something different than what
they had chosen, and sufficiently persistent to duke it out with the
machines and complain to overworked officials when things went wrong. And
for all the effort on the part of Florida officials to escape "close calls"
due to fuzzy voting tools, these errors sound a lot like the dimpled chads
they endeavored to replace.

Or they would, were it not for one more disquieting feature of most
touchscreen voting equipment deployed in this election. Senator Kerry
graciously conceded on Wednesday morning. But had he decided to fight it
out and asked for hand recounts, it's not clear what this would mean with
respect to the new machines: They produce no printed receipt. In fact, they
leave no paper trail at all. A lawsuit fought out in the Florida court
system over the past six months tried to change this fact, but election
officials have ultimately refused to deploy such equipment, calling it a
frivolous expense.

I don't mean to doubt that President Bush won this election fairly, and I
don't think touchscreen voting machines, for all their irregularities,
tipped any balances. They even carried some ancillary benefits: Disabled
persons, the blind in particular, were able to vote unassisted in a
presidential election in large numbers for the first time in American
history.

Still, we need to be able to trust the machines we use to vote. This
doesn't mean we need to understand how they work-no one should have to know
that their voting machine employs strong cryptography to keep their votes
safe. It does, however, mean that in our fleeting interaction with the
machines, we have to be made confident they're doing what they're supposed
to do. We don't, for the most part, trust our computers. We save often,
we're told to run virus-scanning software-and still, we hear stories about
lost theses and long treks in the snow to find working printers. But I
think it's quite clear at this point that while it takes a few days (and
maybe a letter grade or two hit) to rewrite a history paper, it can take
years to recover from a presidential election.

Matthew A. Gline '06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column
appears on alternate Mondays.

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'