E-Voting Dissent Sara Wilson, Katie Noto, John Massie, Will Sutherland, Molly Cooper

BACKGROUND Electronic voting (e-voting) encompasses voting methods that enable votes to be cast and counted electronically. E-voting examples = optically scanned ballots and direct recording electronic voting machines Optically scan voting systems read bubbled-in paper ballots through an optical scanner (similar to multiple choice exams). Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines use buttons or a touchscreen in the voting process (similar to an ATM machine).

ELECTORAL FRAUD Hackers can tamper with election results from DREs It is often impossible to determine if the system has been hacked into DREs are programmed using closed source code –The public cannot look at the code, and programmers can be bribed or threatened Physical tampering is another danger In the 2004 election, computer science experts determined that hacking into DREs was quite possible and that security was weak

BUGS DREs often have serious flaws with both their software and their hardware These “bugs” are extremely hard to detect, and finding them before elections is nearly impossible Small problems have HUGE ramifications The result? Here are just a few examples: In the 2000 elections, DRE machines in one county gave Al Gore negative 16,022 votes. In a recent California Election, bugs in DRE software resulted in 36 precincts being unable to vote In a recent Iowa election, DRE machines showed 140,000 votes in a county where only 25,000 people were registered to vote In a recent Virginia election, 50% of precincts were unable vote due to DRE malfunctions There are literally hundreds of other examples of serious, costly DRE malfunctions. The result is always the same:

MAINTENANCE AND EXPENSE Implementation of DREs requires properly trained engineers specialists to maintain the software and the hardware Poll employees have to deal with electronic machine malfunction and possible data loss Electronic voting machines are complex, expensive instruments

VERIFICATION Once the voter has submitted his vote, it goes into a “black box” and cannot be accessed or changed by the voter Some DREs print out a paper audit (receipt), which the voter can check, but there is not a way for the voter to ensure that the vote is tallied as it was submitted. “‘Unless someone can come up with a foolproof method of producing a paper trail with touch-screen machines, this [banning touch-screen voting] is how we need to go,’ says Florida Senator Bill Nelson, pointing out that attempts up to now to make DRE paper-trail compatible have too often led to printer paper jams and other ‘screw-ups’” (TIME article). “Ultimately, voters want to know that their vote was included in the final tally. Paper audit trails do not provide this assurance” (Castro).

SECURITY/OTHER CONCERNS Natural Disasters Power Outages System Crashes/Failures "By far the most justifiable criticism of DRE machines is that they fail during service or in some cases cannot even be brought into service on election day. There are numerous documented instances of such failures. These incidents are real. They are intolerable when they interfere with the act of voting…” -Michael Shamos (Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy)

VARIOUS PROBLEMS "Feedback from 14 blind and visually impaired voters in Santa Clara County, California showed that many of them found the Sequoia voting machines unacceptable and were disappointed that Sequoia didn't listen to their suggestions. They said the machines performed poorly and were anything but user-friendly in the March [2004] election." Among the criticisms provided by voters was poor sound quality, delayed response time and Braille that was positioned so awkwardly it could be read upside down. [Sam] Chen, a retired college professor, also said the audio message required blind voters to press a yellow button. 'Yellow means nothing to me,' Chen said." “In New Mexico, during the 2004 election, electronic ballots in Hispanic and Native American precincts registered three times as many undervotes (no vote cast) as the electronic ballots in Anglo precincts. But when the state switched to paper ballots, the undervote rates in minority precincts were comparable to those in Anglo precincts.” All from

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