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Tomorrow is election day, and I think the biggest issue for me personally is the fact that so many precincts are using electronic voting machines. This wouldn't be a problem if there were an open, verifiable, and auditable architecture in use for these machines. Unfortunately, the voting process is not transparent, and is ripe for fraud. While you could argue that the voting process has always been ripe for fraud, with electronic voting it can be taken to new levels, and can really call into question whether or not we really elected the officials that hold public office.

Maybe you've heard claims like this before. Here are some articles to help you educate yourself:

• HBO's Hacking Democracy Documentary (to be fair, I have not watched this and will not have time to do so until the end of this week)
• How to steal an election by hacking the vote (PDF) gives an overview of what it would take to rig an election. The bibliography contains more required reading, including:
• Computer Security Expert Avi Ruben's Blog
• A research paper on Diebold's AccuVote-TS written by researchers at Princeton. Watch the video.
• Early voting problems in Florida shows that voters are having problems with their votes being miscast. On election day when there are far more people waiting to vote, how much worse will this problem be?
• U.S. Investigates Voting Machines' Venezuela Ties (NYT: requires free login). Not only can Americans and American corporations sway the vote, but potentially outsiders could do the same.

All is not doom and gloom. There's always a chance to change our voting systems. Wired News recently ran a story about building a better voting machine, and today Slashdot had a link to a company that wants to let you verify how your vote was counted after the election. There are ways to use technology to our advantage without compromising our ability to conduct a proper election. However, unless someone takes steps to do something, we will continue to vote on these suspect machines.

I WANT TO MAKE IT VERY CLEAR:

I don't care which party "benefits" from these problems. The voting process should reflect the will of the people, not the will of an individual, a corporation, or some minority group. Voting is the foundation of our democratic republic, but unless we can trust the election system there's no point in voting.

To that end, I plan to use this helpful article titled E-voting state by state as a springboard to political action. Since this article contains the current electronic voting status of each state, along with contact information for those who oversee the elections in each state, I plan to start a letter writing campaign to ask for a better electronic voting system, and I'm going to start right here in Louisiana.

We recently held a special election to replace the Secretary of State, the officer who oversees elections here. When I was educating myself about the candidates, I came across a questionnaire (PDF) on the New Orleans League of Women Voter's website. I found it troubling that most of the candidates seem to think that the electronic voting machines that the state currently has are sufficient. While it is true that the state just recently finished a project to provide new electronic voting machines to every polling place in the state, I think a more circumspect and perhaps skeptical view would be appropriate. I don't completely mistrust the machines that I have voted on, but there's no way for me to be sure that the vote I intended to cast is the vote that will be counted. They certainly do not provide a paper trail to allow me to either verify my vote or allow someone else to do a manual recount if necessary. Until this basic feature is enabled, who can say how I voted at all?

My final issue with electronic voting machines is that even if you find a problem, you have to invalidate all of the votes cast on that machine. Even if my vote is correctly cast and counted, one glitch, whether intentional or not, requires that my vote be thrown out. Someone who doesn't want the votes to be counted in a particular place could easily disenfranchise the local populace by making it obvious that the machines had been tampered with.

That's a lot to digest, so I'll leave you to it. In my next post I will discuss a possible solution for electronic voting that would address many of these issues (while undoubtedly spawning its own).

—Jack