Electronic Voting: Threat or Menace

The conventional wisdom is that the use of direct recording electronic voting machines without a voter verified paper audit trail (generically, touch screens) will not pose a problem this November because only 30% of the voters will vote using these machines. In fact, there will be some touch screens in states with 349 electoral votes (270 are needed to be elected president).

There are a number of problems with the use of these machines. They include, but are in no way limited to:

• In general the software is not open to public inspection
• The machines may not be tested with the system date set for election day
• The vendors (such as Diebold, one of whose executives promised to do any and everything he could to carry Ohio and the nation for George Bush) are allowed to program the machine ballots without public review of the software generating the ballots
• Other than in Nevada, the machines as configured for this election day can not produce a voter verified paper audit trail.

There are a number of key states in which the number of registered voters in precincts using touch screens in November exceeds the 2000 margin of victory for president in those states. These states include: Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. These states have 209 electoral votes.

So what?

Assume you’re Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry. On Monday, November 1, 2004, every one of the final national polls and many of the key state polls show you winning the national popular vote and most of the key states by 10% (well outside the margin of error in each case). Then assume on November 2, 2004, all of the exit polls have the same results. If the polls are correct, you should win every state Al Gore carried in 2000 plus Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia. You reasonably expect an electoral college victory of about 350 to 188.

However, as the networks should have learned in 2000, the exit polls merely measure how people think they voted immediately after they voted. The exit polls do not measure how the votes will be counted which is all that matters.

On Election Day while awaiting the results and thinking about Cabinet selections, you get encouraging reports of very heavy voter turn-out in normally Democratic areas all over the country. Election night, while putting the finishing touches on a victory speech and waiting for a concession call from George W. Bush, you notice a few oddities. In particular, there is an extraordinarily low presidential vote (and a large Congressional vote) reported in normally heavily Democratic areas of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida where the heavy turn-out was reported all day long. Later, the same low vote from normally Democratic areas appears in results from Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and California. When all precincts have reported, you have carried Ohio, lost California, and the electoral vote stands at 364 to 174 in favor of Bush who is about to become the first Republican elected president without carrying Ohio.

Throughout the night you’ve been getting reports from heavily Democratic precincts using touch screens that while record numbers of voters cast ballots very few votes were cast for president. You decide to contest the results.

Across the country in typical heavily Democratic precincts with 1,000 voters who actually voted on election day the final electronic results are about 100 votes for you and about 100 votes for the Bush-Cheney ticket. Your lawyers go into each of these precincts and obtain affidavits from 500 voters recorded on the poll lists as actually voting in the precinct on Election Day. Each of the affidavits states that the voter voted for your ticket. You’re hopeful when your lawyers finally get into various courts with the affidavits.

The judges decide that the affidavits do not establish that the voters did not make a mistake. All of your challenges are dismissed. The appeals end up in the U.S. Supreme Court where you lose 5-4.

You spend the remainder of a long and distinguished career in the Senate wondering why when you had the opportunity you did not do everything you could to encourage your supporters to vote on paper ballots. You wonder why you never realized there was something odd when almost all the voices complaining about touch screens were Democratic. In more reflective moments, you wonder why. Why you did not arrange for enough detailed questions to be asked in each county where touch screens were used. Questions that insured that the barriers to vote tampering would protect the integrity of the elections or to provide enough evidence to get a court to force the county to use paper ballots. Finally, you wonder why you never realized that the danger arose before election day and had to be stopped then. Instead, you attempted to lock the barn door on election day with thousands of poll watchers, all of whom spent the day diligently watching for the escape of a horse which had already fled.