Our
View: A good call on digital voting
California
Secretary of State Kevin Shelley on Friday
prohibited four of the state’s counties
from using electronic voting systems in
the November elections. An additional 23
counties were notified that they must meet
several requirements before use of the digital
systems will be permitted.
Shelley’s
decision is a welcome injection of soberness
into a mad dash toward high-tech democracy,
the impetus for which is Florida's calamitous
presidential tally of 2000. Prior to the
secretary’s action, the hysterical
drive toward digitized voting systems, which
are wrongly seen as a panacea for all election
problems, was in danger of going unchecked.
Admittedly,
traditional punch card ballots are anything
but foolproof. Awkward placement of candidate
names has confused some voters and led to
significant instances of user error. The
voter error rate for the 2003 California
recall was as high as 2.7 percent, which
occurred in Los Angeles County. The figure
is statistically relevant, as it equates
to tens of thousands of votes going uncounted.
But
the nascent digital voting method is untested
and presents the prospect of a fiasco far
larger and irremediable than a recount involving
hanging and dimpled chads. As the March
primary elections showed, digital voting
needs substantial reform before it can be
relied upon. In San Diego County, the Los
Angeles Times reported, a digital voting
system malfunctioned and caused more than
half of the county’s polling stations
to open late. It also prevented an unknown
number of people from casting ballots, the
paper reported.
In
Orange County, thousands of voters —
including two of our staff members —
were given the wrong access code and thus
the wrong ballot, allowing them to vote
for candidates for whom they should not
have been able to vote, or vice versa, preventing
them from voting for certain candidates.
Several
studies have shown that the digital voting
systems are highly vulnerable to hackers,
who can rapidly break into a system’s
database and alter election results without
ever being detected.
Very
little of the new hardware furnishes voters
with a paper record of their vote; the voter
must simply assume the machine recorded
everything properly.
And
as the San Diego episode proved, there is
a potential for computer failure. On a daily
basis, people across the nation smack the
sides of their computer monitors and pound
furiously on their keyboards out of frustration
with our modern technology. There is little
reason to believe computerized voting systems
will not be susceptible in like fashion
— the only difference will be the
profundity of the damage inflicted by such
glitches. The loss of thousands of votes
due to computer failure is not at all a
far-fetched notion, but how such a situation
could effectively be resolved is almost
unimaginable.
Elections
in our republic have gone relatively smoothly
for centuries now; a headlong dash into
computerization is unnecessary. Moreover,
there seems to be a prevalent and fanciful
notion that a seamless transition into digital
democracy is attainable. Such a grand reorganization
is no fleeting escapade to be undertaken
on a whim. It instead requires a pragmatic
approach that has no agenda or timetable.
Ensuring secure elections with lower user
error rates will take time and resources;
the process should not be rushed or under-funded.
Conny
McCormack, Los Angeles County’s registrar
of voters, criticized Shelley’s decision
on the digital voting machines as a “blow
to the confidence” of voters who “love
the equipment.” We would argue that
the new equipment could cause a blow to
the confidence of voters who love democracy.
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