Voting Technology and Innovation

gbain — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:24:31 -0700

The 2008 election was different from the last two presidential elections in that there was a clear winner on Election Day and the winner was a Democrat, Barack Obama. Controversies over voting technology that raged in 2000 and 2004 were relatively dormant. Instead, the election controversies that did come up were mostly discussions of lines to vote. This lack of discussion does not mean that there were not important issues related to voting technology that took place in 2008, just that they were not things deemed important by the media.

In fact, the 2008 election has proven to be a watershed election in voting technology considered more broadly because in this election, more than one-third of voters nationally voted before election day. As the 2008 Survey of the Performance of American Elections (Alvarez, Ansolabehere, Berinsky, Lenz, Stewart III, & Hall, 2009) noted, “37% of voters cast their ballots before Election Day, either in-person at early voting centers (18%) or by mail, mainly via absentee ballots (19%). The elderly, individuals with disabilities, and better-educated voters were more likely to use these “convenience voting” methods.” This slow revolution in voting is requiring election officials, policy makers, and voters alike to rethink what elections mean, how voting technologies function in this new environment, and how laws, processes, and procedures need to be updated to reflect this new reality. The old mindset of election day as a singular event is no longer a reality. In that vein, voting technology is not some “thing” that is used by a voter to vote but rather is part of a larger process that runs from pre-election voting machine testing through post-election audits.

Every election involves an important interaction between technology, people, and processes. The focus on voting technology—especially voting technology in a single election day implementation—to the relative exclusion of people and processes is problematic in several respects. First, it puts undue credit or blame for election problems on the inanimate technology used in the election. If voters or poll workers have problem with a voting technology because of poor voter education or ineffective poll worker training, a technology-centered focus means that the voting technology caused this problem. Second, the lack of focus on people and processes also limits the ability of policy makers to understand how to improve the system in which the election occurred. Finally, there may be severe gaps in people and process issues that may go unexamined unless there is an evaluation of the people and process components as well. The movement to convenience voting is likely to exacerbate these issues.

In this chapter, I review the people, process, and technology aspects of voting. In particular, I consider the evaluations of all three that occurred after the 2008 election. Then we consider where we stand in relations to innovations with voting technology and the path forward for improving this aspect of voting, both in the United States and internationally.

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gbain — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:37:29 -0800

The 2000 presidential election is remembered for Florida’s hanging chads and highly controversial recount. The 2004 presidential election was similarly contentious, with concerns about improper voting procedures in several states, including the swing state of Ohio. Aspects of the entire voting process were called into question, from voter registration, to the unequal distribution of voting machines, to the accuracy of the count.

Will the voting process be fairer and the final tally more accurate in 2008? And how will voting technology come into play?

Professor Charles Stewart III, Head of the MIT Department of Political Science and a member of the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project, gave is&t an overview of what factors might affect election results in 2008. The Voting Technology Project, established in the wake of 2000’s controversial recount, evaluates the reliability of U.S. voting systems and proposes principles for the design of new voting technologies.

According to Stewart, there has been progress since 2000, but because each state manages its own voting process, there will never be uniform national standards.

In 2002, Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which funded the replacement of mechanical lever and punch-card systems (goodbye, hanging chads). Some precincts bought direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, which display ballots to voters on touchscreens. A voter’s electronic input is tabulated by software, and often backed up by a paper audit trail that the voter can verify. Optical scan systems also continue to be popular: individuals mark their votes on paper ballots, which are read into electronic scanners that tally the results. The paper ballots can be used for manual recounts, if needed.

In addition to this move to modern voting equipment, Stewart notes that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in partnership with the U.S Election Assistance Commission (EAC), has developed voluntary voting system guidelines. While states don’t want to cede control of elections to the Federal government, they do recognize the value of striving for standards. As a consequence, most states operate voting machines certified by the EAC.

So all is well? Not quite.

One Country, Fifty Standards
The design of paper and electronic ballots isn’t uniform. Each state (or in some cases, each municipality in a state) creates its own ballots. Usability testing isn’t required, so on Election Day some voters may still get confused by unclear ballot layouts.

What's more, with 50 different state standards for voting, election software needs to be customized for each state. This lack of uniformity can lead to errors in the software, which is usually written by one of the two large vendors of voting systems – Premier (formerly Diebold) and eSys. These systems are proprietary, which doesn’t encourage either innovation or streamlined code.

Stewart notes that Premier recently discovered a flaw in its software for the 2008 elections. The vendor has come up with a fix, but it requires election officials to follow a multi-step correction procedure. This is far from ideal, since most staff at the polls do not have extensive computer skills.

The Voting Technology Project recommends standardizing all the components of voting systems – CPUs, touchscreens, and scanners. This would allow smaller vendors to compete and could lead to improvements in voting technology. But this recommendation hasn’t won favor with election officials, who prefer to deal with one vendor.

Counting the Votes
Stewart acknowledges that hacking into electronic voting machines remains a risk, and that physical security measures are still the main means of protecting these systems.

He also warns that paper audit trails can instill a false sense of security. Experiments that have tried to reconcile paper trails with e-votes do not match up. Most of the discrepancies are likely due not to hacking but to mechanical errors. Paper audits are produced by printers, which can break, get jammed, and so on. Meanwhile, voters who can view their paper audit in the voting booth often find it cryptic to read and don’t verify its accuracy.

Internet Voting
If proprietary voting systems have their share of problems, what about Internet voting? Why isn’t that an option in 2008?

One primary concern is the security of the channel. Some people draw an analogy between the U.S. banking system, which handles millions of transactions a day, and online voting. But this analogy doesn’t hold. The banking system has built-in redundancies and, even more important, it is not anonymous. Anonymity and voting go hand in hand. You should be able to vote, but the system should not track who you voted for. For now, anonymity online means that votes cannot be verified.

Internet voting also raises concerns about maintaining the secrecy of votes. If you vote at home (or in a nursing home), what guarantees that you were the person who voted? Others could co-opt your vote or coerce you to vote a certain way.

Project Insights
When the Voting Technology Project got under way, says Stewart, "We thought we could solve voting problems by designing the best-ever voting machine or creating the right standards. With time, we’ve come to appreciate that the primary problems are around process and rules. Technology is not the panacea. The key to success is to design voting systems that interact with human beings."

Current MIT participants in the project, in addition to Stewart, include faculty member Ron Rivest and affiliates Steve Ansolabehere and Ted Selker. Rivest is an expert in the fields of cryptography and computer and network security. Ansolabehere examines the role of rules, like voter ID, in the election process. Selker’s research focuses on aspects of voting, including accessibility, auditing, and methodology.

2008 Presidential Elections

Voting Technology and Innovation

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