E-Voting: The Right Framing...

Looking at the volume and passion of response to my previous diary, I would venture that any 2008 candidate that brings this issue forward as a key one in his campaign (as both a symptom and a cause of how the average American has been politically and economically disenfranchised) will attract a groundswell of support from the netroots.  

The question is how to frame the issue.  I think there is a simple way, and it was suggested by many respondents to the previous diary.  Follow me below the jump...

By way of background, I should say I am an IT Architect with 25 years experience, with a good amount of experience with financial systems.  I have worked with a wide variety of technologies over the years, and am well versed with many more--including some very similar to most "smart card" based e-voting technology.  A company I used to work for used that technology over twenty years ago to implement a lottery for a Latin American country where telecom was unreliable.

I profoundly distrust e-voting technology.  Here's why.

Anyone who works with financial systems can tell you that the technology, by itself, is not secure.  You can add all the encryption, authentication, verification, etc. and it can still be hacked.  What ultimately makes the financial system viable is two things: audit trails and auditing.  

Using that as a standard, e-voting falls way short.  The hardware is easily tampered with, the software easily hacked, and the physical security of devices is almost non-existant.  But the most damning thing is, no audit trail and no audits.

Many respondents to the earlier diary mentioned ATMs in the responses, and I think this is precisely the standard we should use in framing this issue.  If money machines can be made secure and trustworthy, then voting machines can be made secure and trustworthy.  Part of this is in the hardware design, part of it the software design, part of it is the logistics (fixed installation with telecom, which facilitates better control over physical security) and part of it is the systems behind the ATMs that batch and process transactions.  But ultimately, it is the audit trails and the auditing that keep your bank account safe.

The beauty of this frame is its simplicity and the fact that is instantly comprehensible in a single sentence:  "If money machines can be made safe and trustworty, voting machines can be made safe and trustworthy."

•  eVoting is not the frame to use

  While I agree that we can't trust eVoting efforts as they now stand, I think that it is easy to swift boat anti- eVoting as tinfoil weirdos. The voting issue is more than eVoting, it also includes voter suppression, and list scrubbing.

  Perhaps a better frame is:
  
  Every eligible voter votes, and every vote counted.

  To that end, I have seen floated the idea of a voter lottery. Vote and get a chance to win $1million dollars. Not sure if it was New Mexico, or Arizona, but I bet that would certainly increase turnout. Then we should just need to figure out how to let eligible people on the voting roles.

  by mperloe on Thu Jun 29, 2006 at 07:00:02 AM PDT

  •  Many do not vote because they can't get the time

    off from work and after work they have to be home feeding the kids. Making everyone vote on the same day is lunacy. They should allow voting to run a full month and put the machines in a public building (library or town hall).

    I support evoting and I agree with the auditing message in this diary. The current system is totally broken and the last 2 presidential elections bear that out.

    If I can pay my taxes by electronic means, why can't I vote that way? And I am talking about from the comfort of my own home and at my convenience.

    I'll answer my own question. It is because the current system serves the purposes of corrupt politicians.

    by CitizenOfEarth on Thu Jun 29, 2006 at 07:13:56 AM PDT

•  Do you have research on ATM security?

  I know that Tom Collins, in RENT, rewired the ATM at the Food Emporium to provide an honorarium to anyone with the code. A-N-G-E-L.

  That is intended humorously, but my question is seriously intended. Are ATMs secure for the purpose of protecting our accounts? Have they been, historically? And, if not, were the insecure aspects, first, related to the audit trails and auditing, and second, resolved by those if they weren't?

  How about with the voting machines? Is there anything which prevents a hacker from rigging it so that it correctly spits out a paper audit with your voting choices reflected, then changes those votes in its internal electronic registry? How might that look in the machine's audit? Who would know if the electronic trail differed from the paper output one?

  Might it be possible to rig machines so that they'd audit perfectly correctly anytime except on election days? In other words that they would audit perfectly right up to the 7 am opening of the polls, then switch to a hacked election protocol, with correctly printed paper receipts but flawed electronic data, then return to perfect audits for any tests following poll closure? The only way fraud could absolutely be proven, it seems to me, would be if every single voter sacrificed the privacy built so carefully into our voting traditions and published the votes they cast for comparison. If any voters declined, the results would still be in question, isn't that so? Do the voting machines know the date and time? Surely they do, don't they? They don't think they are pre-Y2K, do they? Have they been bitten by the Millenium Bug?

  I am just playing devil's advocate here. Just as the technology is sophisticated, so too, it seems to me, are the possibilities for fraud.

  All in all I like your frame. I am just curious as to whether it reflects:

  a. The state of security in modern-day ATMs.
  b. That no security compromise would be possible in the similar. but not-quite-the-same technology used in voting machines.

  Like you, I'd like nothing more than to believe in the integrity of our elections. I think it is critical that we find a way, and I agree we have not found it yet. And I do think voter suppression and intimidation are currently bigger problems.

  by BeninSC on Thu Jun 29, 2006 at 07:30:41 AM PDT