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2002.
If the County Supervisors and Registrar of Voters have their way, San Diego County voters will be casting their 2004 ballots with electronic voting machines. Have we really thought this through?
Voting is far too important to trust entirely to a machine. Computer code is not flawless as anyone who’s ever used a Microsoft product can attest. Sometimes a certain combination of inputs can return the wrong answer.
What if that wrong answer was your vote? What if that wrong answer was the total count for your candidate, or your party?
The AccuVote-TS electronic voting machines are a bad choice for several reasons.
There is no anonymity guaranteed for the voter. The voter is identified, and given a card with encoded ballot information. The card is inserted in the voting machine and the voter’s choices are recorded to the card. The card is then returned to the poll worker who inserts the card into another device which reads the ballot selections into the master database. How does a voter know her name, address or other personal information wasn’t just linked to her vote?
The manufacturer, Diebold, most certainly claims this is not the case, but how would we, the voters, know? Diebold won’t allow anyone outside their company to look at the programming code.
Votes are unverifiable. There is no receipt, no hard copy, and no paper trail. The gold standard of electoral integrity—the hand count of paper ballots--is removed. Once the vote is recorded electronically, that’s it. If something goes wrong, if the count comes into question, if the data is suddenly “bad”, there is no recourse. There is nothing to recount. At that point the outcome of the election is whatever Diebold says it is and they won’t allow anyone outside their company to look at the programming code.
There is no guarantee that the programming of the voting machines doesn’t have a built-in bias. Voters assume their ballot selections displayed on-screen will be written to the data card. But that can’t be verified because Diebold won’t allow anyone outside their company to look at the programming code.
With voting in the hands of a private company, citizens may be at the mercy of that company’s political leanings. In Diebold’s case, their Board of Directors and top executives are heavy contributors to the Republican party, having recently donated tens of thousands of dollars to the RNC and individual Republican candidates. Would Diebold’s senior management use their power to influence the outcome of an election? One would hope not, but we can never know because Diebold won’t allow anyone outside their company to look at the programming code.
While “e-voting” may be the wave of the future, voting is not something that can be entirely paperless. Anyone who works with computers understands the necessity of backups and fall-backs. Our votes are far too important to ignore this simple fact of life regarding electronic data.
There must be a hard copy of every ballot available for a hand recount if that should become necessary, and every voter should receive a paper receipt of their ballot.
The Registrar of Voters and County Supervisors should set up an independent, non-partisan panel of computer database and security experts along with ordinary citizens to verify and certify that our votes are being counted accurately and fairly. The manufacturer of whichever voting machines are chosen absolutely must open their systems and programming code to independent review.
Only then will electronic voting machines be viable for San Diego County voters.
I remember bringing this up at a Dean campaign event and the president of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters essentially telling me I was a conspiracy nut.
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