Big problems continue to dog electronic voting

Electronic voting technology seems to be stuck in a quagmire it just can’t get out of. A few stories this week point up the gravity – or anti-gravity of the situation.       First off the Government Accountability Office said that despite spending $30 million over the past six years to establish a secure way for US service men and women as well as civilians living abroad to vote electronically, no system is in place and won’t be for the major election in 2008.  According to the Army Times, without some guidance from the Election Assistance Commission, which has been busy with other projects — including myriad problems with electronic voting machines — electronic voting may not be available to service members abroad in time for the 2010 elections either, as mandated by Congress in last year’s defense authorization bill.  Combine that wit the fact that many of the estimated two million civilians overseas who are eligible to vote — especially missionaries, Peace Corps volunteers and other Americans working far from urban centers — also complain of ballots arriving late or not at all, according to a New York Times article.  Then we have the mess surrounding The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, which at its core addresses security and reliability flaws in electronic voting machines. HR 811 has created a typhoon of opinion, replete with a high FUD factor even though it really hasn’t had a meaningful Congressional vote.  This week Rep. Dennis Kucinich announced plans to drop his support of HR 811.  The Ohio congressman said he plans to re-introduce “The Paper Ballot Act,” (HR 6200) a bill he filed in the last Congress, requiring the hand counting of paper ballots in Presidential elections. Then it seems like rarely a day goes by where we don’t hear about an e-voting problem somewhere in the U.S. For example,  New York election officials this week said the latest delay in New York’s protracted changeover means that new machines are unlikely to be approved and in place until after New York’s presidential primary in February 2008. The most recent hang-up came in January when state officials learned of problems with Ciber, the company hired to test the electronic voting machines they were considering. The state fired Ciber and is now weighing bids from two competitors seeking to complete the testing, according to the Times Herald Record.  Ciber has its own issues.  Just this week the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has voted to reject an application from Ciber  to be a security test laboratory for electronic voting machines. The EAC voted to terminate Ciber’s application for interim accreditation as a voting system test laboratory, the EAC announced Wednesday. Ciber failed to notify the EAC of key staff changes, required in the interim EAC program to accredit e-voting test labs, the commission said. And the dog list goes on: San Francisco officials recently said they might  end up hand counting its ballots this November — a time-consuming and costly effort — due to certification concerns over The City’s electronic voting machines. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen in May sent a letter to Election Systems and Software, San Francisco’s voting system provider that said the state would not grant an extension on the certification for The City’s electronic voting machines, as the company had requested. And we didn’t even mention the poster child  for How Not to Handle Elections, Florida has a problem of some sort  every week it seems. Texas too  has problems. And the problem extends overseas.  In April officials in France filed suit to prevent the use of electronic voting machines in the French presidential election held in May. They say the machines do not meet the legal requirements set out by the country’s Constitutional Council.  Seven electors from Issy-les-Moulineaux, on the outskirts of Paris, attended the Administrative Court in nearby Versailles, seeking an injunction preventing their city council from using the machines. They also filed complaints from 19 others, while campaigners in other cities petitioned their courts.  One final note on the subject from an MIT professor:  Internet voting is so open to manipulation that it should be avoided at all costs: “It’s voting by mail made worse,” said Ronald Rivest, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, because the Internet inherently is insecure.  Internet voting, like voting by mail, leaves open the possibility that someone other than the voter will cast the ballot, as well as that of coercion, Rivest said at the Usenix confab in Cambridge, Mass. in April . “It’s important that voters have an enforced moment of privacy when they vote,” he says, something that can be assured within a voting booth, but not necessarily outside one.  So how does this end? Well, maybe we just stick with old-fashioned hand countable paper ballots. (No hanging chad jokes please.) Perhaps the Internet and/or electronics industries aren’t up for this one.  What do you think?