The mysteries of voting
Here's my latest editorial, which will run in tomorrow's Technique.




On November 2, the Thursday evening before the election, HBO aired a documentary titled “Hacking Democracy” that described the pursuits of Beverly (Bev) Harris as she explored the process and parties involved in making our republic function. Bev is a regular woman who took it upon herself to investigate what she calls the “secrecy” of the system after noticing irregularities in the 2000 presidential election, such as Al Gore’s vote count of -16022 (yes, that’s a negative number) that appeared on voting machines in Volusia County, FL. Since then, she has become a front runner in the effort to force the makers of these electronic voting machines to be more honest about their equipment, open up their processes, and take greater responsibility for failures in the past. Her organization’s website, www.blackboxvoting.org, describes their efforts and allows others to get involved in the fight.

In general, I make a strong attempt to shy away from blind paranoia about technology. Many of us at Tech have witnessed the phobias that people can display concerning machinery they cannot understand. We can, however, also appreciate the weakness of blind faith in technology. The best way to strike a compromise is either to learn enough about the process to make a conclusion, or to take the word of another trusted source that has learned about the technology.

For example, my latest credit card contains in it an RFID chip that allows me to simply wave it at a reader in many retail establishments and charge my account without ever handing the card over to another person. I welcome a new convenience like this, but knowing the general insecurities of other wireless protocols like WiFi and Bluetooth makes me wary to trust this new feature. I have been reading up on the protocol used in some credit cards and can only determine that some are safe and some are not. Thus, I must decide whether to keep the card and the additional convenience, or practice my Dremel skills on the tiny chip, and I will likely err on the side of drilling a hole in my card. (I can call it a creative outlet!)

The main idea is that any given technology has risks and benefits, and if the risk and cost of failure exceed the benefit, the product must be improved or it must no longer be used. According to the documentary, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Diebold Election Systems, the top two electronic voting machine manufacturers in the US, provide approximately 80% of the nation’s voting machines. Diebold also manufactures ATMs and other security products whose reliability are critical to the company and its banking customers.

One might assume that a company whose ATMs have been shown to be generally secure should be expected to uphold such quality standards in all its products. However, one major difference exists between ATMs and voting machines: constant quality control by customers. Each time we use an ATM, many records are produced in various forms that can confirm the validity and accuracy of the transaction. We can request a receipt that shows our new balance, check our statement online, as well as count the physical cash that might have been dispensed. Voting machines, however, are shrouded in secrecy. The customer (the voter) cannot confirm that his or her vote was actually counted, and in many cases individual votes can never be confirmed afterward. We are forced to take the machine by its word, which implies trusting the manufacturer and the people it employs.

The utopia of electronic voting is a world where machines use open-source software running on well-scrutinized open hardware. Ideally, a process should be set up by which a corporation publishes its source code and hardware designs for public scrutiny, along with offering a small cash reward for the discovery of security flaws. After a few years, the computer science community will likely have found all exploitable flaws and the product can be released for use by voters. Plenty of open-source projects out there exist to prove that this method works, and computer scientists have long known that security through obscurity is no security at all. I can imagine that thousands of college students and researchers would love to participate in this process, and we would see our democracy at one of its finest moments.

So what can we do to achieve this utopia? Unfortunately, there are a few major companies who own the bulk of the market with huge pockets and huge government contracts. Our first baby steps will likely be litigation against these corporations that will force them to open up their processes for scrutiny by an independent organization. The failures of this election should be a catalyst for this step. However, we cannot settle simply for closed scrutiny. In the end, only the utopia I have described will safeguard our democracy and return us to the status of “world’s greatest democracy.”