As the US election approaches, the paranoia about electronic voting machines grows. It is strange that the most technologically advanced nation in the world has so many problems with producing and implementing reliable voting machines. It is also a little bit bewildering.

The level of failure of electronic voting machines is bizarre to say the least. You’d think that before any electronic voting machine could be deployed in the US it would have to be certified as having bullet-proof security and perfect reliability. No so.

The US Democratic Process

Before I dive into this topic, it’s worth explaining something to those who don’t live in the US and have never experienced a US election. First of all, it needs to be understood that, depending on where you are in the US, the number of votes you cast on election day can be very high. It varies from state to state, but you can be voting for the President, a senator, a congressman and a whole swathe of local officials including judges, sheriffs, constables and maybe even democratically elected bottle washers.

You may also be voting on propositions that have been added to the ballot on anything from gay marriage to the environment. So you may be casting many votes. The whole thing is made more complex by the fact that the names and voting possibilities change from district to district. Now you can simply “vote the slate”, which means voting for every single candidate that your party (Democratic or Republican) has put forward. In that case, one button is all you push, but you still cast many votes. However the voter may prefer to be selective, in which case you go through the whole “slate” contest by contest.

It naturally follows that electronic voting – where an electronic device presents you with screen after screen of choices and you select what you want – makes a great deal of sense. And, into the bargain, you can make voting machines more accessible for disabled voters and they can be multilingual too.

Flawed Machines

The only catch is that voting machines have to be secure and impossible to compromise. Unfortunately trying to rig the vote seems to be a local sport in some parts of the US and the voting machine industry seems to have great difficulty in producing a product anyone has confidence in.

If you do a Google search on electronic voting machine failure you get over 300,000 references, including many referring to accusations of actual and potential election fraud plus some simply describing bizarre (and incorrect) vote machine behavior. There’s a specially large amount of criticism for Diebold machines, which produce no paper record of votes cast. In fact problems with Diebold machines led to a satirical video from the Onion in February with the title
Shock, As Diebold Accidentally Releases Result of 2008 Election Early.

As far as I’m aware vulnerabilities have been found on every voting machine currently on offer in the US. However that is not surprising because voting machines are computers and there are thousands of ways of compromising the average computer, whether it runs Windows, OS X or Linux. Nevertheless it is not beyond the wit of man to invent a system that is pretty much bullet-proof. The banks, for example, run thousands of ATM machines and they don’t easily get compromised. There are also tens of thousands of personal gambling terminals issued by the Hong Kong Jockey Club, which don’t get compromised.

Getting cash or placing a bet are, of course, different transactions to registering a vote. But designing safe electronic voting machines is a soluble problem.

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