Post-New Hampshire: Will Every Vote Count?

Posted by Corinne Ramey, Drum Major Institute at 8:31 AM on January 9, 2008.

The news recently has been all voting, all the time. As candidates make epic tours of diners, churches, and city halls, papers and TV screens are chock full of pictures of politicians giving hugs and kissing babies. There's news about Hillary's teary eyes on the campaign trail and the difference the weather made in the New Hampshire primary. But in all the hoopla and campaign coverage, one aspect of the primary season has been surprisingly underdiscussed -- that of the process of voting itself.

Until this past Sunday, that is. The New York Times Magazine featured a lengthy article on voting machines, telling the story of a system rife with problems that we still manage to use to determine hair-splittingly close elections. The Times reports,

"In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices 'flip' from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish."

The voting problems in the article range from the almost-funny (In a town in Arkansas, "touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 -- even though he's pretty sure he voted for himself") to the downright frustrating. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, for example, the server that tallied the results from Diebold machines crashed several times. The next day, 10 of the races had to be recounted because they were so close. But, because so many printers in the machines had jammed, Cuyahoga didn't have paper copies of the votes that had been lost in the crash.

Unfortunately, Cuyahoga's Diebold story is typical. About 10% of touch-screen voting machines "fail in each election," said computer scientist Michael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon University. According to the Times, about one third of voters will cast their votes on touch screen machines during this election. And some areas of the country were definitely worse than others -- in Cuyahoga County in May 2006, an audit showed that in 72.5% of the audited machines, "the paper trail did not match the memory cards." Even worse, sometimes those votes just disappear. In North Carolina, for example, an electronic voting machine lost 4,400 votes in 2004.

So what to do? There is one bill in the works, called the "Confidence in Voting Act of 2008," which aims to replace paperless electronic voting systems prior to the November 2008 election. The bill provides $500 million to election jurisdictions to replace the old systems and $100 million for public audits. The bill is a step in the right direction, although it may be unrealistic to implement the new technology reliably in time for the upcoming election.

Not everyone is for adding new technology to the mix. Law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds suggests a simpler solution: returning to the paper ballot. He writes,

To these problems (well, most of them, anyway) I have a technological solution. The technology is good. It is easy to understand. It is surprisingly resistant to fraud. And it is inexpensive... Actually, it shouldn't be that surprising. A paper ballot encodes lots of useful information besides the obvious. Not only is the information about the vote contained in the form, but also information about the voter. Different colors of ink, different styles of handwriting, etc., make each ballot different. Erasing the original votes is likely to leave a detectable residue."

The best option, perhaps, may be optical scanning voting machines. The Times article reads,

"Critics of touch-screen machines say that the best choice is 'optical scan' technology. With this system, the voter pencils in her vote on a paper ballot, filling in bubbles to indicate which candidates she prefers. The vote is immediately tangible to the voters; they see it with their own eyes, because they personally record it. The tallying is done rapidly, because the ballots are fed into a computerized scanner."

Even optical scanning machines aren't perfect, though. As watchdog group New Yorkers for Verified Voting points out, all complex election software does have bugs, and even optical scan machines can be embedded with malicious codes. Additionally, as the Times says, the logistics of switching to the machines is complicated, and could take about two years to train poll workers and election officials in the new technology.

The New Hampshire primary is over, and our attention has turned to the candidates' whirlwind campaigns cavorting through the states with rapidly approaching primaries. But maybe, instead of focusing only on the theatrics of the campaigns, we need to remember how important the actual process of voting is, too. Although there's no one obvious solution to our voting problems today, the first step may be to include electronic voting in the national conversation.

Tagged as: election08, voting machines, paper ballots

Corinne Ramey is currently an intern at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy.