States ditch electronic voting machines
States ditch electronic voting machines
By Cory Bennett - 11/02/14 09:00 AM EST
States have abandoned electronic voting machines in
droves, ensuring that most voters will be casting their ballots by hand on
Election Day.
With many electronic voting machines more than a decade
old, and states lacking the funding to repair or replace them, officials have
opted to return to the pencil-and-paper voting that the new technology was
supposed to replace.
Nearly 70 percent of voters will be casting ballots by
hand on Tuesday, according to Pamela Smith, president of election watchdog
Verified Voting.
"Paper, even though it sounds kind of old school, it
actually has properties that serve the elections really well," Smith said.
It’s an outcome few would have predicted after the 2000
election, when the battle over “hanging chads” in the Florida recount spurred a
massive, $3 billion federal investment in electronic voting machines.
States at the time ditched punch cards and levers in
favor of touch screens and ballot-scanners, with the perennial battleground
state of Ohio spending $115 million alone on upgrades.
Smith said the mid-2000s might go down as the “heyday” of electronic voting.
Since then, states have failed to maintain the machines,
partly due to budget shortfalls.
“There is simply no money to replace them,” said Michael
Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined
computerized voting systems in six states.
The lack of spending on the machines is a major problem
because the electronic equipment wears out quickly. Smith recalled sitting in a
meeting with Missouri election officials in 2012, where they complained 25
percent of their equipment had malfunctioned in preelection testing.
“You’re dealing with voting machines that are more than a
decade old,” Smith said.
Roughly half of the states that significantly adopted electronic
voting following the cash influx have started to move toward paper.
The Presidential Commission on Election Administration in
January warned that the deterioration of voting machines is an “impending
crisis,” but House Republicans say the issue should be left to the states.
Rep. Candice Miller (R-Mich.), who chairs the house
committee that oversees federal elections and is a former Michigan secretary of
state, said the cash infusion to the states in the mid-2000s was
"unprecedented."
"State and local election officials should not rely
on the federal government to replace voting machines that may be nearing the
end of its useful life. Therefore, state and local election officials should
recognize that they are responsible for upgrading their voting equipment as
needed, and hopefully they are budgeting accordingly," Miller said in a
statement to The Hill.
Some voters might welcome the return to punch voting,
given that researchers have repeatedly proved the fallibility of individual
e-voting machines.
One group from Princeton needed only seven minutes and
simple hacking tools to install a computer program on a voting machine that
took votes for one candidate and gave them to another.
More whimsically, two researchers showed they could
install Pac-Man onto a touch-screen voting machine, leaving no detectable
traces of their presence.
But concerns of widespread tampering are overblown,
Shamos said.
“It’s something you can demonstrate under lab
conditions,” he said. To translate it to an election-altering hack, “you would
have to commit the perfect crime.”
“There's never been a proven case of manipulation of an
electronic voting machine,” he said.
Voting machines are not connected to any network and not
connected to each other, making them difficult to tamper with.
“These machines are not hooked up or networked in any way
that would make them vulnerable to external access,” said Matt McClellan, press
secretary for the Ohio Secretary of State. “We’re confident that process is
secure and the integrity is being maintained.”
“There’s no mechanism whereby viruses can pass from one
machine to another,” Shamos agreed. Best case scenario, “maybe I could fool a
few people” and get several hundred votes “for my guy.”
Bryan Whitener, director of communications for the U.S.
Election Assistance Commission (EAC), noted that all electronic voting machines
are tested and certified.
Many states, like Colorado, keep their machines under
video surveillance with detailed records of when software is being installed.
When Ohio made the $115 million statewide switch to
e-voting, it also passed a law that all voting methods, including touch
screens, must also generate a paper trail.
“It’s not just solely an electronic vote,” McClellan
said.
More than 60 percent of states passed similar laws with
the electronic switch. Some states moved preemptively; others were reactionary.
An electronic machine in North Carolina lost roughly
4,500 votes in a 2004 statewide race after it simply stopped recording votes.
The race was ultimately decided by fewer than 2,000 votes.
“Now what do you do?” Smith asked. “You can’t really do a
recount. There’s nothing to count.”
Within a year, the state passed a law requiring a paper
backup.
Paper trails are simply “more resilient,” Smith said.
Shamos said he expects the move back to paper ballots to
continue, unless there’s a high-profile crisis similar to the 2000 election.
Still, he predicted the drumbeat for Internet and mobile
voting will grow.
“Eventually [a generation is] going to have the thought
that it’s idiotic for me not to be able to vote using my cell phone,” Shamos
said.
Then all bets are off.
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