Confessions of a Voting-Machine Neanderthal

I’m going to respectfully disagree with Sonia Arrison, and agree with Mike over at Techdirt: voting machine manufacturers should be required to make their source code–all of it–available for public inspection, and a mandatory paper trail (in which each vote is recorded on paper as it’s made) is a good idea as well.

The issue seems pretty simple to me: by far the most important concern when it comes to voting machines is transparency. I want to be sure that my vote will be counted fairly. The more people who inspect the machine’s code to make sure it works as it should, the more confidence I’m going to have in the process.

It’s not clear to me what the counterargument is. The source code for a voting machine isn’t particularly valuable. More to the point, publicly available code doesn’t have to mean open source in the traditional sense: the source can easily be licensed for public inspection, but not for use in competing products.

Moreover, it’s not like we need to worry about stifling innovation in the voting machine industry–voting machines perform a relatively simple task, and I don’t particularly want them to innovate, if “innovation” involves rapid technological change. Stability, predictability, and security are far more important considerations, and those requrements don’t change very much over time. It seems unlikely that the quality of our voting machines will suffer if voting machine companies are required to disclose

As for the paper trail issue, the key issue is that it’s important that as many people as possible have confidence in the integrity of the voting process. While advanced cryptographic methods might be more reliable in a theoretical sense, their very complexity makes it difficult for ordinary voters (most of whom are not computer experts) to have confidence in them. Moreover, there’s always a possibility that the technological wizards will overlook something–that some key component will fail that will lead to votes being lost, or to confusion over the final vote total. If that happens, the existence of paper records, which are freely available for public inspection, will be crucial to establishing the credibility of the voting process.

I’m actually sympathetic to the view that switching to electronic voting machines at all is a bad idea, at least for the near future. Although there have been problems with punch-card ballots, and those should be replaced, the latest optical-scan voting systems seem to work just fine, and I don’t see any compelling reason to change them. Why fix what’s not broken, especially when the integrity of our elections are at stake? Why not stick with small-scale trials of e-voting for the next decade, to make sure the kinks have been worked out?

But if we are going to adopt electronic machines on a wide scale, we should do so cautiously and transparently. Publicly available source code and a mandatory paper trail are sensible steps in that direction.

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