CNN has a round-up of voting problems with yesterday’s elections. There seem to be a lot of problems like this:
The New Jersey Republican Committee said Republican voters filed four affidavits saying that they weren’t able to vote for Republican Senate candidate Tom Kean because the Sequoia voting machines they were using were already programmed to vote for Democrat Bob Menendez, according to NJRC Counsel Mark Sheridan. Michelle Schaffer at Sequoia told CNN, “We have been in close communication with the New Jersey attorney general’s office, and we are not aware of any issues that are problematic nor have they raised any to ask us about. “
As tempting as it is, I think it would be a mistake for critics of e-voting to highlight these sorts of problems in their arguments against paperless voting machines. They’re closely analogous to, say, the butterfly ballot debacle from 2000. Human error is inevitable in any election. And it’s a big country, so even if there are dozens of reports of scattered e-voting problems in particular precincts, that probably just reflects the fact that e-voting is new, so both people and the news media are more likely to report e-voting related problems.
What makes e-voting uniquely bad is two things: first, they’re brittle. Paper ballots are not subject to problems like software bugs, power outages, incorrect equipment setup, etc. Under almost any circumstances, it’s still possible for a voter to mark his or her ballot and go on his way. In contrast, with e-voting, the voter’s got to wait around until the machine is fixed, and the poll workers most likely won’t know how to fix it. If the downtime is significant, a lot of voters will get frustrated and leave the polling place. So the system is much less resilient to unexpected problems. We saw several of this kind of problem in Ohio, Indiana, Delaware, and elsewhere.
Secondly, and far more importantly, in precincts without voter-verified paper trails, we can’t be confident that the vote totals represented the actual votes that were cast in each precinct. I haven’t seen any evidence that foul play of this kind occurred. My guess is that none did. But if an election were stolen by hackers, we wouldn’t necessarily find out about it, because there’s no way to audit the result in precincts without paper trails.
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