October 13, 2003
A: FROM MENTOR DENISE HARBERT IN IL
Hi Robin! I was really excited about your question, but I just didn't have
time to write last week. I'm really glad you didn't get a flood of answers
yet! Your question is cool not only because you're paying attention to
what's going on in the news right now, but also because you're trying to
logically approach the problem from a perspective that is not political,
asking how SET might prevent some of the voting "messes" that have happened
in the U.S. recently.

Although I do not have personal knowledge of ALL voting machines or the
technology behind them, I have been a registered voter since I was 18 and I
have voted in dozens of elections across 3 different states and 3 different
levels of government. On at least 3 occasions, I have even been a
volunteer to oversee the vote counting in various areas outside my
district. Voting is very important to me and I am excited to see that you
are also thinking about how important it is. Believe it or not, most
Americans choose not to vote! That absolutely horrifies me! If you don't
cast your vote and speak your mind about government leaders from your local
school all the way up to the U.S. President, then you are effectively
allowing someone else to control your money, your education, your future,
your children's future, your country's future, and the planet's future
without any strings attached. That is just no way to live! It's worth the
time to find out about the political opinions of the candidates and vote
for the one whose opinions most closely match your own. That's my side
lecture on the importance of voting!

My experience with voting is personal, rather than professional. I was a
little surprised the first time I moved to a different state and discovered
that different states have different systems for voting for the U.S.
President. However, I was flat out shocked when I discovered that I had to
learn 3 different voting systems during one period when I happened to live
in the same apartment but voted in the national, state, and local
elections. Until I saw it, I never realized that different government
agencies are responsible for the different types of vote tallying. For
example, you would not expect a nationally cleared voting official to be
overseeing the votes for your local grade school district's
superintendent. Elections for national offices involve voting for U.S.
President, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House of Representatives. (Incidentally,
the House contains what are referred to as Congressmen and Congresswomen,
even though the Senate is also part of Congress. The Senate contains
Senators.) U.S. Supreme Court Justices are appointed by the President and
approved by Congress, so you are indirectly voting for them as well. State
elections are your state Governor, state Senate, and state House. Some
states elect positions like Treasurer, Secretary of State, and Judges,
while other states allow elected officials to appoint them. Depending on
the size of your community and the laws in your state, your local elections
could include mayor, city or community boards, school superintendent,
etc. EVERY state is different and EVERY level of government has the
ability to implement their own election process. This is precisely why we
have a "voting system" problem in this country. There are too many
inconsistencies between different voting districts, so voting is not fair
for everyone.

I have had personal experiences with voting systems that confused the
daylights out of me, and I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent and
logical person. I can't even imagine how intimidating such systems would
be to someone who is less educated, less familiar with English, or less
comfortable asking questions than I am. The confusing systems tend to work
in favor of people who are relatively wealthy and have been in the U.S. for
several generations because, typically, such people are raised with a
stronger sense of entitlement and greater knowledge of their rights. A
poor person or a newly naturalized citizen who is still struggling with
English may have more difficulty in feeling that same sense of entitlement
and having the same confidence to ask questions of the people who are
stationed at the polling place. Such people are less likely to want to
vote and more likely to become disenfranchised. This disenfranchisement is
very severe for people who can't read - illiterate people - because almost
all voting systems in the U.S. require the voter to read. (Some people
argue that if you can't read, then you're not smart enough to vote
anyway. But most learning specialists will tell you that reading ability
and intelligence are really two different concepts. People who can't read
English well could have been victims of a bad school system, poor access to
tutors or one-on-one help, social pressures in their homes or neighborhood,
being born in a country that used a different alphabet than we do, eyesight
problems, and learning disabilities like dyslexia that make letters appear
backwards and mixed up - just to name a FEW.)

Furthermore, different communities may have vastly different resources
available to them, which affects a community's ability to acquire and
assimilate new voting systems. For example, poorer communities or
immigrant communities would not have as much money, information technology,
or political connections as wealthy or well-established historical
communities. This widens the gap in voting irregularities between groups.

Confounding these logistical differences are the varying reliabilities of
the voting systems themselves - some require votes to be "read" by a
machine and verified by a human count later. Others only allow one type of
count or the other without a backup test for verification. Both the people
and machines are capable of making mistakes that miscount the votes and
they do so with different probabilities. This is why voting can be
unfairly lopsided toward more or fewer vote counting mistakes, depending on
what system you're using.

The most common voting systems I have experienced are:
1) Legal size sheets of posterboard paper with broken horizontal lines that
need to be connected with a special marker before you feed it into a
machine, and
2) Small posterboard cards that require you to punch holes in it with a
metal ink-pen-like "poker" before you drop it into a big box to be manually
counted later.

Another system made me circle the name of the candidate I wanted with a
special marker. Another made me fill in bubbles with a #2 pencil just like
on a multiple-choice test. Strangely, I once experienced a system where I
had to step into a curtained booth, pull a crank lever like one of those
Las Vegas slot machines to close the curtain behind me, slide horizontal
levers to the left or right to reveal the names of the candidates I wanted,
then pull the crank again to get the levers to "pop" and snap back into the
"no vote" position so the curtain behind me would open. I vividly remember
that one because it was so weird and so NOT self-explanatory. I had to ask
a dozen questions about how to do it and it seemed more like a casino or a
carnival game than a voting machine! Such a system seriously discourages
voting, especially for those underrepresented groups I mentioned before.

Each of these systems has an error rate associated with it. In other
words, there is a possibility that your vote will not be counted toward the
candidate you wanted to vote for. The ones that need the line drawn to
connect them may not be read by the machine if the voter doesn't make the
line dark enough or put it in the right position. (This problem is
equivalent to the machines that may not read the bubble on your
multiple-choice test if you didn't fill it in dark enough with a #2
pencil.) Or, your vote won't be counted if you accidentally fill in two
lines for the same race. (You can only vote for one candidate for each "job".)

I truly believe, however, that the WORST voting system is the manual punch
card (see #2 above). The card itself does NOT have the names of the
candidates on it. You have to carefully line up the card against a voting
sheet that lists the candidates. If you don't get the alignment right,
then you might be shifting your vote by one candidate all the way down the
card. The cards are counted manually, which makes it easy for the vote
counter to misread the location of your punch and to count your vote in the
wrong category. This is compounded by the "pregnant chad" problem that
occurs if you don't poke entirely through the card or the "hanging chad"
problem that occurs if you do poke all the way through, but the tiny square
you poked out does not entirely detach itself from your card. Making it
even worse is the fact that the cards are pre-perforated like a checkbook
or a coupon from a magazine. Sometimes, a card can get to you with a weak
chad in it that may fall out on its own even if you didn't intend to vote
for the person it corresponds to. If you didn't vote in that race, then
the accidentally loose chad could be counted as a vote for a candidate that
you had no intentions of voting for. If you did vote in that race, then
your vote will not count because two holes are missing from your card in
that race and the vote counter will invalidate your vote because you voted
for two candidates. Even worse still is the fact that the chads get looser
and looser each time the cards are handled. If the election results are
questioned, like in the case of the Florida fiasco during the 2000
Presidential election, the votes may need to be counted again and
again. Each time the cards in Florida were recounted, more and more chads
kept falling out of them.

I know the punch card system was the one questioned in Florida, but I think
it may also be the one that created the controversy in the California
recall election. The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) filed a legal
complaint about the California recall election on the grounds that several
minority communities would be unfairly disenfranchised because they were
the only ones left in the state with a particularly unreliable voting
system. As you know by now, the election did take place in spite of that
complaint and in spite of several others made by different groups on
different grounds, but the ACLU complaint called attention to the voting
systems. It made more people start asking questions about the different
voting systems and whether they are fair for everyone.

I think the technology currently exists to make voting systems simple with
virtually 0 error rates. We currently have the ability to put color
photographs of candidates with their written names and recordings of their
voices saying "My name is <name>" onto a computer screen. The only thing
the voter would have to do is touch the screen where the person they wanted
was located. There could be prompts with pictures and words that make it
very easy for people to pick the candidate they want even if they don't
read or speak English well. We also have the technology to hack-proof the
computer system so it is truly unbreakable. However, how much do you think
it would cost to implement that system in every voting district in the
U.S.? And who do you think could be trusted to program the hack-proof
system and hold the hack-proof master key? Finding the right balance
between technology, human factors, and available funding is the real
challenge in this voting system controversy. And that is not a balance
that will be achieved without a LOT of discussions and negotiations between
a LOT of different groups of people over a VERY long period of time. As
discouraging as that sounds, it is important that we start those
conversations now. The world is growing smaller and closer together
because of advances in SET. We have to start learning how to include
everyone in important decisions to avoid long-term conflicts between groups
that have differing needs and opinions.

Great question!!

********************
October 10, 2003
A: FROM MENTOR NANCY WHITE IN WA
I asked one of our great volunteers and e-voting expert from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (http://www.cpsr.org) Erik Nilsson and here are the sources he recommended:

"A list of voting equipment in use in CA is at: http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/elections_vs.htm
This has some description of equipment types. IFES has some information on voting systems in use at http://www.ifes.org/TechSurvey/data.html.

I lay out the basic election equipment types at http://www.cpsr.org/publications/newsletters/issues/2001/Winter/nilsson.html, and present some material that might help answer questions like "what is the most reliable voting system?" But that is not a simple question. More help in the "further study" section of the newsletter: http://www.cpsr.org/publications/newsletters/issues/2001/Winter/urls.html"

If you are thinking about entering the technology field, or plan to use technology in your work and care about the implications and consequences, I encourage you to check out CPSR!