“Obsolete?” Really?
Home computers in the 1980’s were crappy, broken, and “obsolete” as opposed to familiar ways of doing the same things. Same, though less so, in the 1990’s (Windows 3.1). Same, though less so, in the 2000’s (Windows Vista). Same, though less so, in the 2010’s (Windows 8).
I’m sure there were people who looked at the Commodore 64, or an Intel 386 running Windows 3.1, and said: “These things are just hopelessly primitive and unreliable. They crash all the time and lose data. They make everything harder to use, with their ‘modems’ and ‘ethernet’ and ‘gopher’ and ‘world-wide web.’ I can work much faster and more reliably with a Smith-Corona typewriter, a telephone, and the Yellow Pages.”
Fortunately, the industry didn’t listen to those troglodytes, because we saw the inherent value and promise of computers. Today… well, today, our machines are still broken - but incrementally less so - and no one under the age of 30 is afflicted with “the old ways are best” anti-technology fervor.
How about e-voting machines?
E-voting machines, in general, have one huge advantage over paper ballots: the promise of end-to-end verifiability.
Here’s a simple model:
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Every voter is issued a unique code for the election.
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Every voter votes electronically, and receives a ballot receipt that identifies their unique ID and their vote.
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The election results are reported as the complete list of (unique ID --> vote).
That combination makes many forms of election fraud nearly impossible:
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Every voter can establish that their vote was properly recorded. If a voter’s ballot receipt doesn’t doesn’t match how they voted, they’ll instantly notice and can report it.
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Every voter can establish that their proper vote was counted in the tally, or prove otherwise. (Alternatively, if a voter did not vote, they can prove that a vote was not cast in their place.)
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Every voter can establish that the number of recorded votes matches the expected number of valid votes.
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If new voters are manufactured, the total size of the list won’t match the number of registered voters.
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If votes are removed or changed, people can present their paper ballot as evidence that their properly cast vote was altered.
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If the results don’t reflect the actual tallies, it will be immediately obvious just by summing the individual votes in the report.
Contrast these advantages with the obvious vulnerabilities of paper ballots:
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Ballots can always be added. Unless inflation rises to extreme levels, no one will ever know. (And if they do, they will simply shrug their shoulders and accept the result anyway, because it’s nearly impossible to investigate.)
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Ballots can always be changed or removed.
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The tallying process is always a black box. Everyone casts a vote, the ballot box gets taken into a back room, and someone comes out and announces a result that we accept largely on faith.
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And most critically: Since this entire process is unverifiable and based on trust, some people will always doubt it. Every election is plagued with accusations of “rigging” that are impossible to investigate and possible to dispel. People still doubt the 2000 election, the 2004 election, the 2008 election, the 2012 election… etc.
These problems are endemic, and they are intractable. The fact that they are familiar, as compared with e-voting problems, is little comfort.
If e-voting is possible to get right - and with these enormous advantages - then why do current e-voting machines suck?
Answer: Privatization. The federal government is failing to lead an effort to develop the best e-voting system we can have. Local governments hire these shady companies like Diebold and Sequoia, with lots of back-room deals and personal favors, and end up with proprietary machines and lax security.
Until the federal government initiates a NASA-like effort to create a robust, open, and verifiable e-voting system that the entire country can use, the United States will continue to suffer from vulnerable elections - and endemic mistrust in the results.
