BlogWood: MT Archives

Troxler tanks

Howard Troxler is completely, absolutely, one hundred percent wrong about e-voting problems. Which is a shame, because I often agree with Howard and usually enjoy his columns.

What should a reasonable person conclude about touch screen voting machines? Sure, there are some safeguards it would be nice to add. But most of the worry out there is loony tunes stuff.

The big picture:

(1) No touch screen machine has been shown to have been rigged or to have delivered an inaccurate vote total. They work fine.

Uh, Howard, there’s, like, nothing to recount, you know, like nothing to check the accuracy of these machines, so how, exactly, is one supposed to show that they’re inaccurate? You could have just as truthfully said “No touch screen machine has been shown not to have been rigged or to have delivered an accurate vote total.” See, there is no way to independently verify the totals that are being produced. We don’t know how the machine tabulates the votes. We don’t know from independent studies how accurate these tallies are.

(2) Claims of "flaws" or "errors" in various incidents around the country almost always involve human elements, such as poll workers not getting the things turned on.

”Almost” always involve human error?!?

(3) A conspiracy to rig the machines in a national election is ridiculously unlikely if not impossible. A plot to rig the machines in a state or local election is even less plausible.

How ‘bout a conspiracy of one or two people who can throw 500 or 1,000 votes one way or another? Let’s see, how many votes made the difference in Florida last time?

Critics cry out: "There ought to be a paper trail, so voters can check their ballot!"

Remember, the voter already must confirm a summary of his/her ballot on the screen. But let's say we did create a running print out, displayed under glass, and kept it for posterity. This has been a paper-jam disaster in the few places that have tried it.

So, why is it that manufacturers can produce reliable ATMs and gas pumps and slot machines that produce a paper receipt without paper jams or break downs, but they can’t figure out how to put a printer on a voting machine? Why weren’t these things designed with printers in the first place? A paper receipt solves virtually every problem with these machines. Countable, verifiable receipts that voters deposit in an old-fashioned ballot box before leaving the polls provide a backup system. They provide something physical to recount, and they provide a way to test and verify the accuracy of these machines.

On top of that, an election has to be close to trigger a recount. We think that hackers are smart enough to rig the machines, but too dumb to rig them enough?

Actually, with the accuracy polls these days, rigging them enough might be way too obvious. And with these machines, there is nothing to recount, whether the election is close or not.

Skeptics insist: "There ought to be a physical copy of my individual vote somewhere." Yet millions of Americans have done without it for decades, satisfied to pull a little mechanical lever in a voting booth.

Gee, this sounds like the right wing argument that goes something like “no matter how bad Americans treat Iraquis, they are not as doomed as they were under Saddam...” Howard, these new machines are supposed to be much better than anything ever used before. Now you’re saying that they’re not quite as bad as machines that were popular decades ago. Wow, that’s reassuring.

Next comes the claim that touch screens are unreliable in a Star Trek, amok-computer fashion - "The computer ate my vote!" The routine "undervote," when voters cast an empty ballot, is being recast in a sinister light.

The most-cited example of a suspicious undervote comes from a Florida House special election earlier this year, in which more than 100 blank votes were recorded. It was the only race on the ballot.

Entirely ignored was that it was an unusual "open" primary, in which everyone could vote, even though only Republicans were on the ballot. Some Democrats no doubt saw only Republicans listed and just punched "finished."

So, they showed up to vote not knowing what the election was for or who the candidates were? And then they didn’t bother to vote for anyone? Uh, okay.

Touch screen machines eliminate a much bigger problem than undervotes - "overvotes," in which ballots are thrown out because the voter marked two different candidates in the same race. Now it can't happen. Democrats should be delighted - without overvotes in 2000, President Al Gore would be seeking re-election today.

Most of those overvotes came from optical scan machines. These machines are still in use. Funny thing, but in predominantly black counties with this technology, they took the overvoted ballots from voters and later discarded them. In white counties, they told the voters to fix their overvoted ballots before they accepted them, so very few of the white votes were thrown out.

Now, for the machine-rigging stuff.

To have a national conspiracy, here is what you have to believe: That not one, but several, multimillion-dollar corporations whose existence depends entirely on customer trust have decided to risk criminal indictment, prison sentences, civil lawsuits, bankruptcy and disgrace - and have somehow gotten their key hired help to agree.

Either that, or a single, evildoing programmer has sneaked past everybody. The companies have left it all in this one guy's hands, you see: "Excuse me, Mr. Luthor, would you please write this code that nobody will ever double-check, okay?"

Here lies the problem: no one is allowed to double check anything. All of the code used in these machines is super secret proprietary stuff. Just like the extremely buggy and hacker prone Microsoft Windows, only the manufacturer knows how these machines work. We don’t need a conspiracy. All we need is some buggy software (and most or all of these machines run Microsoft programs, which, as we all know, are extremely reliable and never ever crash) and votes could be lost or misappropriated. This could be in either candidate’s favor. This is not a partisan issue.

How about local evildoers? Maybe our hacker is an evil local elections worker, with inside knowledge. He has even less ability to rig the machine than the manufacturer. And the scheme would have to elude an army of official observers.

Listen: The machines start out at zero on Election Day. They are locked at the end of voting. The total is matched against the number of physical signatures in that precinct's register. Each machine has a unique electronic code used to report its total. You can't leave any machines out of the total. You can't add new ones. You can't jiggle the totals. It's all printed and auditable.

The only things that are auditable are the printouts. They are produced based on electronic tallies that cannot be double checked. Of course they are going to match up - if you hit File and Print, an exact copy of this page will print out, but that does not prove anything about how the page came to be produced.

There's plenty of real stuff to worry about. There's this clumsy felon list by the Bush administration. There are important new rules concerning absentee ballots this year that may prove huge in November. I agree with the critics that source code and audit methods about touch screens should be public record.

?!? You just totally discounted this problem a coupla paragraphs back.

But the crazy tone of most of this stuff represents everything wrong with our know-nothing, Internet society. Worse, it represents a deliberate attempt to delegitimize our democracy for partisan gain. To those churning so hard to undermine faith in the election: Don't you care that you're hurting your own guy in case he wins?

This is not a partisan issue. Many of us have already lost faith in the election if it is to be conducted with voting machines which lack a simple paper trail. All we have to do to restore faith is to provide that simple paper trail. Like an ATM. Simple.

You mention the “clumsy felon list by the Bush administration,” which Jeb! tried hard to keep secret. As soon as the list became public, it was found to be riddled with errors. A week later, the state was forced to drop it.

Why all the secrecy with evoting? Why no paper trail? Why no public source software? Why is opaque better than transparent? What are they trying to hide? Incompetence scares me more than a conspiracy. These things may simply be junk.

This column of yours represents everything wrong with modern know-nothing journalism: for whatever reason, you have simply bought the spin of the manufacturers and the governments that make up their customer base. See, the partisanship here is coming from the companies that are making billions of dollars by selling these machines. They have everything to lose if too many people realize that the machines they are voting on are not any more reliable than the computers that they struggle to use on a daily basis.

Posted by Norwood at July 25, 2004 09:51 PM