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Capitol Connection
Chad, schmad! Let's update our voting system
What a fiasco in Florida! Now everybody's talking about whether federal funds and standards should be applied to state voting systems. Among the options: PC and Internet-based methods.
By Tom Woodruff
Chads, pregnant chads, hanging chads and dimpled chads: For the past several weeks, we have been without a president-elect because of voting disputes arising out of antiquated and, as it turns out, inaccurate voting equipment. Is this any way to elect a president?
Few people realized before this election just how error-prone elements of our voting process really are. News reports have guessed that perhaps as many as 3 million out of more than 100 million votes were thrown out. That’s an error rate of 3%. With the presidential race so close and with Congress nearly evenly divided, an error rate that high is just unacceptable.
Even though the methods and rules for voting are generally the domain of the states, the political will is building in Washington to inject federal funds, and possibly federal standards, into the voting process.
Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York says the current system is “antediluvian” and may be a reason why overall national voter turnout has dropped nearly 20% since 1960. He plans to introduce a bill in January to fund a comprehensive study by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) of the reliability of alternate methods of voting, including Internet voting, voting by mail, computerized voting machines and expanded voting hours and accessibility. In addition, Schumer’s bill would offer a $250 million matching-grant program to give states the financial incentive to modernize their voting methods.
Schumer’s matching-grant proposal is likely to be welcomed in states and voting districts that have been strapped for funds to upgrade their voting systems. Already, Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox has called for a uniform, computer-based voting system throughout her state. “We feel this type of electronic equipment is superior to all other systems out there,” says Cox.
Replacing punch-card voting
While all voting methods have some drawbacks, the Florida fiasco has drawn attention to the physical and mechanical errors generated by the punch-card voting system. These voting systems are the least expensive since they are composed of cheap, foldable tabletop “booths,” paper punch cards, and card readers based on 1960s-era.
According to a 1998 survey of all 3,140 U.S. counties, here’s what we use to vote:
Punch-card systems. About 37% of all voting precincts.
Optical-scanning methods. About 25% of precincts. The voter shades in an area with a pencil or pen to indicate his vote. The vote is read and recorded.
Mechanical-lever systems. 22% of precincts. They’re old-fashioned and reliable. But to keep them that way is costly. You flip levers for your candidates. Your choices are recorded when you pull a lever.
Electronic voting. 7% of precincts. Voters record their choices via a keyboard or touch screen. Riverside County, Calif. had the first large countywide election using a $14 million touch-screen system developed by Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment, a subsidiary of Jefferson Smurfit Group.
Paper ballots. These are still used in just 3% of the precincts.
(About 6% of the counties wouldn’t say what systems they used.)
Counties, which run most elections, spend $3 to $7 on each vote, says Safevote, a company that’s trying to promote Internet voting.
In recent days, some analysts and interest groups have begun to raise the issue of voting bias resulting from the use of the punch-card voting system, which are the cheapest systems on the market, though they’re error-prone. There’s growing evidence that these systems are used disproportionately in poorer and minority voting districts. If further study shows this to be true, expect a big push nationally to either outlaw or replace these systems.
PC and Internet voting?
The most common alternative to punch-card voting -- optical-scanning voting -- does not fix one of the biggest problems with voting: double- (or over-) voting. The old-fashioned lever machines do not permit over-voting, but these machines are no longer manufactured.
So, attention has turned to PC-based voting, both at the polling places and at home over the Internet. Advantages for PC voting include no chads, easy confirmation of voting choices, no over-votes and nearly instant recounts. After this year’s election, these advantages seem pretty substantial. And elections officials have recently indicated that they’re now very interested.
PC-based voting at polling places does not have to involve the Internet, but this year, a few places experimented with Internet voting. On Nov. 7, voters in Sacramento and San Diego counties, Calif., and in Maricopa County, Ariz., were able to try online voting from computers at their polling places. VoteHere.net, the company that conducted the experiments, says an independent exit poll of Arizona voters showed:
100% of voters using the system said it was “easy or very easy to use.”
80% percent of voters said they preferred Internet voting to other methods.
65% of voters said they would vote via the Internet from home if they believed it was secure.
Internet security concerns are a major problem for Internet voting. In a recent research paper, Avi Rubin of AT&T Labs warned, “The election is a huge, huge target where the attacker could get a huge amount of publicity and have an effect on the whole world.”
While widespread use of Internet voting may be some years away, certain populations, such as the armed forces overseas, may make wider use of this technology as soon as the next presidential election. The controversy over counting military ballots in Florida is likely to accelerate the use of this technology.
Cost is the main impediment to non-Internet PC voting at designated polling places. PC voting machines designed by Indianapolis-based MicroVote, for example, cost $4,000. Since multiple machines would be needed at most precincts, costs for their system run about twice what optical-scanning systems cost. Presumably, unit costs for these systems would go down as production volume increased due to demand.
But since we need to replace voting technology in at least the 37% of precincts using punch cards, and optical-scanning systems have many problems too, here’s a suggestion for Senator Schumer and Congress: Don’t be cheap on the federal grants here. Use some more of that surplus you keep talking about -- at least $1 billion or so -- and provide enough money for all precincts to provide a voting system worthy of this country in the 21st century.
Can you invest in voting?
Not really. Voting is a $16 billion or so industry, says Safevote. Most vendors are subsidiaries of big companies or small privately held companies.
Players include:
Election Systems & Software, Omaha, Neb. The company has about 2,200 accounts.
Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment, Jamestown, N.Y. The company or its predecessors have been around for 75 years. It works with 1,300 jurisdictions, including New York City and the state of Louisiana.
Election Resources, Little Rock, Ark. (They sold the system used in Palm Beach County.)
Global Election Systems, Vancouver, B.C.
But who knows? Maybe there’s a growth industry in voting.
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