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Electronic invitation trouble Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/5081921.htmhttp://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/5081921.htm
Posted on Sat, Feb. 01, 2003
Dan Gillmor: Electronic voting system an invitation to trouble
By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist
News and views, culled and edited from my online eJournal (www.dangillmor.com):
Counting votes: The people in charge of elections, in California and much of the nation, seem hell-bent on turning voting into a sucker's game.
Here in Santa Clara County, which like most jurisdictions needs to update creaky election methods, officials are apparently close to buying a touch-screen, computerized voting system. However, instead of assuring integrity in elections, these well-meaning but grossly uninformed people are giving voters new reasons to worry that ballots won't be counted properly. And elections officials will be handing crooked politicians, and others who'd corrupt the process, new, potentially undetectable ways to fix our elections.
Alarmist? Listen to the people who know technology best -- computer-science professors and researchers from the nation's top universities and labs.
They've signed onto a document (http://
verify.stanford.edu/dill/EVOTE/statement
.html) urging voting officials everywhere to think further before acting so stupidly. Their language is blunt, and frightening in its implications. Here is the highlight of their message:
Computerized voting equipment is inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering. It is therefore crucial that voting equipment provide a voter-verifiable audit trail, by which we mean a permanent record of each vote that can be checked for accuracy by the voter before the vote is submitted, and is difficult or impossible to alter after it has been checked.
Many of the electronic voting machines being purchased do not satisfy this requirement. Voting machines should not be purchased or used unless they provide a voter-verifiable audit trail; when such machines are already in use, they should be replaced or modified to provide a voter-verifiable audit trail. Providing a voter-verifiable audit trail should be one of the essential requirements for certification of new voting systems.
The machines the county proposes to buy do not meet these safety requirements. Foolishly, state law doesn't require this kind of paper audit trail.
That's partly because of a judge's order to update the admittedly bad system we have in place. Making it worse is not the right move, but that's where we're heading.
The scariest part of this is that these non-verifiable touch-screen machines are already in use in many jurisdictions. We are replacing a flawed system with a potential disaster.
It's incredible to me that the most high-tech place in America, where people understand that technology is full of bugs and holes that can be exploited, is so close to such a terrible move.
The right to vote -- and for that vote to be counted with integrity -- is at the heart of liberty. People are already skeptical. If we continue on this path, pure cynicism will corrode what's left of public trust in an already frayed system.
Please. Stop this runaway train, before it's too late.
Blogging on: This is my last Saturday column for several months, although I will continue to appear on Wednesdays and Sundays.
I will be working on a book about how technology is changing journalism. I could use your help.
One of my foundation principles, as many of you already know, is that my readers know more than I do, not just about technology but about any subject you can name.
Technology is helping to turn what once was a lecture into something resembling a conversation or seminar, where the former audience is an integral part of the process. It's also allowing people who feel left out of the process to become serious journalists in their own right.
This is an exciting, if somewhat disconcerting, trend for traditional journalists and journalism organizations. But I believe it's inevitable, and valuable.
The people who are at the core of this transition are not just technologists. I'll tell you briefly about some of them from time to time in the weblog and the newspaper, and more fully in the ultimate book.
I'll also count on you, as always, to help fill in what I don't know, and to send me on intellectual paths I hadn't considered. This will be interesting, and fun.
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Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. Visit Dan's online column, eJournal (www.dangillmor.com). E-mail dgillmor@sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917.
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