By: Michael A. Carrier
The 2000 presidential election had a searing effect on this
nation. Few who witnessed the events in Florida could displace
the images of election officials peering at punch cards, struggling
to determine the intent of voters. Congress, for example, did
not forget. Congress did not wish to see the scenes from
Florida replayed in future elections. And so, in 2002, it
enacted the Help America Vote Act, known as “HAVA,” which provided
$325 million to the states to replace their punch card voting
systems.
Many states have enthusiastically embraced this invitation,
replacing punch cards with electronic voting machines, known as
direct recording electronic devices (DREs). Given the rapidly
approaching 2006 deadline to upgrade, other states are currently
considering such activity.
In the rush to solve one problem, however, states may be
creating another, far greater, one. To be sure, DREs promise to
reduce certain errors, increase access for voters with
disabilities, and relieve election officials of the challenge of
ascertaining the voters’ intent.
But the full panoply of dangers from such systems have largely
avoided scrutiny. This Article attempts to remedy this
deficiency. In particular, it underscores several disturbing
characteristics of electronic voting, including reduced
transparency, increased magnitude of error and fraud, and lack of
security controls.
I supplement the analysis of the DRE software by examining vote
counting flaws in the 2004 presidential election, including machine
breakdowns, vote totals that exceeded or underrepresented the
number of voters who cast ballots, and incidents in which the
machines switched votes from one candidate to another. I also
collect circumstantial evidence such as exit polls and pre-election
polls that significantly diverged from the official vote count and
questionable activity in states such as Ohio. Although such
evidence does not automatically prove the existence of error or
fraud, it is crucial given the nontransparent nature of the vote
counting process and inability to directly uncover fraud.
I conclude by offering recommendations to improve the accuracy
and verifiability of vote counting today. In particular, I
propose for electronic voting machines a voter-verified paper
trail, random audits, open source software, and other
recommendations. Only after these proposals are adopted can
voters have confidence that the promise of vote counting technology
will match its perils.