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“Criminy,” he said. “You’ve got four different vendors. Why should their source codes be private? You’ve privatized the essential building block of the election system.”
-Jeff Hastings, Republican head of election board, Cuyahoga County, Ohio
This year, if you find yourself standing at a touch-screen voting machine, consider this: How the machine actually tallies your votes is secret. The programming in the machines paid for by taxpayer dollars, used in public elections of our public officials, is considered by the machines' manufacturers to be a proprietary secret.
If we did the same thing for paper ballots, a private company would collect the ballots, count the votes in secret, in a locked room, without any public or bipartisan supervision, and then emerge with what it says are the results. Would the American public stand for that? I think not.
So why are voting machines different?
Why do we take out of the public's hands what is arguably our most sacred trust -- counting our votes for our democratically elected leaders -- and hand the job to private corporations to do in secret?
The New York Times covered this issue about a month ago:
As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person “undervote” for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes....
...[T]he truth is that it’s hard for computer scientists to figure out just how well or poorly the machines are made, because the vendors who make them keep the details of their manufacture tightly held. Like most software firms, they regard their “source code” — the computer programs that run on their machines — as a trade secret. The public is not allowed to see the code, so computer experts who wish to assess it for flaws and reliability can’t get access to it. Felten and voter rights groups argue that this “black box” culture of secrecy is the biggest single problem with voting machines. Because the machines are not transparent, their reliability cannot be trusted....
...The upshot is a regulatory environment in which, effectively, no one assumes final responsibility for whether the machines function reliably. The vendors point to the federal and state governments, the federal agency points to the states, the states rely on the federal testing lab and the local officials are frequently hapless.
This has created an environment, critics maintain, in which the people who make and sell machines are now central to running elections. Elections officials simply do not know enough about how the machines work to maintain or fix them. When a machine crashes or behaves erratically on Election Day, many county elections officials must rely on the vendors — accepting their assurances that the problem is fixed and, crucially, that no votes were altered.
Ugh.
Fox Business reports that 15 of the 24 states with elections this Tuesday are using these electronic voting machines.
The ratings for the 15 states holding presidential primaries on voting machines on Super Tuesday are below. Forty states, including the District of Columbia, are reviewed inside the report. The remaining states were not reviewed since they hold caucuses and do not use electronic voting machines.
State Risk Level
Arkansas HIGH
Delaware HIGH
Georgia HIGH
New Jersey
