Nov

4

Election tech

Dealing with technology in real life
By Brian Coole [ZDNet]

I’ve been doing a lot of research into electronic voting in preparation for this week’s slew of media requests for comments on the technology. I’m no expert, since I cover this topic only for about four days every four years, but I have come upon some concepts that I know are solid:

  • Swapping out paper ballots for electronic voting machines just trades one set of polling problems for another. Gone are the hanging chads, overpunched ballots, and poor pencil erasures. But say hello to confusing GUIs, poorly calibrated touch screens, and the potential for a bad motherboard, a fried power supply, or another computer system failure. Yet most research indicates that electronic machines do actually reduce the number of spoiled, unreadable, or generally screwed-up ballots.
  • The real problem is that electronic voting machines are computers. So when they fail, they will do so massively. It’s a lot harder to obliterate 10,000 paper ballots than it is to wipe out 10,000 voting records on an SD card. There’s also the problem of malicious code inserted by one rogue employee of one e-voting machine company. And there’s one more problem: Windows.
  • We have a major misfit at the polling places. Let me be perfectly politically incorrect: Confused ancient retirees and marginally literate adults make up the bulk of volunteers who run polling places. And yet we’re surprised when things go wrong. A polling place is a high-pressure, fast-paced retail environment with new advanced technology where the staff gets to practice only once or twice a year. This would stress the hell out of a well-oiled team from a Nordstrom store, and polling place teams definitely ain’t that.

Like just about everything else in life, and certainly in technology, there will always be a few percentage points’ worth of voting errors. I don’t think technology can eradicate that any more than the word processor ended bad writing. A close race just makes the error rate relevant.

And isn’t all this to be expected anytime more than 100 million people try to do something all at once that they don’t do very often?

Do you think there’s a better way to run elections with technology?

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