So I voted this past Tuesday, and my polling place had just switched to the Diebold machines. Last year we did the punch card thing, and since this was only my second time voting, I don't have any experience with anything else. So I figure here, I'll give a quick little review of my Diebold voting experience, and a couple comments on what was right and what was wrong.
First off, I liked the touch screen voting better than the punch cards. That's just a personal preference, though. I am far more comfortable with computers than most people, especially in the area that I live in (a mixture of suburb and rural). The punch card thing last year was pretty confusing to me at first, although I figured it out pretty quickly. So this won't be a big diatribe against electronic voting. I aim to keep a level head about the issue and try to view the positives & negatives from a relatively objective view.
When I walked into the polling place, I gave the pollsters my name & street, and in turn they provided me with a smart card that held the ballot information for my district. I stepped up to an unoccupied voting machine, slid my card into place, and the machine came to life.
Each issue / race had an entire screen dedicated to it. In a nice, large font, it showed the race (mayoral, judgeship, etc), along with a line for every person running for the position. There was an empty checkbox next to each name. Touching this checkbox would place a check in it & change the color of the box surrounding the candidate's name. This made it very easy to see who I selected. At no time did the software mistakenly check a candidate I did not desire. Although the boxes were large, they were placed one atop the other, so it is possible that the touch screen could report a mistaken choice. There has to be a tradeoff, however, between space on the screen and the number of candidates running for the position (for instance, council seats would have 6 or 7 candidates running for 3 positions, so there is not much screen real estate to be spared).
After selecting your choice, you can easily see who you have chosen, and then press the `Next' button to move on to the next issue / race. This is repeated for every race / issue. At any point, you can hit `Back' and return to a previous vote. You can simply hit `Next' to abstain from a vote. It was very simple and intuitive. The whole time, there was a poll worker standing a couple feet away that would happily answer any questions the voters had.
After everything was voted on, the screen showed a summary of all votes. Here, you could see every choice you made. I abstained on one race, because I knew nothing about either of the candidates. This summary box was highlighted in red with `Abstain', easily noticed by the eye, so it would be easy to see a race that you might have missed during the voting process.
Then, you have the option to print a paper receipt indicating your votes. This is what confused me. The paper receipt should not be an option, it should be mandatory. If it is just an option, then what good does it do? I believe that Diebold just put this in there to avoid the criticism of not having a paper trail, but they obviously don't understand the reasons behind having the paper trail. I will discuss this in a bit.
The receipt was printed on a small sheet of paper that scrolled within the machine on the right hand side, viewable through a small window. You had to open a plastic flap to see what was being printed. Underneath this flap was a clear piece of plastic that was supposed to serve as a magnifier, but all it did was make the text blurry and almost unreadable. I did not realize, at first, that this, too, was able to be flipped up. A poll worker pointed that out to me, and I was able to read the receipt clearly after that.
The receipt window was rather small, too, so it would print a small section of your voting choices out, let you review it, and then wait until you hit `Continue', where it would then print the next section. This seemed a bit awkward, but it did serve the purpose, you were able to see, on paper, what your actual votes were. The paper would then scroll away and be stored in the machine.
At this point, you could still return to previous and make changes, and repeat the review process again, or cast your current votes and finish the process. I said `Accept', pulled the card out, and went on my way. I discussed the machines with a poll worker, and he said they were great, only one small problem earlier in the day where one wasn't printing. They got that issue fixed, though, and overall they really liked the new machines.
Basically, the software seems to be intuitive and could be a beneficial addition to our voting procedures. However, there are some big issues that need to be resolved.
The biggest problem I see is the paper trail. The main question in my mind is what determines the official vote tally with these machines. I can only assume that the official tally comes from the machine itself. In my opinion, the official tally should be the paper receipts that are printed with each ballot. The problem here is that it is optional to print the receipt. This completely undermines the entire paper trail notion. How can a recount ever be done if some of the ballots are not recorded outside of the machine? The paper trail is there to ensure that the software is fully functional.
What I think needs to be done is to declare the paper receipts to be the actual official tally from the ballots. The computers would report their tallies at the end of the day, and then 5% - 10% of the precincts would be randomly selected to undergo a manual recount. These recounts would then be compared to the results being reported by the machines. If everything lines up correctly, then the remaining computer results would be accepted as official. If there were any discrepancies, the computer results would be thrown out and a manual recount would be done across the board.
I've been toying with the idea of adding targeted recounts to the randomly selected recounts, as well, but I don't know if that would be good or simply cause more problems than necessary. For instance, there could be 5% randomly selected, and then allow the state Republican party to select another 5% to undergo the manual recount, and another 5% by the state Democratic party. This would alleviate any suspicion of corruption in the random selection, allowing each party to target suspect precincts. Whether it's necessary or not, I don't know.
The second thing I'd like to see with these voting machines is open source code. The software code that determines our nation's leaders should not be proprietary. Transparency in government is on of the most fundamental principals a democracy is based on, and that transparency should extend to the methods of representative selection. It is simply unfathomable to me that we are supposed to rely on a corporation's word that their software is infallible. Even if it is not intentionally designed to be unsecured, and the practices of Diebold fail to quell these concerns, unintentional mistakes almost undoubtedly remain in the code base.
The millions of eyes that scour the code of Open Source projects would find a vast majority of these bugs. In a piece of software this vital to our democracy, I don't think that we can afford it to be closed source and proprietary. I will say right now that any government official that starts the process of forcing all software related to voting in our democracy, be it national, state, or local, will receive money & support from me.
And the final point I'd like to make is that there is absolutely no reason for a network cable to be attached to the voting machines. None whatsoever. I am still kicking myself for not investigating this at my polling place. I didn't even think of it. So I don't know if that is a complaint I should be registering or not. But I have heard other people report that voting machines are connected to a network while in use. That is simply beyond absurd.
In conclusion, I would like to say that electronic voting can and should be a great benefit to a modern democracy. But we have a long way to go before we can get there. Diebold either criminally misunderstands the issues involved with electronic voting, or they understand them too well and are criminally subverting the democratic process. The software is decent (a lot could be done to make it better, but that is the least of my complaints here), but the processes around the rest of the voting procedures requires massive attention.
Well, this was a little longer than I originally intended, but if anybody wades through it all (or at least some of it), feel free to comment. I know electronic voting is looked down upon here, and I fully blame Diebold and their bumbling for casting it in a criminal light. I hope that we can overcome their fuckups and move on towards a better voting system.