Electronic Voting Machines

The is an extensive article in todays New York Times about electronic voting machines. The title of the article is "Can You Count On These Machines"?

America voted on paper in the 19th century, until ballot-box stuffing — and inept poll workers who lost bags of votes — led many to abandon that system. Some elections officials next adopted lever machines, which record each vote mechanically. But lever machines have problems of their own, not least that they make meaningful recounts impossible because they do not preserve each individual vote. Beginning in the 1960s they were widely replaced by punch-card systems, in which voters knock holes in ballots, and the ballots can be stored for a recount. Punch cards worked for decades without controversy
(except for those minor "hanging chads").

So I guess there are potential problems with every method of casting and counting votes. But it appears that "touchscreen" voting has more than it's share of problems. This confuses me. I've used automated teller machines for about 25 years now and I've yet to find a mistake in any of my accounts. I've used credit cards even longer than that and also (knock on wood) have never had a problem. How come the financial systems seems to be able to process transactions via computer but we can seem to find a way to do a simple vote count using computers?

The voting machines seem to be built with important redundant mechanisms in place.

Inside each machine there is a computer roughly as powerful and flexible as a modern hand-held organizer. It runs Windows CE as its operating system, and Diebold has installed its own specialized voting software to run on top of Windows. When the voters tap the screen to indicate their choices, the computer records each choice on a flash-memory card that fits in a slot on the machine, much as a flash card stores pictures on your digital camera. At the end of the election night, these cards are taken to the county’s election headquarters and tallied by the GEMS server. In case a memory card is accidentally lost or destroyed, the computer also stores each vote on a different chip inside the machine; election officials can open the voting machine and remove the chip in an emergency.

The machines’ lack of a recountable, verifiable paper trail has sparked controversy, and some elections officials are rushing to phase them back out of use, as has been done in Sarasota, Fla.

Booths for paper ballots in Cleveland. Paper is subject to poor design and ambiguous markup, but many elections observers believe optical-scanning systems still provide the best way to ensure public confidence in the voting process.
But there is also a third place the vote is recorded. Next to each machine’s LCD screen, there is a printer much like one on a cash register. Each time a voter picks a candidate on screen, the printer types up the selections, in small, eight-point letters. Before the voter pushes “vote,” she’s supposed to peer down at the ribbon of paper — which sits beneath a layer of see-through plastic, to prevent tampering — and verify that the machine has, in fact, correctly recorded her choices. (She can’t take the paper vote with her as proof; the spool of paper remains locked inside the machine until the end of the day.)

Yet servers fail, printers jam, memory cards are lost or misplaced, poorly trained poll-workers are confused and the problems are still there. But here is the biggest problem:

But the 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.

Naturally the vendors disagree. They point out that the machines are tested by the government and are certified to work properly. But if this is the case, how come the machines still have so many problems? Obviously the testing isn't rigorous enough. Besides that, testing is not mandatory. And, government officials are a bit too cozy with the vendors. Do we really want private companies to be involved with our voting?

“The types of malfunctions we’re seeing would be caught in a first-year computer science course,” says Lillie Coney, an associate director with the Electronic Privacy Information Commission, which is releasing a study later this month critical of the federal tests.

I've only discussed half of this ten page article. If you are a concerned voter you should take the time to read the entire article. Vote counts in the last two elections, at least in Florida and Ohio, have been way to close for us to allow any slack in properly recording votes.