NYT: Searching for a Reliable Voting System - letters to the editor on e-voting:

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Searching for a Reliable Voting System
June 27, 2009
To the Editor:



Re “How to Trust Electronic Voting” (editorial, June 22):

Although I’m a strong advocate of the need for paper audit trails as part of our voting process, I’m disappointed to see your editorial touting optical scan machines as the preferred way to achieve this goal.

People who are not familiar with optical scan machines may not know that ballots used in these machines must be printed in advance for each election, in sufficient numbers that there would be a ballot available for every eligible voter. The cost of these ballots, printed at taxpayer expense, for use in one recent local election with which I’m familiar was 26 cents per ballot.

When was the last time voter turnout even approached 100 percent? So the vast majority of those expensive, preprinted ballots end up being either thrown away or sent to the recycling bin. There has simply got to be a less costly, less wasteful system.

John C. Smith
Vienna, Va., June 22, 2009

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To the Editor:

Your editorial is right to insist upon the need for a paper trail; but a paper trail alone is not sufficient to gain my trust in electronic voting systems.

As Harri Hursti and Dr. Herbert Thompson have repeatedly demonstrated, there exist significant security vulnerabilities in the optical scanning machines manufactured by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) still in use throughout the country today. These vulnerabilities make stealing an election quite simple.

In addition to eliminating paperless voting systems, we must require manufacturers to disclose all information concerning their voting machines. This transparency will allow for independent review and verification, which can resolve issues ahead of the election.

Furthermore, a verification process must be in place on Election Day. This process would involve hand-counting a percentage of ballots for comparison with the electronic totals and triggering an automatic hand recount if significant discrepancies arise.

Daniel Cannon
Albuquerque, June 22, 2009

The writer is a computer science student at the University of New Mexico.

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To the Editor:

Electronic voting cannot be trusted, period. A machine can print a document showing how the voter voted while recording, internally, a different result.

The printed document is worthless because it is unlikely that that ballot would be counted by hand. The party in power in the state is the one that would decide in which precincts to do the manual count, and it would rig that count, according to demographics, to serve the party needs.

Yes, the best system is voting by hand on paper, but only if the votes are counted by hand. Otherwise, it’s all a wasted effort.

James Steeves
Albuquerque, June 22, 2009

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To the Editor:

In your editorial you write, “By 2014, machines that produce paper trails would have to be replaced by ones in which voters directly record their votes on paper.”

Mechanical voting machines replaced paper balloting decades ago when it was discovered that paper ballots were easily tampered with. And stocking polling places with pencils and ballots could cause more problems than they solve.

This last election, I voted at a New York City location on the same type of noncomputerized machine I have voted on for more than 40 years, and despite the long lines there were no problems.

There is no need to change to a digital voting system, which you admit will soon become obsolete, wasting scarce government funds. Retaining mechanical voting machines makes more sense and in both the long and short run is more economical.

Henry Finkelstein
Brooklyn, June 22, 2009

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To the Editor:

Thank you for your editorial supporting the use of paper ballots. I’d like to call your attention to the discovery by the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project that even in Humboldt County, California, where paper ballots are in use, the Diebold GEMS system dropped an entire batch of 197 ballots from its final results in the November 2008 election, leaving no evidence in its “audit” trail.

The discovery was made by the Transparency Project, a volunteer group of which I am a member, using my ballot-counting software.

California’s secretary of state, Debra Bowen, conducted an investigation and discovered many flaws in GEMS, leading her to decertify the version of GEMS then used in Humboldt County.

It is vital that America return to paper ballots. It is equally vital that these ballots be made available for independent counting, whether by hand or by computer-assisted projects like the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project. No democracy can function when its election results are suspect.

Mitch Trachtenberg
Trinidad, Calif., June 23, 2009

[Stevepol]

1. Excellent reply to the Ed. Thanks for the post WillYourVote. K&R!!