Democrash Electronic voting is a good idea - just not yet Justin Hartfield
Through breakthroughs in technology, many powerful tools have been developed to improve our quality of life. Advancement of the microchip specifically have resulted in an increase in human communication, more efficient ways to fulfill job requirements, and the ability to automatize perviously painstaking tasks. For the most part this automation is beneficial, as it allows people to get less caught up in the details and more focused on ideas. Some tasks, however, while ofttimes grueling and meticulous, are better performed manually.
Voting is a perfect example. It all comes down to using the right tool for the job at hand. Using a computer to determine the candidate or proposition you want to vote for is like using a shotgun to kill a fly. The tried and battle worn fly swatter works just fine (and without the added complexities of using a firearm). Technology is great at solving complicated problems, but on elementary tasks like, choosing your particular candidate, it's overkill. If the problem is simple, so should be the solution. I mean its worked for the previous 200+ years, so why do we have to fix it now?
If you compare voting methods by ease of use, speed of implementation, and cost there is only one true winner: old fashioned paper. Paper doesn't crash. Paper does not need maintenance, reboots, or electricity. Paper can be used by the elderly or computer illiterate without training. Paper is everything that a computer isn't - namely simplicity. But the most convincing argument surrounding paper is that, unlike a computer, it cannot be hacked.
A troubling aspect of the computer based voting systems is its susceptibility to hackers. Covertly, hackers could alter the results of an election without the public ever realizing there was a fix. What would be more crippling to the American government? A terrorist attack on another aircraft or terrorist hackers who discreetly stuff virtual ballots to throw the outcome of a national election?
Every computer is susceptible to tampering. Computers, by their present day definition, are quite literally potential errors. Errors, in the hands and minds of experienced computer scientists, can be exploited.
Maryland is currently grappling with their own electronic poling machine problems. The Washington Post reported, "A week after the primary election was plagued by human error and technical glitches, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) called yesterday for the state to scrap its $106 million electronic voting apparatus and revert to a paper ballot system for the November election."
"'When in doubt, go paper, go low-tech,' he said."
Rather than admit failure and start correcting the problem immediately, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. said, "We paid millions. These are state-of-the-art machines,...(it) cannot happen. It will not happen."
I always find it amusing that people who use the phrase "state-of-the-art" often have no idea what the actual state of the art is. If it were really 'state-of-the-art" then voting stations would be the new 24" iMacs or a dual core Pentium running Ubuntu. But going back to the paper ballot would imply that a mistake occurred when they were initially ordered, and since the government seems incapable of admitting error, they'd rather continue with a new system which they know is faulty in order to save themselves public embarrassment.
Their seemingly irrational behavior is not without justification. I understand the clamor which occurred in the 2000 Presidential election scandal in Florida. What came out of the chaos, besides the increased awareness of the "chad," was the need to reform our voting system. Technology, the Powers reasoned, was the obvious solution. We've been using paper since the conception of the US, surely it was time to upgrade this most important civic duty?
So millions of dollars were spent, two top US technology companies - Unisys and Microsoft - were commissioned to provide the systems. They work well. But they suffer from the same problems which plague most computers: fallibility.
Computer technology, as a science, is still in its infancy. Far more is known about the automobile, for example, than the computer. Since the personal computer has only been in existence for thirty years, our experiences are limited simply due to lack of historical perspective. So computers of today are equivalent to the cars which were made in the 1930s; they were able to deliver you from point A to point B, but in terms of reliability there was more to be desired. There are shockingly few best practice guides on the market for designing bug-free software, because there just has not been enough time elapsed to accurately study the effects of poorly written software on a large-scale. So it is for all these reasons to believe that problems will occur. Indeed, they will occur for a long time before we should expect software to execute to perfection, even though we are asking it to perform to such a level now.
So, at best, computer voting machines are prone to the same amount of human error and corruption as paper. But the cost is astronomical- $106 million dollars in Maryland alone. Wasted money which would be better served on problems which we have yet to solved or reforming process which already work.
It's time to realize that the decision to modernize our polling stations was a hasty one. The technology simple isn't there yet. Instead of redoing the entire system that worked well in the vast majority of cases, let's just reform it until the technology is ready. We can devise a simple machine that would check ballots before submission, ensuring the holes were punched properly and none of those infamous chads were hanging.
Ask for a paper ballot this election year to show your support for the paper cause. Let's keep voting old school - for now.
