Electronic Voting Follies Continue

September 13, 2008

By Rob Pegoraro
September 12, 2008

The District of Columbia has witnessed yet another triumph of electronic voting this week, when a computer malfunction inflated records of write-in votes in the city's Tuesday primary elections by insane amounts: D.C. election officials blamed a defective computer memory cartridge yesterday for producing what appeared to be thousands of write-in votes that officials say did not exist.... For example, in the Republican at-large race, 1,560 write-ins at 9:50 p.m. dwindled to 18 by 12:16 a.m. The problem also added thousands of votes to individual candidates, inflating vote totals. At 9:50 p.m. 8,246 ballots were recorded cast in the at-large Republican primary, but that shrank to 3,735 by 12:16 a.m.
Hmm. This time around, the malfunction was caught and corrected. But how it happened remains something of a mystery. The firm that supplied D.C.'s voting machines, Sequoia Voting Systems, says that its database and software functioned just fine, so something else must have gone wrong:

Instead, the company pointed to possible static discharge or other scenarios, including the possibility of human error.

Could be. But that's what concerns me. A voting system should not be susceptible to math errors this large because of minor goofs like, say, somebody dragging their feet on the carpet and picking up too much static that zaps a memory card when they pick it up.

To recycle a concept I've used before, the problem isn't that electronic voting systems can fail--it's that they can fail badly.The efficiency of computers can make any mistake widespread and, at worst, undetectable--Florida voters can only guess if an e-voting malfunction might explain why 18,000 people had no votes recorded in a 2006 congressional election who did cast votes in other races.

Ohio voters were luckier--local election officials noticed a bug that would have lost votes in the March primary vote.

Fortunately, the e-voting fad seems to have passed, as states move to scrap their electronic voting systems and return to paper-based systems that provide a final record that can't be instantly modified or erased by a programming error. But it will take years to retire all the e-voting machines states and counties have purchased at vast expense. I, for instance, will apparently be using the same "WinVote" terminals this year that I've used since 2004.

How about you? Do you have any anxiety about your vote getting lost--or, perhaps more realistically, the system acting like any other computer and crashing in some unexpected manner, causing you to wait even longer to cast your ballot?

Source: The Washington Post