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Donna Wentworth: E-voting Forensics: What They Can - And Can't - Tell Us.
Submitted by Howard2 on Thursday, November 11, 2004 - 16:45
The media are buzzing about whether the electronic voting systems used in this election really worked as "smoothly" as they appeared to work. Is it possible that some machines malfunctioned in ways that skewed results? Could problems like the 4,530 votes lost in North Carolina due to a data storage error be only the tip of the e-voting iceberg? The good news first: From what we can tell, it is unlikely that the problems with touchscreen machines changed the outcome of the presidential race. But that doesn't make it impossible, and EFF is still looking into some problems in Ohio and elsewhere that could be very important. The bad news: Let's suppose for a moment that the picture of the presidential race stays unchanged. Does this mean, as some vendors are claiming, that the machines "passed the test"? In a word, no. If the election had been closer in such key states as Florida, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, or even Ohio, the problems we saw could easily have thrown this election into chaos, and that chaos could have affected either candidate. It will take some time to analyze the information collected in the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), but regardless of what we find, the current figures show that machine malfunctions were the third most common voting problem reported. And recent reports demonstrate that not all problems were obvious. EFF is therefore moving to examine the machines that exhibit the most troubling malfunctions, with the goal of determining whether what we've seen indicates even more serious or widespread problems. Which brings us to the ugly news: There's one story about this election that we'll never know - what happened inside the machines that do not have a paper trail. It's somewhat reassuring that, in most instances at least, final exit polls and other external systems give us roughly the same picture that the election results do. But suppose that wasn't the case? This is what audit trails are for. The figures in cooked books often look perfectly fine; so would a cooked vote tally. In this election, we are forced to take it on faith that our votes were recorded in the way that we intended. But as the late former President Ronald Reagan noted long ago, when important issues are at stake, we need to both "trust" and "verify." That's why the battle continues to persuade election officials nationwide to adopt systems that are 1.) verified by the voter, and 2.) can be audited after the fact. To learn more about the e-voting problems that have been reported so far and EFF's concerns, check out the links below, including the audio recording of the joint EFF and Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) press tele-conference held on Election Day. CLICK HERE or the original version of this article online. They Said/We Said: EFF E-voting Conference on MP3. The Nation: "A Stolen Election?" Donna Wentworth The Electronic Frontier Foundation San Francisco CA
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