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September 30, 2008

The many problems with the November 2000 elections in Florida are still fresh in most people memories. Earlier designs of electronic and so-called online voting machines left a lot to be desired in terms of security, fairness and well, overall design. But now, times have changed. The technology today is more wide-spread and generally more accepted as it gets better and better.

The State of California's secretary of state, Debra Bowen, now believes that open-source software should be used in elections involving electronic voting machines, to protect against error and fraud.

On Sep. 25, speaking in Cambridge, MA, during a panel discussion at the EmTech organized by Technology Review, Bowen noted that individual counties are currently responsible for purchasing voting machines. Often the choice is left up to an IT professional who may lack detailed knowledge of cryptography and computer security.

However, according to Bowen, today's biggest concern is a lack of access to the machines' underlying software code. "Often times, a person has no legal right to review the software, even if they could," she said.

In the past, Bowen has a history of pushing for greater transparency and accountability in election technology. After taking office in November 2006, she commissioned a top-to-bottom review of California's e-voting systems, including detailed analyses of source code, documentation, security, and usability.

Bowen said "with no exceptions, all of the systems had serious security issues."

When asked about future elections, Bowen said the one technology she'd like to see integrated into voting systems in the next coming years is open-source software for creating ballots and tabulating votes. Both tasks are immensely complicated, she added, a lot more than what most people think.

So it goes without saying that they all need to be closely and very carefully monitored. For example, Los Angeles County alone may use 330 different ballots for a single election, simply because dozens of local races may be going on in different neighborhoods.

Another important problem that was detected with early deployments of touch-screen voting machines was that voters were presented with ballots that didn't show all the races that applied to them.

In the U.S., so-called eVoting companies are working to address these problems, but Bowen is still very frustrated that all the software running on today's commercial voting machines is proprietary.

Another significant problem is tabulating votes. During most elections, votes arrive through a variety of channels, via mail as well as polling stations, and must be tabulated quickly and accurately. But there is little regulation or oversight of the way existing software does this.

"A lot of the concern comes out of the fact that no one can look at the software," Bowen says. She notes that voting-machine analysis often has to be performed under a nondisclosure agreement, meaning that the details of some flaws remain undisclosed, and probably will stay that way until there are many complaints and that someone finally does something about it.

Compounding the problem even further, today there exists various methods that technology can complicate the election system and create additional issues. For example, one of Bowen's biggest worries about this year's presidential election isn't the voting machines being used themselves, but rather the databases in which voter registration information will be stored in November.

A number of U.S. states recently introduced a specific requirement that names on drivers' licenses and voter registration records match exactly as they are written on the license certificate. Bowen says this could unfairly disqualify some voters, because the software used to compare records often cannot account for the usual typos in some people's first or last names.

For example, a computer may not recognize that "OM'alley" is a typo of "O'Malley." In 2006, Bowen says, exact match requirements prevented more than 20 percent of Los Angeles County voters from being properly placed on voter registration lists, and this is unacceptable today.

Under Bowen's watch, the City of San Francisco will experiment with new software in November. It's one of the few areas already using instant-runoff voting, a system that lets voters rank candidates in order of preference instead of choosing just one.

Overall, the rankings data can be used to determine if a candidate is a winner if no other candidate receives a majority of the vote.

Source: IT Direction.

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