As my handful of readers are already aware, I have taken an interest in America’s voting process. I am an Officer of Elections (the fancy way of saying volunteer) in Henrico County, Virginia, and I actually just got a “promotion”, in that I will be our precinct’s Assistant Chief in the 2008 presidential primary. Last year I mailed a copy of Avi Rubin’s Brave New Ballot to each state’s Secretary of State, with some positive responses.
I am passionately opposed to direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines without a voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). Their inherent complexity is hugely disproportionate to the task at hand, and they just plain suck at fulfilling the fundamental requirements of an objectively verifiable, meaningful election. The brief explanation for how we got these damned things goes back to the goat rodeo that was Florida’s 2000 presidential election. In 2002, by way of response, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which, among other things, provided billions of dollars for states to replace their punch card voting systems. Salivating like dingoes in a maternity ward, vendors like Diebold, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic then descended upon the states with their shiny solutions.
After the hue and cry from computer scientists like Avi Rubin and Ed Felten, numerous independent Red Team audits of these voting systems (for example), and some sobering failures in actual elections, it appears that a sea change has occurred with regard to the continued use of DREs. Florida (remember how all this started?), California, Colorado, Maryland and Ohio have enacted legislation within the last year to restrict or eliminate DREs altogether, returning to paper ballots and optical scanners. Other states (like Virginia) have opted for a phased approach, enacting legislation barring the purchase of any new DRE equipment. At this point, 40 of the 50 states either have a legal requirement for a VVPAT, or are currently considering legislation. The devil is always in the details (when he’s not hanging out at the bar I frequent), but I am highly encouraged by this turn of events.
The bad news is that states like Maryland will be spending (collectively) billions of dollars implementing replacement systems while still paying off the systems that they just scrapped. If I weren’t so cynical I might say something like, “Perhaps next time states will not turn so quickly to solutions involving expensive technologies whose development was unencumbered by standards or clear requirements, furnished by vendors who have no vested interest in the public good.”
*sigh*