Over and over, journalists ask voters about their experiences using a touchscreen voting machine, and the answer they report is a variation of, "It was easy to use." We agree that voting machines should be easy to use. But the touchscreen machines' reputation for being easy is not all that it seems.
For example, we have an eyewitness account that in at least one Pennsylvania precinct last Tuesday, poll workers stood side-by-side with voters and helped them cast their votes on the new machines. [Privacy concerns, anyone?] Another report from voting machine watchdog John Gideon, editor of the Daily Voting News, mentions that tall people often have difficulty voting on DREs because the machines are calibrated by someone much shorter.
Originally touted by their manufacturers as the panacea for disabled voters, many of the touchscreen models are not very easy to use for those with a variety of disabilities. [And why did we ever think that there would be a one-size-fits-all solution for the disabled community, when their impediments come in such a wide variety of forms? Consider, for example, the different needs of a blind voter, a deaf voter, and a quadriplegic voter. Finding solutions that allow all voters to vote privately and independently, while not easy, is definitely worth pursuing.]
Here's what should be easy: It should be easy for all eligible voters to register, cast their votes, and to have well-founded confidence that their votes were counted accurately. It should be easy for elections officials to prove that the election results they report were free from error or fraud.
And here's what should NOT be easy: compromising the security of voting machines. On Weekend Edition this morning, Linda Wertheimer had a long story about the recently divulged security flaws in the Diebold TS6 and TSX touchscreen machines, as reported by Black Box Voting and others, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Baltimore Sun. According to computer scientists, this security flaw is so egregious and makes it so easy to compromise voting machines that they won't even give us the details, for fear of giving hackers all the tools needed to crash the machines or manipulate results.
If you didn't catch the story this morning on NPR, you should download it and have a listen -- it's one of the best stories on this issue to hit the national airwaves. Don't miss the commentary by Johns Hopkins computer science professor Avi Rubin, who says that your home TiVO has better security than these Diebold touchscreen machines. Ouch!
Finally, here's something that isn't as easy as you might suppose: convincing lawmakers to pass a federal law requiring all voting machines to produce a voter verified paper ballot that is used in audits. This paper ballot is a representation of your voting choices printed on paper -- either by you or by the computer's printer -- and kept at the polling place. In an audit or in the case of a machine malfunction, the paper ballots are counted and compared to the electronic vote tallies.
Governor Richardson of New Mexico believes in this safeguard as do the majority of legislators in the 26 states which have passed such a requirement. But even though 187 House Members from both parties have signed onto a federal bill, Rush Holt's HR 550, that bill is stuck in committee. We need to pry it loose and get it passed in Congress. Not easy but surely necessary.
[May 21 update] Check out this article on Newsweek.com, "Will Your Vote Count in 2006?"
