The Exponent - letters


09-27-2004	Previous edition: 09-24-2004

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Machines won't leave paper trail

Your Sept. 20 editorial ("Machines will reduce errors in voting") paints a deceptively glowing picture of direct-recording electronic voting machines. Regardless of however easy to use they may be, it is grossly irresponsible to suggest that these machines without an automatically generated paper trail are acceptable for use. Without a paper trail, there is simply no way to verify that the machines have tabulated the correct results. The dangers are not limited to the threat of an attacker tampering with the machines; without a paper trail, it is impossible to recover the votes if the machine fails. As anyone who has ever used a computer can tell you, the one thing you can count on computers to do is to fail at the worst possible moment.

Merely saying "there hasn’t been a single case of vote tampering" isn’t good enough; any electronic machine failure that affects the outcome of the election is unacceptable. There are plenty of cases where this has happened in recent elections, see http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/23.51.html#subj2.1 for several examples.

Furthermore, it’s certainly possible that there have been cases of vote tampering that simply haven’t been detected. For example, http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78 reports a backdoor in Diebold’s vote tabulating machines that allows the operator to select whatever election outcome he wants; more than 1000 of these machines are in use. Without an independently verifiable paper trail, there is no way to detect these sorts of errors and attacks.

If you believe that the machines are completely bug-free, entirely impervious to outside attack, developed by people of unimpeachable moral character, and built using hardware guaranteed never to fail, paperless electronic machines may look like a good idea. For those of us in the real world, however, such systems must be kept as far away from the voting booth as possible.

Paul Kuliniewicz
Graduate Student
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