Another election year is upon us and once again we hear about the wonders and ease of E-Voting.
Of course we always want to try to find ways to make our lives easier and anything that decreases work or actually using our brains seems to be considered advantageous to society as a whole. Yes machines are wonderful, and they really do enrich our lives if we do use them correctly and don't abuse their power.
But amazingly the more we seem to progress, the worse we seem to feel about it. I think it is mainly because the more we let machines do the work and thinking for us, the less we feel in control of our daily lives. Too often we hear that someone can't do their job because “The Computer is Down”, when all we want is change for a dollar. Too many people are too lazy to understand the why they do something and just accept things as a given, yet when an emergency arises can't function as they are just ignorant as can be wen faced with technology.
Luckily I was blessed with being born with an insatiable curiosity about how things work, and a very inquiring mindset. I studied science and economics and have seen enough behind the scenes to understand how to read between the lines. I also seem to be a bit of a cynic, yet I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.
But I regress....
The issue of using Computers to register and count votes (AKA E-Voting) has been coming up the last few elections. It is a hot topic as proponents see it as a panacea to stop all fraud and get quick and accurate counts without worrying about uncounted ballots or ballot box rigging, so they can have the results NOW and get back to their mind-numbing “reality” TV shows. Yet the opponents to E-Voting tend to look at all the negative press computers get about viruses other attacks and use that as reasons to ever trust computers.
The truth as always falls somewhere in between these two extremes.
Yes computers are wonderful tools and yes they can be made to be safe and secure, regardless of what you hear in the press, computers are safe and secure. However there are those times when security is breached, but it is usually found to be linked back to some sort of avoidable human error that can be avoided in the future with smarter humans.
The main question one should be asking is who is coding the program for these machines, and who is verifying that the programs work as they are advertised. It is very easy to make it so that the user sees one result, yet when the selection is tallied the result the machine registers is totally different. Take a simple survey on a web site for instance. How difficult do you think it would be to offer up a menu of choices, accept the user input, show the user what they chose, along with cumulative results, yet the back end database actually registers a different choice? How would one know that the cumulative results are actually what has been recorded and not just something the programmer coded in to show? It is surprisingly easy to do , and unless one is trained very hard to catch. What makes you think it isn't being done now at your favorite site now? You don't and it is impossible for you to prove.
Now just think about that and project that to a National or Local election. It can be easy to turn in a “Test Box” with the correct program that actually runs honestly and everything in it is above board. Yet when the machines are mass produced for distribution, the code is altered ever so slightly and in such a way as to fool a comparison program looking for changes. Heck the only thing that has to really change is the code in the collected database that can say, strip out every so many votes for candidate “A” and divert them to candidate “B”. Again it is way to easy to disguise this code from sloppy inspectors and you only need to alter a few key districts to manipulate the outcome. And who would know after the fact, since all the voters saw the results they were expecting pop up on the screen, yet in the back end hanky-panky was running amok.
This is how easy it is to steal an election in the computer age.
And of course we haven't even talked about outsourcing the work and how a foreign government can control the election though their own software and back doors into the systems, but that is a worry for another day.
Yet not all is doom and gloom. There are ways to control the chaos. For one, the database designers and coders should not be from the same company so there can be no collusion between the two. Collection techniques could be made so that a third company can write a program that collects what appears on the voter's screen and is recorded into a different database. Have random collection of data throughout the day at the different precincts by bonded representatives of all interested parties. They come to the polling places and check up on the Election Judges anyway (Yes I have been an Election Judge may times in the past). Right now we rely on these people to go over paper ballots and counts if there is a discrepancy so why not train them on electronic means, or get younger people in who understand the technology and retire the fuddy-duddy Luddites.
E-Voting is coming, but it doesn't have to be the end of Democracy if we do it smart and don't leave it up to the political parties to design the systems.
Chin up America, there is always hope.
Mahalo.
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