How to restore trust at the ballot box

By late Tuesday night we might find that we voted for a shift in the Washington power base, with some congressional races decided by margins of fewer than 5,000 votes.

In a congressional race decided by so few votes, a bad, erased, or corrupted memory card in one electronic voting machine can change the result of an election.

And that's what's behind a dangerous trend in the American electorate: Voters are losing faith that their ballots will actually count.

When so many elections are decided by so few votes, we should feel more empowered as voters, not less.

So why, as the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported in October, do 12 percent of all voters and 29 percent of black voters not believe that their votes will be tallied accurately?

Think about this: more than one in 10 voters think they have thrown away their votes! That’s more than 8 million voters who don’t believe in what they are doing. Will they continue to vote as election machine debacles continue to proliferate?

The problem with our pallid national debate about voting technology has been driven by conspiracy theorists and framed as an excuse for Democrats losing elections. As a result, Republicans and independents who care a great deal about the integrity of American democracy have been driven away from the debate.

This should not be a matter of Democrats versus Republicans. The problem is that election bureaucrats — both Democrats and Republicans — put too much faith in the vendors who build and maintain the machines and too much faith in the technology itself.

So what’s actually happening here is a clash between science and bureaucracy. State and county officials want to get their contracts out and their vote tallies in as fast and as cleanly as possible. They favor the illusion of precision over the necessity of accuracy and fidelity. They don't want to hear or consider bad news.

It’s also a struggle between private contractors and the public interest. Electronic voting vendors capitalize on American faith and fascination with all things flashy and new. As a result, scientific critics of electronic voting and fans of good-old-fashioned paper get dismissed as Luddites or fear mongers.

The erosion of faith in the electoral system started in the 2000 election with the aborted Florida recount and the realization that thousands of voters had mistakenly voted for Patrick Buchanan rather than their first choice, Al Gore. That technological glitch alone cost Gore the White House.

While that was a rather low-tech problem, it unfortunately yielded an expensive and foolish high-tech solution. Congress passed a law and funded transition to electronic voting around the country. It did so without mandating simple and obvious standards to ensure that votes would be secure. The simplest of these would have been to mandate a printed paper record of each vote so that controversial or wacky results could be verified later.

In the interest of expediency, and at the expense of democracy, Congress, led as usual by the voting machine lobbyists, rushed headlong into a techno-fundamentalist fog. States and counties soon followed.

Then, in 2002, Georgia reported surprising upsets in both its gubernatorial and Senate races, in which Democratic incumbents who had led in the polls found themselves out of jobs. Coincidentally, in 2002 Georgia (Democrats, it so happens) introduced new and untested electronic voting machines that prevented manual recounts or independent oversight of the software.

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