How to restore trust at the ballot box

Once you clear out the bureaucratic, interested, and anti-scientific smoke from the debate, it’s actually really simple to restore faith in our voting systems.

• First, states and Congress must mandate that all voting technologies be redundant — they must have paper records that can be recounted in the event of a breakdown, a malfunction, or a very close result. Either major party can and has stolen elections through fraud. And more commonly, computers break down, electricity fails, and memory cards get corrupted. Only with auditable paper records can we determine that fraud or error messed up an election.
• Second, election hardware and software code must be made available so that security experts may test it for vulnerabilities and errors. Secret code is almost always bad code. It’s a basic programmer’s rule: you need a large and diverse set of eyeballs to catch all the glitches in a pile of code. The fewer people involved, the more errors you will protect.
• Third, we should trust paper in general. Optical-scan paper ballots are by far the best medium for signaling one’s voting preferences. They are sturdy, securable, local, distributed and easy to use.
• Fourth, we should make steps to nationalize and standardize voting methods. A national non-partisan commission should issue rules that govern voting, counting, data storage, and recounts. This patchwork system in which methods vary county-by-county and state-by-state is irrational and dangerous.  
• And finally, public officials who make technology decision must have no interest in or involvement with the companies that provide voting methods, machines, and services. There are already too many questions about the propriety of partisan officials counting their own votes and ruling on important election laws (see Ohio this year). Those in charge of our elections must be above reproach and beyond conflicts of interest.

“America deserves a foolproof voting system,” Rubin writes in his new book. “Whoever designs that system must be able to prove that the system cannot be cheated and be able to explain to the average eighth grader.” The current, secret, proprietary model is not going to meet that standard.

If we do not have a rich, informed, non-partisan, publicly minded nationwide examination about how we vote and how we count our votes, we are in danger of becoming like just another shaky, storefront democracy.

So if Tuesday evening we learn that a handful of seats Republicans thought they had won go the other way amid reports of malfunctioning electronic voting machines — and there is no way to run a recount — perhaps Republicans will join the critics of electronic voting and we can move to restore trust in our balloting system.

We should not wish for chaos and controversy. But without a reason to wonder and worry we are in danger of being too complacent and letting a handful of untrustworthy companies rule our most basic public ritual: the vote.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of Culture and Communication at New York University. His latest book is The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). He blogs at Sivacracy.net.

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