Voting in the Digital Age

Originally published in the summer 2008 issue of the Harvard Kennedy School Bulletin.

Once upon a time, before the 2000 presidential election, very few of us knew of the word chad, although the punch card system of voting had been in use for well over 30 years by the time Bush v. Gore came before the Supreme Court. The spectacle of Florida election workers scrutinizing ballots to determine if a chad was hanging (by one corner), swinging (by two corners), “dimpled,” or “pregnant,” (a ballot with an indentation), made an impression that few have forgotten.

Now, as the clock ticks down to another election, a drama is unfolding behind the scenes that is every bit as compelling as the race itself. At the center of it all is not the question of who but how: How will millions of votes be cast and recorded at some 198,000 polling locations across the United States? In what is forecast to be a tightly contested race, how will officials ensure that the results are trusted in the event of a recount?

David King, a lecturer in public policy, is a longtime observer of election reform issues at the local, national, and international level.

“Before the 2000 election, we had a highly decentralized voting system, with little oversight or control — and that actually fits with the character of our history,” he says. “In 1808, if you asked a person where government resided, they would have told you the county. That’s where you’d go to register births, deaths, and property transactions, and that’s still true today. In 1908, having just fought the Civil War, most citizens would say that government is in the state capital. Today people say government is in Washington; that’s where all the big budget entitlements come from like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”

As a result, King says, “a system that’s designed around the idea of having minimal government has created an accretion of multiple layers of government with huge overlaps in jurisdiction.”

That makes things complicated when it comes to administering an election. Most are run at the county level, but seven states oversee elections at the municipality level, while Michigan and Oklahoma run their elections at the state level. All of this adds up to about 7,000 election jurisdictions, each of which can have separate rules and procedures concerning the nitty-gritty details of ballot design and what sort of voting machines are used.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) has brought some common standards to this scenario. The law mandated a new federal voter registration form, guaranteed individuals the right to a provisional ballot in the event of a snafu at the polls, and stipulated that each state have one person (often the secretary of state) in charge of election administration. It funded the creation of a statewide computerized voting list and required that every polling place have at least one voting system accessible to those with disabilities. HAVA also established the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan government agency that tests and certifies voting equipment and offers officials general support and guidance in running elections.

Most significantly, HAVA provided $3.65 billion to fund technological innovation in voting machines. The punch card systems that caused so much confusion in the 2000 election and old-style lever machines were out. To replace them, many jurisdictions purchased Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems. Similar in style to an ATM machine, DREs display nominees’ names on a screen; after voters push a button or touch the screen next to their candidate of choice, their vote is recorded electronically on a memory card or hard drive. (The machines also have components that make them accessible to visually impaired voters or those without the use of their arms.)

Initially, DRE systems (currently used by about one-third of voters) seemed a solid solution to the issue of accessibility and the specter of hanging chads. In a digital age, why shouldn’t voting go electronic? (The other common system, an optical scan ballot, is printed on heavy paper so that tabulation machines can read the pen or pencil marks a voter has made; not coincidentally, the expensive paper necessary for this system to function properly is frequently provided by the same company that manufactures the machines that read the ballots. In addition, the disabled require assistance with voting, raising privacy concerns.)

Unfortunately it didn’t take long for the downside of the DRE system to appear. In April 2002, a DRE system in use for a local election in Johnson County, Kansas, miscounted hundreds of votes in six different races. Diebold, the voting machines’ manufacturer, later attributed the glitch to a software error — an issue that has cropped up in subsequent years with machines made by other companies as well. Critics point out that the machines, built on proprietary software, are as susceptible to hacking and viruses as any other computer. Some have called for a move to open source software that would make the systems transparent and allow programmers inside and outside the company to continuously debug and strengthen the code. (Opponents counter that this would also open up the machines to tampering.)

Problems also arose when poll workers were confronted with a malfunctioning machine. In numerous incidents during the 2006 mid-term elections, when workers were unable to address the problem themselves, machines either went out of commission for the day (resulting in longer waits at polling locations) or were fixed by the vendor, with their reassurances the only insurance policy that the problem would not recur and that no votes were altered in the process.

More recently, in a tightly contested 2006 congressional race in Sarasota, Florida, between Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican Vern Buchanan, results indicated that 18,000 abstained from voting in a race ultimately decided in Buchanan’s favor by 369 votes. However, hundreds of voters complained they had been stymied by a malfunctioning touch-screen interface that highlighted Buchanan when they had chosen Jennings; when they arrived at the final screen to review their picks, the Jennings-Buchanan race was missing.

The iVotronic machines in question, manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), didn’t produce a paper receipt that could be used for cross-checking purposes; as a result, the only record of votes was the computers in question. While some states have retrofitted their DRE machines with printers that create a paper audit trail, voters in all or part of 20 states currently cast ballots without backup paper verification. In April, a bill sponsored by New Jersey Democratic congressman Rush Holt that would have reimbursed states for the cost of providing voter-verified audited balloting failed to pass in the House of Representatives.

Despite the demise of the Holt Bill, King believes many states will institute audit trail provisions on their own. “The system as we know it now is opaque — that has to change,” says King. “Without an audit trail, we have no way of knowing what’s going on.”

King points to a DRE system that prints out an optical scan ballot as the current best solution to the question of voting machinery. Sold by ES&S, the Automark was introduced in 2006, when most of the money allocated by HAVA had been spent.

The reality is that many of the issues related to DRE systems and voting will not be resolved by this fall’s election — a fact that leaves election reform activists dissatisfied with the degree of improvement since 2000. Even so, King emphasizes that there is a new energy around election administration that has brought increased scrutiny and discussion to the entire process.

“People have less confidence in our voting system today than they did before 2000,” he says. “In reality, we have a much better system in place now. We’re out of the Dark Ages and able to see a little better. We had no idea how bad it was.”