Washblog

1 - Unconstitutional

Electronic voting and counting are invisible activities, and therefore not transparent. Washington State Constitution specifies that voting must be open, fair, and verifiable.

2 - Outsourcing Democracy Is Bad

Democracy is for the people by the people. Elections must not be privatized. This includes the use of proprietary electronic voting and counting, which vendors claim are protected as trade secrets.

3 - Lack of Confidence

No meaningful tests have been conducted on our state's electronic voting and counting equipment. Existing tests are nominal, at best. The findings from the small amounts of independent testing are alarming.

There is no way to verify that what is used on election day is in fact what was certified for use.

4 - Improperly Certified

Federal and Washington State laws and rules have not been met. Vendors have not submitted their source code to escrow. Accessibility requirements for the disabled have not been met.  Voting equipment continues to use prohibited interpreted code.

5 - Error-Prone

Electronic voting and counting do not meet the Federal HAVA requirements for an error rate of less than 1 mistake for every 500,000 votes, the equivalent of 244 votes during the 2004 presidential race. Yet, there are news accounts of 10,000s of errors. The failure rate is not even uniformly and consistently tracked. It is very doubtful, even given unlimited resources, that electronic voting could ever meet reliability requirements.

Computers fail silently. Existing cross checks are insufficient. So there's no means to determine when errors do occur.

6 - Inherently Insecure

Though any election system is vulnerable, the use of computer hardware and software compounds the security issues. Voting systems and memory cards (the new ballot box) must now be both physically and electronically secured. Anybody with access can undetectably hack an election. Machines can even be accidently infected with a virus.

7 - No Performance Audits

All electronic voting and counting systems should undergo mandatory, statistically meaningful performance audits after every election. Currently, our state only audits DREs.  Optical scanners, which count the majority of the votes, are not audited.  (Performance audits are not a substitute for comprehensive testing.)

8 - No More Paper Ballot

Even though the voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) has the legal weight of a paper ballots, it's not a functional substitute. Testing shows that voters do not (and sometimes cannot) proof the paper trail. There's no guarantee that a vote is counted as printed. During a "hand recount", only 1/4th of the VVPAT must be manually counted.

9 - Poor Judgement

The vendors of electronic voting, electronic counting, voter registration databases, and ballot printing are openly partisan. Many of the principal actors are also felons. Nationwide, vendors have openly and knowingly broken the law, including tampering with voting machines during elections and using uncertified code. Diebold alone as already settled or lost many lawsuits for breaking the law and selling bad equipment.

10 - Waste of Money

Electronic voting is very expensive with no discernible benefit. Costs include initial capital expense, ongoing contract costs, storage, security, troubleshooting, training, consulting, redundant equipment, etc.

Terms Used

Electronic voting is done with direct recording electronic (DRE) devices such as Diebold's touchscreen AccuVote TSx and Hart Intercivic's rotary optical encoder eSlate.

Electronic counting of paper ballots is done with optical  scanners such as the Diebold AccuVote OS. A central tabulator accumulates results from voting and counting machines, such as Diebold's GEMS.

Sources

Black Box Voting
Vote Trust USA
Voters Unit
Washington Citizens for Fair Elections

(Version 5, Last updated 2/22/2006)