As the 2004 presidential election approaches, computer science professor David Dill isn’t worried that a debacle like the Florida recount will recur. He’s afraid the votes will simply disappear.
Dill is concerned about electronic voting machines that lack paper ballots. He compares the machines to a man behind the curtain who takes your vote and says he wrote it down correctly but shows you no proof.
“There’s not a little guy in the computer, but there are lots of people involved in programming the software, handling the software, installing the software, distributing the software, and those people are no more trustworthy than the random guy behind the curtain,” he says. Nor, he adds, are they immune from making accidental errors.
Dill never intended to become a political advocate. He merely cared about what happened to his vote. He read news accounts of electronic voting and was struck by one conspicuous absence: any way to check a vote after it was cast. Though—or perhaps because—Dill is a computer science professor, he doesn’t trust computers, at least not implicitly.
“It seems the people manufacturing and selling [electronic voting] equipment haven’t really developed appropriate levels of respect for how difficult the problem is that they think they’ve solved,” he says. Because voting is anonymous, he explains, voting machines cannot keep records of who cast what vote in the same way electronic banking systems keep audit records. So other methods, like paper printouts, are necessary to create a permanent, unalterable account.
Dill wrote a resolution that 5,500 computer scientists, voting experts and citizens worldwide signed, asking for voter-verifiable audit trails—paper records of all votes cast. These could be checked by voters before leaving the polls, and manually recounted later if necessary.
“This is the most important technology we will ever use, and we need to know it is accurate and secure,” says Jennifer Granick, executive director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. The center represents two Swarthmore College students who posted online 15,000 internal documents discussing flaws in the software and network of Diebold Election Systems, the country’s largest manufacturer of electronic voting machines. Diebold had threatened to sue the students, who are asking for a ruling that their posting falls under the fair use doctrine of copyright law. “This is a free speech issue that affects everyone who votes or is affected by who is elected,” Granick says.
Dill, too, has encountered opposition in his efforts to ensure that voting systems are secure and reliable. “I really thought once I got the computer security experts and the electronic voting experts to all get together and say, ‘This is a big problem,’ then everyone would see the obvious truth of what they were saying. But not everybody believes experts, first of all. And there are various people who have other agendas, too, a little more political than I would have hoped.”
Still, he is making progress. Last year, California became the first state to require paper audit trails on all machines, though not until 2006. And Congress is considering a bill that would institute such a requirement before the election this fall. “I think it’s gone from kind of a nonissue to a real national debate, which is exactly what it needs,” Dill says. “I’m pushing as hard as I can to make sure that the problem is solved before [November] 2004.”
-MICHAEL MILLER, ’06
