Electronic voting enhances elections but adds risks

In recent years, technological advances have encouraged states, cities and municipalities nationwide to experiment with electronic voting machines as a way to increase poll participation, speed up counting, reduce costs and enhance the accuracy of results.

Although electronic voting presents significant problems — from equipment failure to insufficient transparency — "more is explained by incompetence than by conspiracy theories or malfeasance," California Secretary of State Debra Bowen said in her keynote speech at the fifth annual research review of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing.

Held at the Tom Bradley International Center on Oct. 10, the all-day event featured the highlights of a wide range of multidisciplinary information-technology research under way at the center, one of the nation's leading science and technology institutes established in 2002 by a contract worth $40 million over 10 years by the National Science Foundation.

Over the roughly nine months that Bowen has been secretary of state, she has overseen a wide-ranging review of electronic voting systems as California's chief elections officer. While the integrity of these systems is just about everybody's concern, "there have been lots of theories and accusations but not too many studies or facts," said Bowen, who is responsible for overseeing state and federal elections.

The review was done under a contract that the state government has with UC. Other researchers from the private sector, as well as Rice, Pennsylvania, Princeton and other universities, also participated in the state review. One of the review's major aims was to examine the voting system's vulnerabilities, in addition to making the machines more user-friendly for handicapped voters. The results "surprised even the vendors," Bowen said, who learned about the nature of the problems with their equipment. (See the report at the Secretary of State's Web site.

Bowen said she decertified and then recertified each of the voting systems to facilitate a new physical and hardware security plan provided by vendors and counties using the equipment. (Unlike paper ballots, electronic votes can be manipulated, and the responsibility for preventing fraud lies largely in the hands of companies that supply electronic voting machines.)

Bowen has also instituted a new method of doing a post-election audit, which she said is a critical issue: "It is impossible to review any piece of complicated software sufficiently well so that every single bug or problem or malware can be found before balloting."

Over the past four years, the state government has required the manual auditing of 1% of all the election precincts, but, said Bowen, "we have no rules for an escalation of audit procedures if we discover discrepancies or have a very close election," where five or six votes could determine who wins and loses.

Enhanced post-election audit procedures will be implemented in 2008, Bowen said, adding that her office needs to do a lot more work with the academic community on auditing.

"One of the great challenges of using computers in elections is that we sacrifice transparency automatically when we put a computer in the mix," said Bowen, who trained as a lawyer and is a self-confessed computer geek. But large states like California have such a "complex soup of governmental entities that if you are going to hand-count ballots, you would find yourself having quite a time just figuring out how to do the processing," Bowen said.

A typical precinct in Los Angeles County, for example, may have well more than 100 contests — from presidential to local elections, as well as the usual list of ballot initiatives.

"That adds greatly to the complexity, and it's the kind of place where computers are well-suited," Bowen said, adding: "Even having it done by computer, errors are made."

That conclusion wasn't based on Bowen's professional experience alone. "I received a phone call last April from someone who asked me why I had chosen to quit running for secretary of state and run instead for controller," she said. It turned out that a county election official had made a mistake in a draft ballot: Bowen had been listed in the wrong race. "Fortunately, we were able to correct the error before the ballots went in the mail and before people went to the polling places," Bowen said.