Paperless E-voting Is a Threat

Opinion by Dan Gillmor

FEBRUARY 09, 2004 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) - In the electronic-voting scandal that threatens one of our most fundamental duties in a democracy voting there's a small amount

of good news but plenty of bad news. Which is why I'm going to ask IT people to do something that may seem, at first glance, overtly political.

In reality, this isn't about politics. It's about the first duty of a citizen: voting. IT people have a unique chance to help save the franchise from some know-nothing bureaucracies and greedy corporations that are threatening the foundations of democracy.

The issue is bubbling up over two basic technologies. The first is the use of touch-screen computers devices that always have bugs and can be hacked with no paper trail. This is, in a word, nuts.

Imagine if banks refused to give paper receipts for ATM transactions, or if merchants didn't print receipts for credit card purchases. The use of ATMs and credit cards would plunge, not because we'd believe our financial institutions were ripping us off, but because we'd have no way of proving that they weren't.

Yet jurisdictions across the U.S. are installing such machines for voting including, I'm embarrassed to say, the county in the heart of Silicon Valley, where officials have basically laughed off warnings that this kind of system is dangerous.

A few state officials are beginning to wake up. California will require a paper trail by 2006, but other jurisdictions prefer just to do what the vendors tell them, and that's an abdication of public responsibility.

All this is bad enough. But now the federal government is moving forward with a scheme to have expatriates and members of the military vote over the Internet using Windows computers from places such as Internet cafes.

The average IT person, having read that sentence, is surely shaking his head in disbelief at the government's folly. [It was learned on Thursday that this plan has been put on hold (see story) Ed.]

Four members of a team looking into the Internet voting idea became so alarmed at the prospect that they jumped the scheduling gun and issued an early report of their own. They are widely acknowledged as experts, and their report was scathing [QuickLink 44255].

Read the report at www.servesecurityreport.org, and then do something to help save our democracy from people who endanger it so cavalierly. Part of your job as an IT person is to recognize the inherent flaws, in people and machines, that make information technology so annoying and interesting. You know that systems have problems for human and technical reasons, and a big part of your job is to ensure that when not if you have problems, you can recover. So you make sure there are backups and true redundancy. You work hard to prevent malfeasance from within the organization or from outside.

The voting machine companies and Internet voting advocates have done an abysmal job with security. We don't have to believe someone will steal an election though people will surely try to worry that simple bugs will create wrong results.

Please call your local voting officials and member of Congress. Ask your CIO or CEO to raise hell.

You have credibility. If you don't use it, we could lose something precious. You can make a difference. I beg you to try.

Dan Gillmor is technology columnist at the San Jose Mercury News. Contact him at dgillmor@sjmercury.com.