Why We Fear the Digital Ballot
By TOM ZELLER Jr. New York Times Published: September 26, 2004

WASHINGTON — It was a bit of gorilla theater.

At an event meant to highlight the dangers of electronic voting, a smattering of reporters and voting-rights advocates at the National Press Club last Wednesday watched a film of Baxter, a chimpanzee, poking the "Delete" and "Enter" keys on a computer keyboard. This was presented as evidence that even a chimp could tweak an election.

Breathless accounts of "secret back doors" and "hidden triggers" embedded in election-tabulating software were cited as indications that democracy was endangered. A man protesting computerized voting marked the 15th day of his hunger strike.

In fact, while most experts appear to agree that electronic voting has real problems, few argue that they could completely undermine the November election, or that they are products of a dark conspiracy. "The people who designed these systems just weren't thinking enough about security," said Aviel Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and one of the first people to point out major flaws in electronic voting systems.

But the burlesque and passion on display last week may indicate a simpler truth: Voting has always required a leap of faith - one that, after the 2000 election debacle, and in a culture grown hip to the fallibility of technology, is proving harder to make.

For over a century, as election technology moved from the tactile (paper, ballot boxes) toward the invisible (the hidden workings of lever machines, optical scanners, touch screens), each upgrade was touted as a bulwark against manipulation or human error.

"A device for registering votes without possibility of fraud has been patented by Albert Snoeck, a Belgian inventor," The New York Times reported on Aug. 20, 1896. "It is called the Perfected Voting Machine."

While Mr. Snoeck's particular innovation didn't quite catch on, New York State did introduce mechanical lever machines at the end of the 19th century. By the 1930's most major cities had followed suit, according to Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Voting Technology Project, which studies election systems. One of the machine's best security features: its size. "You couldn't just walk away with it," Professor Ansolabehere said.

But rumors of tampering swirled around mechanical voting through much of the early- to mid-20th century, and by the 1960's, mechanical devices were yielding to the magic of I.B.M.'s computerized systems.

"Could a skilled technician set a vote counting computer to switch a candidate tally ... ?" another New York Times article asked in 1969. "Recently, six local computer experts, after pitting a computer against a set of tests they devised, declared it was possible to rig the machines to cheat." I.B.M. countered that "a crooked technician couldn't get close enough" to the computers "without attracting the attention of others."

Despite such debates, the culture quietly absorbed the new technology, as it did optical-scan voting in the late 1970's, push-button electronic voting in the 1980's and touch screens in the 1990's. In the context of a culture flooded with compact discs, DVD's, personal computers, the Internet and MP3's, digitized voting made sense.

And after the election breakdown of 2000, the solution, to many, was plain: electronic voting machines. "In the immediate post-2000 era, enthusiasm for the machines was pretty high," said Doug Chapin, the director of Electionline.org, a nonprofit group monitoring election reform.

But the 2000 election also occurred just as the dot-com bubble was bursting, and as words like "hacker," "virus," "worm" and "pirate" were becoming commonplace. If everyone needed anti-virus protection, spam filters, 128-bit encryption and firewalls, even the most ardent technophiles had to wonder, could electronic voting machines be hacked? Infected? Hijacked?

Many voting-rights advocates are now demanding a return to paper ballots, as a means of restoring transparency to the voting process. Others insist that the major manufacturers of electronic voting systems, like Diebold and Sequoia and Election Systems and Software, release their source code to the world for inspection.

The fear that electronic voting represents a corporate conspiracy is probably overblown, experts say. Too many people would have to cooperate on too many levels - from the programming labs at each company to the warehouses where machines are stored to precinct floors on election night. "It would be a heist on the order of 'Ocean's Eleven,' " said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who spent 20 years testing the integrity of election systems. "It would make for a fascinating movie, but it's not reality."

But that's no longer likely to satisfy everyone. Even some middle-of-the-road voters, whether they submit punch cards or poke an electronic screen, will pause to wonder what's going on under the hood of their voting system.

"Even in places that don't have new technology, the voters are different now," Mr. Chapin of Electionline said. "They've been exposed to the process. They're thinking about it more. Even in those places where the only upgraded moving part is the voter, there's still change."