If Paper Ballots Restore Trust In Elections, Let's Switch

By Marc Fisher
Thursday, September 21, 2006

Well into the second decade of the television era, the machines still conked out, a lot. "TV's on the fritz again," folks would say. There was such a thing as a TV repairman, who would come to your house. Now, TVs work.

Here in the relatively early stages of the computer era, these vastly more complex machines still lock up and shut down. Yet we're so enraptured by computers' power that we want them to do everything -- even handle the sacred core of our democracy, voting.

But the machines aren't yet reliable, at least not 100 percent. Maryland voters learned this firsthand in last week's primary, and now the state has less than seven weeks to gin up a credible, smooth general election.

The obvious solution, as Gov. Bob Ehrlich said yesterday, is to put the machines in the closet (actually, returning them to the store is an even better idea; does anybody in Annapolis still have that receipt for $106 million?) and go back to paper ballots. The governor bemoaned flaws in the Diebold electronic poll books that Maryland used for the first time last week to check in voters: "Technology is a wonderful thing, but clearly, given their apparent inability to function appropriately -- when in doubt, go paper, go lower technology."

But going back to technology that works means giving up on cutting-edge modernity, admitting error and angering a giant corporation that has been pushing states across the country to go electronic. This will not be easy. Ehrlich said he may even call a special session of the legislature to rework the law requiring Maryland to use electronics rather than paper.

I asked the state's elections administrator, Linda Lamone, whether Maryland wasn't just a bit too quick to adopt electronic voting. Doesn't the computer at your desk ever freeze up on you?

"No," she replied.

Never?

"No."

But surely people in your office have had that experience?

"No."

(Maybe we've found the solution to Maryland's voting problem: Everybody head on down to Linda Lamone's office, where the machines work 100 percent of the time.)

Does this sound like a woman who is open to solving the problem or more like someone beholden to a $106 million contract with Diebold, the machines' Ohio-based manufacturer?

"My role is to run an election with the equipment I have," Lamone said.

Here's the question no one seems able to answer: What, exactly, was so awful about the old, paper-based voting system?

Diebold's marketing guy, Mark Radke, said last week's mess was not the fault of the machines; it's the people running them who cause problems. Seems some of the volunteer poll workers who make Election Day possible "were plugging the poll books into the wall" instead of into a computer hub. Radke thought this was the height of humor.

What Diebold and the politicians who brought us electronic voting don't get is that elections are an inappropriate forum in which to test new technology. Voting is about trust; the goal is to use the least-complicated technology so it is transparent and accessible to all.

At this point, tech-savvy readers will grumble that I'm an unreconstructed Luddite. But I'm in learned company. As Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Avi Rubin puts it, "Computer scientists are pretty unanimous in our opposition" to electronic voting.

"I am the anti-Luddite," said Rubin, an expert on electronic voting who opposes Maryland's system. "I have more gizmos and gadgets than anyone you've probably ever met. But part of technology is having unexpected results. A system like this voting software has millions of lines of code. The technology obfuscates the voting experience for average people. The answer is to move back to a paper-based system."

When I asked Lamone if it's possible to revert to paper by November's election, she stared at me: "Are you crazy?" she said.

Crazy or not, if that's what it takes to restore trust, that's what has to happen. People trust paper ballots because they're real. You can hold them in your hand and count them again if you need to. This isn't about resisting change; it's about rejecting change that enriches one company at the expense of public confidence.

Diebold's contract requires the company to hold six training sessions statewide for poll workers. Never mind that Diebold's project manager, Tom Feehan, told me it would take four hours to train a computer moron like me to run the voter sign-in machine. Diebold held those six sessions. "We fulfilled our obligations," Feehan said. How's that for public service?

As usual, Comptroller William Donald Schaefer cut through the excuses: "Everything's been whitewashed pretty good." Then he wondered about the results of this messy election: "Maybe I didn't lose after all."

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