How to Reform E‑Voting

On Friday, I made the case for scrapping computerized voting. Today I'm going to look at the leading legislative proposal to accomplish that goal, Rush Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act. As I wrote in a recent article, the proposal would do several things:

It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available.

All of these seem to me to be big steps in the right direction. Requiring source code disclosure gives security experts like Ed Felten and Avi Rubin the opportunity to study e-voting systems and alert the authorities if major security problems are discovered. Banning Internet connections and wireless networking hardware closes off two major avenues hackers could use to compromise the machines. Perhaps most importantly, by requiring that machines produce paper records, that those records be the official record, and that the records be randomly audited, the legislation would provide a relatively high degree of certainty that even if a voting machine were hacked, we would be able to detect it and recover by using the paper records.

All in all, this seems like a good idea to me. But the legislation is not without its critics. I'll consider two major criticisms below the fold.

One set of objections comes from state election officials. Some officials argue that some of the legislation's requirements would be an unreasonable burden on them. I'm a strong proponent of federalism, so those concerns are worth taking seriously. But the Holt proposal appears to do a reasonably good job of respecting states' autonomy in designing their own election procedures. For example, if a state already has an auditing procedure that differs from the procedure mandated in the Holt bill, it is permitted to continue using its own procedures so long as the National Institute for Science and Technology certifies that the state's procedures will be no less effective. Other tweaks may be appropriate to avoid stepping on the toes of state election officials, but on the whole, the Holt legislation seems to me to strike a good balance between local autonomy and the need to ensure that federal elections are secure and transparent.

The most vocal critics of the legislation come from activists who feel the legislation does not go far enough. They believe that nothing less than an outright ban on computerized voting is acceptable. And they have some good arguments. They point out that the add-on printers now on the market are slow and unreliable, that technical glitches can lead to long lines that drive away voters, and that many voters don't bother looking at the paper record of their vote anyway, reducing their usefulness.

These are all good reasons to prefer old-fashioned paper ballots over e-voting machines with a printer bolted on. Fortunately, the Holt bill does not require any state to use computerized voting machines. That decision is left up to the states, and activists are free to lobby state legislatures to use only paper ballots.

The activists may be right that an outright ban on computerized voting would be a simpler and more elegant solution to the problem. It would certainly make the legislation a lot shorter, since most of the bill is designed to address the defects of computerized voting machines. However, there does not appear to be much appetite for an outright e-voting ban this Congress, and I don't think we can afford to run another election on the current crop of buggy and insecure voting machines. The Holt bill may not be perfect, but it seems like a big step in the direction of more secure and transparent elections.