The Death Knell for Electronic Voting Machines?

Though it's been more than a month since the 2103 election, the attorney general race in Virginia has only now been decided. The Republican, Mark Obenshain, has conceded to the Democrat, Mark Herring, after a recount that gave Herring a 907 vote margin.

The reason? Democratic areas use paper ballots, which provide a paper trail. Herring received more than 600 additional votes during the recount, mostly due to undervotes that the scanners did not detect originally. These undervotes usually occur when the voter doesn't fill in the oval properly, often by using an X or check mark instead of filling in the oval, circling the candidate's name, or when the ballot is wrinkled, dirty or smudged. Voter intent in these cases is easily discerned by a human reader when the machine isn't programmed to recognize non-standard marks.

Republican areas in Virginia tend to use electronic voting machines, which provide no paper trail at all. That means that there's nothing to recount, and Obenshain got almost no additional votes during the recount. Electronic ballots simply cannot be verified.

Electronic voting was heavily pushed by Republicans in the early 2000s, frequently at the behest of companies that sell electronic voting machines. It is entirely possible that George Bush won the 2004 election due to irregularities in the electronic voting machines in Ohio.

As a programmer I've always been opposed to electronic voting: it's impossible to verify a voter's intent after the ballot has been cast. User interfaces can be confusing, especially for elderly and low-vision voters. Users frequently claim that the wrong candidate was selected (still happening in 2008 and even in Virginia in 2013). Whether this is user or system error doesn't really matter. Sometimes users are unable to change their vote.

It's impossible to detect fraud with proprietary electronic systems since there is no physical paper trail. Some systems provide a "feel good" paper record to the voter: this has nothing to do with what actually gets counted. Finally, just because a user makes a selection on a screen or gets a printed slip of paper doesn't mean that selection was recorded in the computer's memory: the user cannot verify their selection was registered properly.

Paper ballots have their problems, but voters can just look at their ballot and see that their vote was registered as intended. Ultimately, humans will be able to perform a manual recount, even if the optical scanners are buggy or intentionally producing fraudulent totals.

The interesting thing about this is that Mark Obenshain knew electronic voting machines were a problem, as stated on his website:

In 2000, a member of my own party, President George W. Bush was elected by a razor-thin margin in Florida, an election ultimately confirmed by multiple recounts but certified by the Supreme Court amidst significant controversy. Subsequent elections have been similarly contentious, with partisans on both sides expressing concern about the integrity of our election process, raising concerns about registration fraud, voter fraud, and reliance on electronic voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail [emphasis added].

and

Here in Virginia, we’ve taken voter confidence seriously. We’re phasing out electronic balloting in favor of voting methods that include a paper trail, we’ve worked to create greater uniformity in election deadlines and to streamline overseas absentee balloting, and now we’re addressing legitimate concerns about the lack of safeguards at the polls themselves.

Since the early 2000s Republicans have been making it more difficult for minority, student and elderly citizens to register to vote through onerous ID requirements, all in the name of reducing "fraud." At the same time, they've been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on overpriced electronic voting systems that were technologically obsolete even before they were installed. Worse, these proprietary systems make it possible to commit completely undetectable fraud on a massive scale.

Maybe now that these electronic chickens are coming home to roost they'll see the error of their ways.