The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines
Bruce Schneier’s new essay, “The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines,” is an excellent introduction to the problems with Direct Record Electronic voting machines, which include both the famous Diebold touchscreens and Harris County’s eSlate button-based system. I would recommend this essay to anyone who wonders why there is so much concern about these systems (”if there’s no hanging chads, what’s the problem?”).
Schneier begins with the goals of a voting system, accuracy, anonymity, scalability, and speed, and from there covers the connection between simplicity and accuracy, the effect of error distribution on the accuracy of the final tally, anecdotes about the sort of problems that have occurred with DRE machines, and the “it works for ATMs, why not for voting?” argument. Finally, he explains the two things that need to happen to make the systems trustworthy: a paper record verified by the voter at the time the vote is cast and open review of the voting machine source code.