The Gong Show

Voting Machines

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When I voted today I voted on a Mechanical Lever voting machine (AKA a “direct recording voting system”). It was a pretty cool system.  The lever made a loud KA-CHANG as you pull it back and forth.

I interacted with a mechanical interface that provided me with no evidence that my vote was appropriately counted.  I’m fine with that. I trust my government enough to assume that the system they set up will record my vote correctly.

Both electronic voting machines and mechanical voting machines use abstractions (interface design and physics) to register and count votes.  The fact that one does so mechanically vs digitally is just an implementation detail, and one implementation is not inherently better/more-secure/more-verifiable than the other.

The only significant difference between a mechanical voting machine and an electronic voting machine is the level of complexity involved in the system.  I have reasonable confidence that if I tore apart a mechanical voting machine and tinkered with it for a week I could A) figure out how it works and B) figure out if it’s working properly. I don’t have that same confidence with an electronic voting machine because the complexity of each layer of the stack (electrical engineering layer, machine code layer, pre-processed code layer, etc) is so complicated that the complexity of the aggregated device is orders of magnitude more complicated than a mechanical voting machine.

So, I grant that electronic voting machines are scary because they are so difficult to debug, and it would probably require PhDs in EE and CS to confidently verify they are working properly, but that’s the only substantial difference I can see between electronic and mechanical voting machines, assuming both types of machines generate a paper trail.

According to VerifiedVoter.org, the mechanical lever voting machines in New York generate a paper trail. (Update: I’m not sure whether or not mechanical lever machines produce a paper trail or not… does anyone know for certain? I was originally faked out by a law in NY requiring paper trails, but I think that requirement only applies to electronic voting machines.) A paper trail is crucial.  If you have no way of auditing the output of a voting machine against another system (such as paper record) then it doesn’t matter if the voting machine is electronic or mechanical; it is fundamentally flawed. There is no way to debug a system that doesn’t generate a record of activity for auditing purposes.

Fun history facts: the type of voting machine I used today (Mechanical Lever Machine) was first invented in 1892. These machines are no longer manufactured as of the mid-nineties, and New York is the only remaining state to use them. These facts are drawn from a combination of About.com and Wikipedia, so take them with a grain of salt.

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