Dust Settles on Election Results, But Not Voting System Troubles

It should come as no surprise that this month’s election activities included claims of voting machine malfunction and related investigation and litigation. In many parts of the U.S., the voting systems used this month are the same flakey systems that in the past have created controversy and legal wrangling. (I promise to define “flakey”.)

But are the new lessons learned? or is this more of the same underwhelming voting technology experience that observers have come to expect? I think that, yes, there are new lessons learned. North Carolina the source for one set of teachable remarks, shown in two statements made in the context of North Carolina’s voting machine controversy in this election.

The background is that in some parts of NC there were numerous reports of touch-screen voting machines apparently malfunctioning, swapping voter selections from what the voter intended, to selections that they hadn’t made. (Some people call this “vote flipping” but I find it to be a misleading term that doesn’t cover the extensive range of odd touch-screen behavior.) The NC RNC claimed that these glitches seemed to favor Democratic candidates over Republican candidates, and started some interesting litigation.

The first notable statement was from NC GOP chair Tom Fetzer in the context of starting the litigation:

We cannot have an election where voters in counties where the machines are used have less confidence that their votes are being accurately counted than in counties where optical scan ballots are used …

The second is form Johnnie McLean, deputy director of the State Board of Elections, at the conclusion of the litigation:

I hope this is the end of the issue. We have every confidence in the voting systems North Carolina has and I’ve seen no evidence that we should feel differently.

I really find these to be curious statements that nevertheless cast some new light on the existing decades-old touch screen systems. With respect to Mr. Fetzer, I don’t think that one kind of voting machine is inherently more reliable than another — though people may have a more confident feeling about one over the other. Both the optical scanners and the touch-screen DREs are computers running software with bugs, and it’s possible that either could be mis-counting votes. Both can and should be cross-checked in the same way with statistical audits using hand-counting of either the scanned paper ballots, or the paper record produced by the DRE.

Old news: every kind of voting machine is a computer that should not be blindly trusted to operate correctly. New news: that fact is not altered if some people think that one system is more flakey than others. With respect to Ms. McLean, people will unavoidably “feel differently” if they see touch screens mis-behaving.

Next time … “flakey” defined, and a full response to Ms. McLean.

— EJS