Voting System (De)certification – Another Example of the Broken Market (1 of 2)

Long-time readers will certainly recall our view that the market for U.S. voting systems is fundamentally broken. Recent news provides another illustration of the downward spiral: the likely de-certification of a widely used voting system product from the vendor that owns almost three quarters of the U.S. market.

The current stage of the story is that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission is formally investigating the product for serious flaws that led to errors of the kind seen in several places in 2010, and perhaps best documented in Cuyahoga County. (See:  “EAC Initiates Formal Investigation into ES&S Unity 3.2.0.0 Voting System”.) The likely end result is the product being de-certified, rendering it no longer legal for use in many states where it is currently deployed. Is this a problem for the vendor? Not really. The successor version of the product is due to emerge from a lengthy testing and certification process fairly soon. Having the current product banned is actually a great tool for migrating customers to the latest product!

But at what cost to who? The vendor will charge the customers (local election officials, or LEOs) for the new product, the same as would have been if the migration were voluntary and the old product version still legal. The LEOs will have to sign and pay for a multi-year service agreement. And they will have the same indirect costs of staff efforts (at the expense of other duties like running elections, or getting enough sleep to run an election correctly), and direct costs for shipping, transportation, storage, etc. These are real costs! (Example: I’ve heard reports of some under-funded election officials opting to not use election equipment that they already have, because they have no funding for the expense of taking out of the warehouse to testing facility, and doing the required pre-election testing.)

Some observers have opined that vendors of flawed voting system products should pay: whether damages, or fines, or doing the migration gratis, or something. But consider this deeper question, from UCB and Princeton’s Joe Hall:

Can this market support a regulatory/business model where vendors can’t charge for upgrades and have to absorb costs due to flaws that testing and certification didn’t find? (And every software product, period, has them).

The funding for a high level of quality assurance has to come from somewhere, and that’s not voting system customers right now. Perhaps we’re getting to the point where the amount of effort it takes to produce a robust voting system and get it certified — at the vendor’s expense — creates a cost that customers are not willing or able to pay when the product gets to market.

A good question! and one that illustrates the continuing downward spiral of this broken market. The cost to to vendors of certification is large, and you can’t really blame a vendor for the sort of overly rapid development, marketing, and sales that leads to the problems being investigated. The folks are in this business to make a profit for heavens’ sake, what else could we expect?

— EJS

PS – Part Two, coming soon: a way out of the spiral.