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ACCIDENTAL ADVOCATE: Dill’s
resolution garnered 5,500 signatures.
Linda Cicero |
As the 2004 presidential election
approaches, computer science professor David
Dill isn’t worried that a debacle like the Florida
recount will recur. He’s afraid the votes will
simply disappear.
Dill is concerned about electronic voting machines
that lack paper ballots. He compares the machines to
a man behind the curtain who takes your vote and says
he wrote it down correctly but shows you no proof.
“There’s not a little guy in the computer,
but there are lots of people involved in programming
the software, handling the software, installing the
software, distributing the software, and those people
are no more trustworthy than the random guy behind the
curtain,” he says. Nor, he adds, are they immune
from making accidental errors.
Dill never intended to become a political advocate.
He merely cared about what happened to his vote. He
read news accounts of electronic voting and was struck
by one conspicuous absence: any way to check a vote
after it was cast. Though—or perhaps because—Dill
is a computer science professor, he doesn’t trust
computers, at least not implicitly.
“It seems the people manufacturing and selling
[electronic voting] equipment haven’t really developed
appropriate levels of respect for how difficult the
problem is that they think they’ve solved,”
he says. Because voting is anonymous, he explains, voting
machines cannot keep records of who cast what vote in
the same way electronic banking systems keep audit records.
So other methods, like paper printouts, are necessary
to create a permanent, unalterable account.
Dill wrote a resolution that 5,500 computer scientists,
voting experts and citizens worldwide signed, asking
for voter-verifiable audit trails—paper records
of all votes cast. These could be checked by voters
before leaving the polls, and manually recounted later
if necessary.
“This is the most important technology we will
ever use, and we need to know it is accurate and secure,”
says Jennifer Granick, executive director of Stanford
Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
The center represents two Swarthmore College students
who posted online 15,000 internal documents discussing
flaws in the software and network of Diebold Election
Systems, the country’s largest manufacturer of
electronic voting machines. Diebold had threatened to
sue the students, who are asking for a ruling that their
posting falls under the fair use doctrine of copyright
law. “This is a free speech issue that affects
everyone who votes or is affected by who is elected,”
Granick says.
Dill, too, has encountered opposition in his efforts
to ensure that voting systems are secure and reliable.
“I really thought once I got the computer security
experts and the electronic voting experts to all get
together and say, ‘This is a big problem,’
then everyone would see the obvious truth of what they
were saying. But not everybody believes experts, first
of all. And there are various people who have other
agendas, too, a little more political than I would have
hoped.”
Still, he is making progress. Last year, California
became the first state to require paper audit trails
on all machines, though not until 2006. And Congress
is considering a bill that would institute such a requirement
before the election this fall. “I think it’s
gone from kind of a nonissue to a real national debate,
which is exactly what it needs,” Dill says. “I’m
pushing as hard as I can to make sure that the problem
is solved before [November] 2004.”
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