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September 20, 2004

Amherst County Touchscreen Voting Demonstration

Select photos by your connection speed:

Amherst Democratic Committee Meeting - E-Voting Demonstration (slower)

Amherst Democratic Committee Meeting - E-Voting Demonstration (faster)

At our meeting in Amherst last Tuesday, County Registrar Gary Beasley, came to demonstrate Amherst County's new touchscreen, electronic voting system.

The system is the Patriot made by a company called Unilect. Personally speaking, not being a Diebold system pleased me a great deal. The geek in me finds electronic voting to be a marvelous concept (having written a web-based system for Sweet Briar which is used by our Student Government to conduct their elections).

First came the Florida elections which screwed it up pretty well with the art of punching holes in paper (about as analog as it gets). The outcry afterward brought e-voting to the forefront where Diebold swooped in and scared the crap out of both the geek and luddite world with their hamfisted handling of closed-source software and a CEO quoted as saying (in a fundraiser letter, no less) he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

I'm not going to get into the details of either story as they are both discussed in far greater detail all over the web and, to some degree, the mainstream press. Google is your friend.

Amherst chose the far less diabolical Unilect Patriot and, from what I have seen, chose very well. The system is very easy to use with its large, colorful display and various safety features. The votes are stored in non-volative memory in seven locations internally. It is operated entirely by county staff and does NOT operate over a network to a central location except an ability to dial-in and almost instantly upload the final totals after the polls close. Prior to doing this, though, the system will print an audit which has to be certified by the poll workers at each location. All the key pieces of the system are marked with numbered seals that will be broken if any tampering is attempted.

No, the system does NOT generate a receipt for each voter... the "paper trail" that has been discussed of late. I was initially perturbed by this, but the valid argument against doing so was one I had not considered: vote buying. In other words, persuadable people can't walk out of the polls and hand a receipt to someone in exchange for cash or cigarettes or some other incentive.

In a nutshell, I didn't have any alarm bells going off in my head when comparing it to the somewhat error-prone lever machines we've been yanking on in rural Virginia for the last few decades. On the other hand, the tallies should be much faster after the close of the polls and, in my opinion, the voting process now provides an opportunity to review your selections in a more vivid and sytematic way with the colorful touchscreens.

Even more intriguing was the portability of one machine in each location. Elderly or disabled voters need not even leave their cars. The unit can be carried out for a curbside vote. The moment the official returns it to the booth and reconnects the wire, the vote is cast and confirmed. An official also must reset each terminal at the main control unit after each ballot is cast to prevent someone from standing in the booth and ringing up numerous votes (akin to the curtain opening when you pull the big lever in years past).

Everyone is required to use the machines... there are no alternate methods aside from absentee ballots. Write-in candidates can be spelled out with an on-screen keyboard. There is also an option for a braile machine for the visually impaired.

All in all, I found the system rather impressive and I look forward to casting my vote in November. Wild guess who I pick... ;)

Posted by amahler at September 20, 2004 04:51 PM

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