In the age of technology, elections have come a long way from the days of voting for someone in a loud voice—viva voce. Paper ballots served their purpose, but as of 1996, only 1.7 percent of the registered voters in the United States still made use of them in small communities and rural areas, and for absentee balloting. Ever since the 1990s, several countries—including Australia, Portugal, Spain, and other European countries—engaged in nonlegally binding trials for electronic voting conducted in localities, municipalities, and universities. In 2001, Australia reported that 8.3 percent of the electorate used electronic voting. However, many still do not consider it secure enough for use in all types of elections, especially national or parliamentary elections.
For reasons of convenience, paper ballots have been progressively replaced by punch cards (first introduced in 1964), optical scanners in the 1980s, and touch screens in the 1990s. However, continued research in the United States seeks to provide appropriate methods of voting for those with disabilities, those who do not primarily speak English, and those who do not have a high literacy rate.
In the early twenty-first century, voting machines are commonly used for two main reasons: to provide secrecy and to simplify vote counting. Various types of voting machines exist, including mechanical levers, punch cards, electronic scanners, optical scanners, and direct recording electronic (DRE) voting systems that make use of computers and cell phones. The changing technology has sparked ongoing analysis of the positive and negative aspects of relying on the evolving machines and technology for determining an election’s outcome.
Definition
Voting machines are the various instruments used to cast a vote and count it. In the modern technological world, a voting machine usually connotes an electronic voting machine (EVM) and implies the electronic means of casting the votes and counting them. Electronic voting technology can include punch cards, optical scan voting systems, and specialized voting kiosks (including self-contained DRE voting systems). It can also involve transmission of ballots and votes via telephones or cell phones, various computer networks, or the Internet.
Polling-place electronic voting, or Internet voting, has taken place in numerous countries, including Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, the European Union (EU), France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela.
History Of Voting Methods In The United States
Voting is a democracy’s method to deter mine the will of the people on issues as well as on representation for resolving society’s political problems. The U.S. history of ballot casting, as outlined in Paul McCaffrey’s The United States Election System (2004), may be said to have started with the use of a quill pen and since evolved to the current use of a touch screen.
In the U.S. colonial days, voting was a matter of assessing shouts and shows of hands to determine a winner. By the time the new nation was born in the 1770s, actual balloting would replace this show of hands or voice votes. Voters wrote out the names of their candidates in long hand, gave their ballots to an election judge, and trusted that their vote was recorded accordingly. In the1850s, political parties dispersed preprinted lists of candidates to enable even the illiterate to vote. The ballot resembled a train ticket since it came out as a long strip of paper. In 1869, Thomas Edison received a patent for his invention of the voting machine, intended for counting congressional votes. In 1888, Massachusetts printed a ballot at public expense, listing the names of all candidates nominated and their party affiliations. Most states would adopt this landmark improvement within the next eight years.
The first official use of a lever-type voting machine, known then as the Myers automatic booth, occurred in Lockport, New York in 1892. Four years later, these machines were used on a large scale in the city of Rochester, New York, and soon were adopted statewide. By 1930, lever machines had been installed in almost every major city in the United States, and by the 1960s, over half of the nation’s votes were cast on these machines. In the 1996 presidential election, mechanical lever machines were used by 20.7 percent of registered voters in the United States. Because these machines are no longer made, computer-based marksense, or DRE systems sometimes referred to as optical scan systems, are emerging as one of several methods for recognizing marks on paper through optical reading techniques. Marksense systems were used by 24.6 percent of registered voters in the United States for the 1996 presidential election, and their use is on the rise.
The punch card ballot was introduced in two counties in Georgia in 1964, and by the 1996 presidential election almost four in ten voters used punch cards to vote. Punch card systems employ a card (or cards) and a small clipboard-sized device for recording votes. Voters, using a supplied device, punch holes in the cards opposite their candidate or ballot-issue choice. After voting, the voter either places the ballot in a ballot box, or the ballot is fed into a computer vote-tabulating device, at the precinct.
Michigan in the 1990s was the first state to switch to optical scanning devices, which have been used for decades in standardized testing. About 25 percent of voters used the technology in the 1996 election. As a result of the storm over the 2000 presidential election results, when Florida’s punch card ballots and Palm Beach county’s butterfly ballots marred the results, new federal laws in 2002 authorized funding to help states upgrade voting technologies and phase out punch cards and lever machines. Georgia was the first state to use DRE touch screen technology exclusively. In 1996, 7.7 percent of the registered voters in the United States used some type of DRE voting system.
Table 1. Voting Technologies Used In The United States, 1998
Table 1, from Denis Lancorne’s 2006 article “Chad Wars” notes the various voting technologies in use in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Voting Methods Around The World
Some developing countries have been effectively using electronic voting machines for longer than the United States. Brazil prides itself on the reputation of being the first country in the world to have fully electronic elections in all levels since 2002.The chief goal for Brazil’s use of EVMs is to make voting as simple and straightforward as using a public phone booth.
Though India first used EVMs in its 1989 elections, it was only in the May 2004 elections that they have been used in all of India’s 543 parliamentary constituencies. The Indian electorate is so large that it required 700,000 voting stations, open for five days of voting. The use of electronic voting led to quicker voting and faster tallying of votes with results obtained in hours versus days. Finally, in Estonia, 1.85 percent of voters used electronic voting in the 2005 elections.
Internet Voting
A public network DRE voting system is an election system that uses electronic ballots and transmits vote data from the polling place to another location over a public network. Vote data may be transmitted as individual ballots as they are cast, periodically as batches of ballots throughout the election day, or as one batch at the close of voting. This includes Internet voting as well as telephone voting. Internet voting can use remote locations, voting from any Internet capable computer, or can use traditional polling locations with voting booths consisting of Internet-connected voting systems.
Despite the speed at which the vote can now be cast and counted with the help of such voting machines, there are concerns that a lack of testing, inadequate audit procedures, and insufficient attention given to system or process design with electronic voting leaves elections open to error and fraud, especially when the accuracy, honesty, security, and verifiability of votes cast cannot be guaranteed—as shown by the experience in the 2000 U.S. presidential elections. There are those who argue further that the cost of the validation processes for software, compiler trust, installation, delivery, as well as the validation of other steps related to electronic voting is complex and expensive. Thus electronic ballots are not guaranteed to be less costly than printed ballots.
In order to ward off such problems, legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress appropriating funds to states for EVMs, for precinct audits in federal elections, as well as for mandating some form of voter-verifiable paper audit trail by the year 2012 on any type of voting technology. Verifiable ballots are necessary because no technology is error proof. Computers can and do malfunction. The consensus is that optical scan systems are the most efficient provided they include a precinct counter, which tells the voter about possible voting errors such as no recorded vote or too many votes and allows them to correct their mistakes.
The Growing Use Of Electronic Voting
In the age of electronic voting, it is quite clear that electronic entry devices are replacing paper ballots, punch cards, and lever machines. The most commonly used EVMs in many parts of the world are optical scan, touch screen or DRE machines, and smart cards. In countries such as France and Germany, the EVMs manufactured by different companies such as the Dutch firm Nedap do not print receipts like those in the United States; these have therefore been a source of protest and skepticism. The Estonian e-voting system utilizes an ID card, which serves as a regular and mandatory national identity document as well as a smart card with an integrated electronic chip. It has a state-supported public key infrastructure allowing for both secure remote authentication and legally binding digital signatures that can be used for voting and other purposes.
Despite the direction toward a process beyond the use of paper, according to the World Bank, about 85 percent of electronic voting projects in developing countries have failed in some respect. Likewise, numerous e-voting inconsistencies in developing countries, where governments are often eager to manipulate votes, have only added to the controversy.
Bibliography:
- Alvarez, R. Michael, and Thad E. Hall. Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004.
- Harris, Bev. Black Box Voting. Boone, N.C.: Plan Nine Publishing, 2003.
- Herrnson, Paul, Richard G. Niemi, Michael J. Hanmer, and Benjamin B. Bederson. Voting Technology. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008.
- Lancorne, Denis. “‘Chad Wars’:Voting Machines and Democracy in the United States.” In The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot, edited by Romain Bertrand, Jean-Louis Briquet, and Peter Pels. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
- Litan, Robert E., and Alice M. Rivlin. Beyond the Dot.coms: The Economic Promise of the Internet. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.
- McCaffrey, Paul, ed. The United States Election System. New York: H.W. Wilson, 2004.
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