Electronic Voting

My town is using an Election Systems & Software (ES&S) iVotronic touch screen voting system this election. A registered voter signs in, then a poll worker inserts the Personal Electronic Ballot (PEB) into the slot of the machine. Then via the touch screen a voter makes his/her selections. The voter can even review his/her selections and change any of them. Finally, (s)he presses the "Vote" button to cast the vote. This system does not make a paper printout of the selections for the voter. That would have been a nice receipt for the voter and would have possibly relieved any suspicions of any voter (like ones who are weary of computers) who thinks his/her vote is not being counted. All in all, I don't think this is a bad system.

The ES&S web site talks about Anywhere Voting Architecture. What the company wants to do is to allow a voter to vote anywhere in their town. An ambitious proposal, but I like it. I think this is where voting is heading. But any voting system will have to prevent voting fraud as much as possible. Basically, a voting system has to prevent voting fraud by checking three things: 1) It should only allow registered voters to vote. 2) It has to verify the person voting is actually the person voting--not an impersonator. 3) It should only allow a person to cast a ballot only once. The voting system we have in place now is not bad. It is too bad there are some people against photo id for voting. That would help with checking 2). Unless the poll workers know a voter anyone can pose as the voter. A person has to show photo id when writing a check, why not when voting? I just don't get it.

I think a better way to accomplish all three checks is to use fingerprint scanners connected into the electronic voting machines. This is the way my system would work. In a city or town all registered voters would have their fingerprint patterns of their right forefinger in a database. It could also be the left forefinger--it does not really matter. This fingerprint pattern would be linked to their name and address and a voting indicator switch (VIS). The VIS indicates whether the voter has voted or not. A voter goes to the poll and puts his finger on the scanner. The scanner reads his fingerprint and checks it against voter fingerprints in the database. If it finds a match (ie the voter is registered) then the system looks at the VIS. If the VIS is false (ie the voter has not voted yet) then screens like in the iVotronic system are displayed. Once the voter presses the "Vote" button the VIS is set to true--thus disallowing people to vote more than once. If the registered voter tries to vote again she will get a "You have already voted." message displayed on the screen. Then the police comes and arrests the person for voter fraud--just joking, although that could be set up too. If the system cannot find the print in the database the system can ask the person to retry re-entering the fingerprint. After three tries the person gets a "not a registered voter" message. After which the voter can talk to a poll worker about not being allowed to vote. As you can see, my voting system handles all three voting checks really well, especially check three because all fingerprints are unique (even identical twins have unique fingerprints).

This system could be even more advance by allowing a registered voter to vote anywhere in the country. It might require a more complicated system to do this but it would still be doable. I don't think it would be that much more complicated. Of course, you would need a country wide database with all the fingerprints in it. The fingerprint program would check to see where a voter lives and bring up the appropriate ballot screens. The only potential problem is if a voter was in another state and after three tries the system could not read his fingerprint, he would be stuck. The poll workers could not really help him. He would have to go back to his residence to vote.

Is my system foolproof you might ask? No system is 100% foolproof. I suppose a person could chop off a finger (gross!) of a registered voter and sneak it into a polling place and put that on the scanner. Or if the scanner was an optical scanner it could be fooled with picture of a fingerprint. Still, my future system would still be better than what we have now. I suppose you could use an retinal scanner instead of a fingerprint scanner. That would be virtually foolproof, but that technology is more intrusive and more inconvenient (a person has to stand still for 10 to 15 seconds) than a fingerprint scanner. Also, retinal scanners do not work with blind people and people with cataracts.