The Governmnet has defferred e-voting, and American voters are also having serious doubts about its reliability, reports Ian Kilroy
Remember the protracted drama of the last US presidential election? All those punched ballot papers held up to the light, all those counts and recounts. In the end there were only 537 votes between George W. Bush and Al Gore in the decisive state of Florida.
After that experience, a frustrated American electorate was eager for a better way to vote. Electronic voting was the promised panacea to the problems of Florida in 2000. However, a federal commission - created to develop more effective voting in the US - has heard this week that e-voting is not the cure-all that was promised; that, in fact, it is not reliable enough for use in the next US presidential election in November.
On Wednesday, critics of electronic voting told the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) that hackers and bugs could as easily plague the new voting system as they could a home computer. A verifiable paper trail was called for, one that could act as a back-up check if fraud was suspected and a recount called. That paper trail, it was argued, should be provided by printers offering back-up print-outs of electronically cast votes - something that will not be in place for election time in the US, just six months away.
These recent concerns over electronic voting date back to the Super Tuesday primaries last March, when a number of Californian polling stations suffered software failures, with the result that some voters could not cast their ballots. A further setback for advocates of e-voting came last week, when Californian Secretary of State Kevin Shelly rolled back electronic voting in the state because of security concerns. An investigation Shelly instigated found that the software involved wasn't properly tested - a finding disputed by the company that made the voting machines in question, Diebold Election Systems.
Shelly has added his voice to calls for a back-up paper trail in any e-voting system employed - indeed, he has demanded that all electronic voting machines in California provide a paper print-out of votes cast by 2006. There are a number of reasons for this demand. Firstly, it enables the voter to obtain a print-out of the vote they cast. If the ATM-like voting machine had been fixed or tampered with - to register a vote for candidate A as a vote for candidate B, for example - there would be no way the voter could know. Having just voted by touching an electronic screen, the voter cannot know for sure how that vote is being registered by the computer. A print-out of the registered vote would confirm to the voter how his or her vote has been recorded - and it would also offer a back-up hard copy, as well as a record of votes for manual recounts, independent of the computer.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, a paper print-out of the vote cast inspires public confidence in the electoral system. The ethereal nature of e-voting is unsatisfying compared to the tangibility of a paper ballot that can be held in the hand. Just as there's nothing like reading a real newspaper rather than an online edition, or receiving a real letter rather than just an e-mail, so there's no substitute for the physical act of voting, of making one's mark on a page.
Then there's the whole dramatic nature of the counting of ballots - not only does it inspire interest in the excitement of politics, but it ensures democracy is not only done, but is seen to be done, in a tangible and verifiable way.
Yet even the many critics of electronic voting in the US concede that its day is almost here. Computers do have a role to play in the electoral process, they say, and if we have learned to trust our money and even our lives to computers, so we will learn to trust our democratic system to them.
And yet, every time we use an ATM machine, we always have the reassurance of a paper record of our transaction. It is that reassurance that lies behind calls for a paper trail in electronic voting in the United States - and the same thing is wanted in Ireland, as Mr Justice Matthew P. Smith's commission looking into e-voting for Ireland recently reported. Concerns that the software is tested properly and that it functions satisfactorily are also common to the US and Ireland.
As for California, which uses a different type of voting machine, the Secretary of State Kevin Shelly has asked his attorney general to look into possible civil and criminal charges against the company that attempted to pass off its allegedly untested machines. (Diebold, who made those machines, refutes the accusation of trying to deceive the state of California.)
Meanwhile, it looks like e-voting is on hold in the sunshine state - at least until hard-copy print-outs become available.
It all makes you wonder: why spend so much money on ensuring paper is central to the e-voting process now? Wasn't it paper we had to begin with?