A Way to Restore Confidence in Elections

In next week's midterm elections, 90 percent of Americans will vote on electronic touch-screen voting machines or optical-scan systems. According to a 2005 study by the Government Accountability Office, these systems have inherent flaws that "could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to … the integrity of the voting process."

Three companies -- Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia -- control 80 percent of the nation's voting and tabulating machines. These companies that we entrust with our franchise operate without public oversight. The software in machines of all three companies are proprietary, and when voters faced with surprising election results have sued to examine the machines, elections officials have claimed they are prohibited by contract from allowing inspection.

In response to concerns about electronic voting, Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn., recently introduced the Confidence in Voting Act, which according to Boxer "urges local jurisdictions to make paper ballots available at every polling place, so any voter who wants one can use one."

Such legislation would not have been enough. Given the lack of a reliable means of counting these votes, systematically auditing those counts and securing ballots in case of dispute, America must support an alternative means of checking the veracity of the official count.

A public, transparent exit poll is just such an alternative.

Around the world, exit polls -- surveys of how voters immediately upon leaving the polling place say they have voted -- are used to verify the integrity of elections. In nations with reliable voting systems, such as Britain and Germany, exit poll results are within 1 or 2 percentage points of the official numbers.

Discrepancies between exit polls and the official count have generally been understood to indicate corrupted counts. In four nations -- Serbia, Peru, Georgia and Ukraine -- they have been used to successfully overturn election results. In each case, subsequent elections, re-run with more secure voting systems, have borne out the initial poll results.

In the words of John Tefft, former deputy assistant secretary of state and current ambassador to Georgia, exit polls are "one of the few means to expose large-scale fraud." And that is why the United States funds them in emerging democracies.