As well, verifiable voting centralizes power in the hands of technology experts, eliminating citizen oversight and checks and balances. The problem is further exacerbated when computerized voting is privately owned and controlled by corporations claiming proprietary trade secrecy for the software counting our votes.
Despite the inherently false premise of verifiable voting, it has become the clarion call for 21st century election reform. Congress, the Election Assistance Commission, and activists have all jumped on board.
Suspending Disbelief
HAVA's passage and implementation is chockfull of K Street influences, money laundering, technological complexities, White House interventions, and billions of American dollars. Nonetheless, surprisingly, a large number of election reformers still struggle to believe this magic act.
But verifiable voting election reforms demand a fairly high degree of suspension of belief, because they all fail the basic tests for democratic elections.
Perhaps overwhelmed by its complexities, perhaps too far removed in time and space from the founding principles of American democracy, or perhaps just desperately clinging to their idealism, election reformers grabbed at verifiable voting illusions like a magician pulling an ace out of the deck.
After HAVA rolled computerized touch screen machines into roughly 40% of America's polling places, reformers clamored for "voter verified paper audit trails"(VVPAT) (22). This reform would send more money to the e-voting industry to attach printers to their touchscreen voting machines. The printers would then display a receipt-like printout to voters, who could look through a window and "verify" their vote.
But VVPAT, corporate controlled and proprietary, denies citizens the opportunity to oversee how their vote is being recorded and counted. Computer scientists remind us that a computer can easily be programmed to display one thing, record another, and count something altogether different. To make things worse, the display window in many of the VVPAT machines is inadequate for voters to even read the print out.
No number of magic wands could transform verifiable voting reform to meet the standards of democratic elections. With black box, trade secret computerized vote counting, there is no citizen oversight. There are no checks and balances.
Studies soon showed that between 10-20 percent of VVPAT paper records are unreadable and unusable for the purposes of "verifying" the votes in a recount. Other studies showed that only a very small percent of voters "verify" their vote in this manner. (23)
Ultimately, many VVPAT reformers abandoned the cause.
Every computerized voting solution-holding the vote hostage in a black box of invisible bits and bytes-fails the test for democratic elections, especially when those bits and bytes are trade secrets owned by private corporate interests.
Today many reformers would willingly exchange all touch screen voting machines for optical scanners using voter marked paper ballots. I myself have advocated for just such a solution, as a great way to reintroduce voter marked paper ballots into every polling jurisdiction in the nation, itself a step in the right direction.
But optical scan technology, like the touchscreens, keeps the count itself secret and proprietary. Citizens and candidates are denied access to the count, even when the computers perform such bizarre tabulations as were seen in Florida 2000's negative vote count for candidate Gore.
Although they use real paper ballots, optical scanners, with their proprietary, black box computer counts, turn public votes into privatized election data. Corporate controlled, trade secret optical scanners, like their touchscreen brothers, fail the test for democratic elections.
Paper ballots are only as good as the hands that count them.
