10 hour wait to vote? Isn’t there something wrong with that?
(Voting lines in Mozambique. The ones in Atlanta are longer today.)
Andrew Sullivan notes that in Georgia there is a 10 hour wait to vote today. Now, on the one hand, this is a great sign. It means that this election matters to a whole bunch of folks and we’re seeing tremendous turnout. Well done, America.
On the other hand, however, what does this say about our voting mechanisms and organization? It’s clear to me we need an electronic voting solution that is fast. I’m thinking an Open Source solution:
Over the past two decades, computerized technology has become a growing element of election administration and many parts of voting technology are now enshrouded in mystery. Computer software is subject to all types of intellectual property protection (copyright, patents, trade secrets and trademark) and electronic voting machine vendors are notoriously protective of their products. They do business in a small and highly competitive market that has just seen a large injection of $3.9 billion from HAVA. While any trade secret that they may hold is in no way rocket science, you can imagine that their implementation of software and hardware would give their competitors an edge if known publicly.
Now that we are seeing serious concerns in the areas of vote tabulation and human factors from Tuesday’s election, there will be a need, as David Wagner suggests below, for comprehensive investigation into the source of these problems. Undoubtedly, this will involve examinations of source code and attempts to reproduce problems on the same machines used in the election. The examination of any vendor’s source code is a particularly sensitive topic filled with NDAs and negotiation; for example, it took the California office of the SoS 6 months to negotiate the terms of an independent source code examination of California’s four EVM vendors (Diebold, ES&S, Hart Intercivic and Sequoia).
Another benefit of open source, open standards, is also highly desirable in election administration. As you can imagine, having different types of raw vote data (encrypted or not) in proprietary formats, makes combining results from different vendors at the state level a major pain in the ass. In fact, I’ve got anecdotal evidence that the “official” canvass here in California involves a few employees of the office of the Secretary of State entering in county totals by hand into a spreadsheet precisely because there is no interoperability between data formats of our 4 vendors. Talk about an environment ripe for human error… This is why it is heartening to see IEEE standards work (IEEE 1622) and the OASIS Elections and Voter Services TC working on voting data interchange.
We’ve been talking about this for awhile. Time to get serious about it, legislators.
