Ballot Boxes Go High Tech; From touch screens to digital 'frogs,' technology to make voting more secure is tricky, but it's coming.(Cover Story)

Publication: Newsweek

Publication Date: 29-MAR-04

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Byline: Steven Levy, Graphics by Josh Ulick

The Florida election debacle in 2000 brought us face to face with some bad news: common voting technology can be untrustworthy. Many state and local election officials were already moving toward what they thought was the answer: sleek electronic touch-screen voting terminals where confusion would be eliminated by confusion-free ATM-like technology. Congress sped up the process by passing the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which partly pays for the machines. Now the devices, made by major election suppliers like Diebold and Sequoia, are in 30 states (the only way to vote in Georgia and Maryland), and will be used by about 28 percent of the country in the November elections. But in recent months, computer scientists and security experts have uncovered weaknesses in these gizmos. Many now claim that it's entirely possible to hack an election--deleting electronic votes as if they were misspellings in a word processor, or doing a cut-and-paste from one candidate to another--without anyone's knowing it. That's because there's no way to ensure that the choices punched on the screen will actually be reflected in the final tally. Many experts are concluding that touch screens, the alleged voting technology of the future, are... untrustworthy.

A new set of players in the election arena--computer scientists and cryptographers--are now developing systems to let--people know that their votes have actually counted. It's a tricky task. The bedrock requirements of any decent voting system are security strong enough to prevent fraud and the anonymity of a secret vote. This makes...

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