Defenders Of Democracy

Voting without paper is like drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch toy. The moment you touch the CAST BALLOT button on an electronic voting machine, the screen is wiped clean, just like when you shake your Etch-a-Sketch. As it turns out, that vote you thought you just cast has about as much permanence and inviolability as your Etch-a-Sketch drawing.

Where did your vote go? Truth is, folks are as likely to find intact ballots inside a Diebold machine as they are of finding intact drawings stored inside an Etch-a-Sketch. That's because voting is supposed to be anonymous. So what's inside a voting machine is the kind of data computer scientists call "unstructured". Pretty much the same kind of stuff that's inside an Etch-a-Sketch.

With an Etch-a-Sketch there's no "end-of-day" record of what's happened, but if there were, you'd need somebody to come along and "restructure" that aluminum powder for you. In a voting machine, where you do need an end-of-day total, that restructuring is done by anyone with access to the software.

The point is, the restructuring has no necessary relationship to what the voters did standing in the polling booth. What happens with the tally and what happens at the touch screen are two entirely separate events.

Yes, it would be nice if your touch screen ballot went directly to the tally with the inevitability of an apple falling from a tree. But inside a computer the laws are written less by nature than by the programmers. And who are the programmers? Fact is, we don't know.

What we do know is that with elections, we're not talking about an Etch-a-Sketch toy any more. People don't lurk in the shadows to rig Etch-a-Sketch drawings. There are plenty of people, however, who would love for the programmers of our election software to do their bidding. Some of them even have enough money to make that happen.

So how do we protect the value of our vote against the dangers of Etch-a-Sketch voting?
Think about this: As any parent knows, when it comes to placing a value on your 6-year-old's artwork, the Etch-a-Sketch is not the way to go. When you want that priceless drawing to send to the grandparents, what do you give your little girl? An Etch-a-Sketch? No, you give her a piece of paper. When it really counts, you need paper.

Same thing with voting. Unless you're just playin' around when you're in the voting booth, you're gonna want your vote on paper.

Even with all the political apathy and nonexistent choices we get in our elections, I still have a hard time believing that people really place so little value on their vote that they don't care how their vote is counted, or by whom. As if folks are out there saying, "I don't care who counts the vote - some corrupt programmer somewhere, or maybe a hacker. It doesn't matter all that much to me."

No. It will always matter how our votes are recorded and counted, and it will never be O.K. to hand over the custody of those votes to some unaccountable, shadowy group of technicians working at the behest of those who would subvert our democratic process.