New York Times Magazine Covers Problems With E-Voting

This past Sunday, the New York Times Magazine [1] had a pretty jarring image on its cover--a voting booth with an explosion coming out of it and a warning label, "WARNING: Your vote may be lost, destroyed, miscounted, wrongly attributed or hacked." The accompanying story discussed the problems of touch-screen voting at length.

I highly recommend taking the time to read the whole article, but I just want to highlight a section that I found particularly compelling. On top of all of the technical problems that electronic voting machines have, and the near-impossibility of verifying their accuracy, there is also a fundamental issue of the privatization of our elections: "Vendors do not merely sell machines to elections departments. In many cases they are also paid to train poll workers, design ballots and repair broken machines, for years on end." The author also makes an excellent point by comparing this problem to the out-sourcing of military responsibilities in Iraq to private contractors. By handing over the core functions of our government to private companies--whether Blackwater in Iraq or Diebold in Cuyahoga County, OH--we are ceding part of our democracy.

I should also point out that while I was glad to see the New York Times cover this issue last weekend, and I hope that they will continue to do so as the 2008 election heats up, none of the issues with electronic voting that they discuss are particularly new. Bloggers have been covering these problems for years, especially folks like Brad Friedman, and I would encourage you to pay a visit to his analysis of the article [2] as well.