The best laid schemes o' mice and men
Gang aft a-gley,
And lea'v us nought but grief and pain,
For promised joy.
—Robert Burns
Electronic voting machines are, at heart, devices that present questions and tally the answers. As with all gadgets, when everything works, the final totals correctly represent the machine's inputs every time. Unfortunately, real life rarely works out so nicely.
Much of the discussion about electronic voting deals with how to prevent hardware or software corruption, yet it seems to me that a more serious problem lies in the organizations surrounding the voting booth. While you can fix hardware problems with a forklift and correct software errors with Yet Another Version, those pesky people problems may just be unfixable.
I've presented postmortem reports on various NASA spacecraft, examined automobile recall info, and crawled through other projects to show how good intentions go bad. It turns out that Cuyahoga County, Ohio, used Diebold electronic voting machines in May 2006, an election they describe as "at best problematic and at worst a disaster." The County appointed a panel, which produced a comprehensive Final Report that should serve as a red alert to anyone who believes the solution to electronic voting involves fixing hardware and software problems.
Last month, I discussed some rules for evaluating hardware and software proposals. This time, let's look at what you might expect from the wetware running the show. Italic sentences come directly from the Cuyahoga Report.
