In search of a software fix for Florida's presidential ballot bugs

Chris Gulker: There are hi-tech security measures that might make some methods of vote fraud less likely

So I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley, wondering just exactly how you fix things in Florida. Internet elections? Hi-tech voting machines?

So I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley, wondering just exactly how you fix things in Florida. Internet elections? Hi-tech voting machines?

What am I saying? Fix Florida? Bill Gates couldn't fix Florida. Steve Jobs couldn't fix Florida.

Florida is kind of upside down compared with the rest of the United States. It has a unique combination of conservative immigrants (Cuban expatriates) and liberal wealthy people (retired New Yorkers). It manages to be Old South, New World, New South, Old World, New Economy, New Wave, Old Economy and Backwater all at once.

Election, uh... difficulties, are old hat in Florida. In fact, they're kind of a tradition. The American Civil Liberties Union says that Florida has a "rich history" of stunts like police roadblocks around polling places in minority districts, telling voters of a certain ethnic persuasion that they've run out of ballots, requiring two picture IDs for persons who happen not to be white, and otherwise behaving like the Civil War never happened.

There's also the infamous 1997 election for mayor in Miami, which was invalidated by a judge after finding that independent candidate and ex-Mayor Xavier Suarez had committed massive fraud by forging signatures on absentee ballots.

And if the Elian Gonzalez custody battle hadn't been enough of a black eye for the Sunshine State, now we have the Palm Beach ballot fiasco. According to Time magazine, the Cuban foreign minister has suggested calling new elections, with Cuban observers to guarantee impartiality. Impartial observers courtesy of Fidel Castro? Here in California, I can feel the slow burn from Dade, Broward and Volusia counties all the way to Washington.

Indeed, so "rich" is the electoral tradition in Florida that, when it became apparent that the race was close, a Volusia County judge ordered that the rubbish bins be sealed behind the county's ballot-counting facility. Guess we've had some problems with votes in bins in the past? The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People produced a photo of a locked and sealed Dade County ballot box - sitting in a Miami hotel room. No word how it got there.

But what the heck? Maybe we ought to take a look at hi-tech election stuff, anyway. I mean, how much worse could it be?

America has experience with internet-based elections, but that's not the only road to go down. There are also hi-tech voting machines - basically, computers that people operate in person, usually from a touch screen.

This year's Democratic primary election in Arizona allowed internet voting. Voters were mailed a PIN number along with their ballot papers. They could choose to go to a polling place on election day or vote early over a span of a few days by entering their PIN number using a Web browser. An outfit called Elections.com ran the Net part, which resulted in a turnout of more than 40,000 voters - three times the normal turnout for an Arizona Democratic primary.

As far as Elections.com could tell, there was no fraud or other problems, even though a denial of service attack was launched against the site, and some voters couldn't log on at high-traffic times. This doesn't mean the system is foolproof, but the high turnout is bound to convince other states to set up their own trials. Two other Net firms, Votehere.net and eBallot, have conducted trial elections in the US as well.

But a lot of people are very nervous about remote voting via the Net, pointing out that there exists at least the potential for hijacking an election. If Xavier Suarez could fix an election by mail, think of how much easier it might be via the internet.

So another tactic is to retain the polling-place paradigm, where you can actually eyeball the voters, and use hi-tech machines. Brazil already uses ATM-style electronic voting machines, so the Brazilian community in Florida must find the paper-ballot ruckus quaint.

In fact, the elections in Riverside County, California, were handled completely by a $14m-system developed by Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment. The system features highly reliable touch-screen computers that don't permit things like voting for two candidates for the same office, as well as a multiply redundant back-end system.

Sequoia Pacific claims the system reduces the kind of errors seen in paper-ballot systems to zero. Voters who've used the system overwhelmingly find it better than the usual paper ballots. To minimise tech hassles, Sequoia's computers use a high-reliability operating system, and have no moving parts - read hard drive - that are the normal failure points in PCs. The system also has built-in security measures that would make large-scale fraud quite easy to detect.

But just keeping an eye on people doesn't automatically eliminate fraud. One person can show up in a lot of different precincts without arousing suspicion. Chicago's former mayor Richard J Dailey is famously supposed to have encouraged Chicago Democrats to "vote early, and vote often". Huey Long, a legendary former governor of Louisiana, said that he wanted to be buried in his home state, where he knew that he would still be able to participate in local politics after he was dead.

Yet there are some interesting, hi-tech security measures that might actually make some time-honoured methods of vote fraud less likely. One concept, "circles of trust" - where each of our digital signatures is guaranteed by others who actually know us - avoids the potential for fraud in a corrupt central authority. No need to seal the digital rubbish bins.

But, fix Florida? Why bother? I think the fix is already in.

cg@gulker.com