HOW DOES IT WORK?

 

The two most common forms of electronic voting machines are optical scan and touchscreen. You’ll remember optical scan machines from taking the SATs—that little answer sheet that required a number two pencil and a fondness for filling in tiny bubbles was an optical scan form. At your polling center, a locked and lightly armored machine consumes and scans the sheet, recording your vote and sending the results to a central tabulation machine at another location. The paper record of the vote is sealed in the metal body of the scanning machine. Theoretically, the only person with access to the completed voting forms within these machines is the state officer in charge of managing the polls, usually the secretary of state.

Touchscreen machines eliminate the paper form altogether. When you enter your polling place, you are given a unique voter identification card, which you must slot into the machine to begin. The screen of the device will offer you your choices, and a simple touch of a finger will highlight your selection. When you’re done voting, the machine thanks you, you turn in your voter ID card, and head home secure in your knowledge that democracy has been served. The difference between these machines and the ATMs that inspired them, of course, is that an ATM gives you a receipt. Most touchscreen voting machines are incapable of producing a printed record of an individual vote.

Both systems rely on a central computer at a remote location to count the votes. The central tabulation computer can receive information as votes are cast via the Internet or after the polls close by having vote collection machines plugged directly into it. Most central tabulation computers do not record individual votes. Instead, they just count the votes from each polling machine and put each one, hopefully, in the appropriate bucket, offering a total tally to the secretary of state.

The most popular machines, manufactured by Diebold, run on Windows and count the votes in an unsecured Microsoft Access database. If you’re a database nerd, Access is pretty sexy, offering all sorts of powerful and fancy tools for the manipulation and administration of large or complex data sets. On the other hand, if you’re a computer security nerd, Windows in general makes you nauseous with fear.