{"id":274,"date":"2010-09-01T11:14:21","date_gmt":"2010-09-01T16:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2010\/09\/01\/electronic-voting-and-direct-democracy\/"},"modified":"2010-09-01T11:14:21","modified_gmt":"2010-09-01T16:14:21","slug":"electronic-voting-and-direct-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2010\/09\/01\/electronic-voting-and-direct-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Electronic Voting and Direct Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Voting<\/a>In this post, I’d like to connect a specific area of my expertise\u2014electronic voting (e-voting)\u2014to issues of interest to the legal information community. Namely, I’ll talk about how new computerized methods of voting might affect elements of direct democracy<\/a>: that is, ballot questions<\/a>, including referenda<\/a> and recall<\/a>. Since some readers may be unfamiliar with issues related to electronic voting, I’ll spend the first two parts of this post giving some background on electronic voting and internet voting. I’ll then discuss how ballot questions change the calculus of e-voting in subtle ways.<\/p>\n

Background on E-voting<\/h3>\n

The images of officials<\/a> from 2000 closely scrutinizing punchcard ballots during the U.S. presidential election tend to give the\"official<\/a> mistaken impression that if we could just fix the outdated technology we used to cast ballots, a similar dispute wouldn’t happen again. However, elections are about “people, processes, and technology”<\/a>; focusing on just one of those elements disregards the fact that elections are complex systems<\/em><\/a>. Since 2000, the system of election administration in the United States has seen massive reform, with a lot of attention paid to issues of voting technology.<\/p>\n

In the years after 2000, this system that had mostly “just worked” in previous decades was now seen as having endemic, fundamental problems. During the turn of\"Tammany<\/a> the 20th century, frauds involving ballot box-stuffing, vote-buying, and coercion were the major policy concern and the principal focus of reform<\/a>. In contrast, at the turn of the 21st century, the prevalence of close, contentious contests\u2014e.g., see this example of an analysis of New Jersey elections<\/a>\u2014often put the winning margin well within the “error”<\/a> or “noise” level associated with ballot casting methods.<\/p>\n

In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA)<\/a>, which provided the first federal funding for election administration, created the Election Assistance Commission (EAC)<\/a> and established the first federal requirements for voting systems, provisional balloting<\/a>, and statewide voter registration databases. As my colleague Aaron Burstein<\/a> and I argue in an article currently in preparation, in terms of advancing the state-of-the-art in voting\u00a0 technology, HAVA conspicuously focused on providing funds that had to be spent quickly on types of voting systems that were then available on the market or soon would be available. The systems on the market at the time\u00a0were invariably of a specific type: “Direct Recording Electronic” (DRE) voting machines<\/a>, in which the record of a voter’s vote is kept entirely in digital form.<\/p>\n

In the years since the passage of HAVA, computer science, usability, and information systems researchers have highlighted a number of shortcomings with this species of voting equipment. Three principal critiques voiced by this community are:<\/p>\n