{"id":422,"date":"2003-12-12T17:33:47","date_gmt":"2003-12-12T21:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/benadida\/2003\/12\/12\/an-epiphany-we-technologists-dont-al"},"modified":"2003-12-12T17:33:47","modified_gmt":"2003-12-12T21:33:47","slug":"an-epiphany-we-technologists-dont-always-get-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/2003\/12\/12\/an-epiphany-we-technologists-dont-always-get-it\/","title":{"rendered":"An Epiphany: We Technologists Don&#8217;t Always Get It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a69'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I just returned from 2 days at the <a href=\"http:\/\/nist.gov\">National Institute of Standards and Technology<\/a> where we discussed <a href=\"http:\/\/vote.nist.gov\">eVoting<\/a>. I wasn&#8217;t expecting much from this conference, but to my surprise I learned a tremendous amount. Most importantly, I got a nice wake-up call: we technologists don&#8217;t necessarily have the answers just because we can think logically.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m thinking specifically of Robert Cringely&#8217;s columns from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/cringely\/pulpit\/pulpit20031204.html\">last week<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/cringely\/pulpit\/pulpit20031211.html\">this week<\/a>. I am usually a big fan of Cringely&#8217;s no-nonsense approach to technology problems, but, as I&#8217;ve learned these past few days, his approach to eVoting is too simplistic and thus incorrect.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll keep it short and mention some basic facts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> paper receipts in ATMs are very different from paper receipts in elections. What happens, for example, if the printer jams halfway? Do you have to call in the election official and thus reveal your vote? ATMs can function more or less properly even with printer failures. Not so for voting machines. Surely, this problem can be solved, but not simply by taking the ATM printer technology and sticking it on a voting machine.\n<li> HAVA requires accessibility for all, including the disabled (blind, deaf, etc&#8230;). This is a serious issue. We need to have a solution that includes all eligible voters. We also need to take into account that millions of americans are partially disabled (e.g. the millions of eldery citizens who have partial eyesight loss but refuse to admit it) in ways that also make hand-counted paper ballots a poor solution.\n<li> US ballots are vastly more complicated than Canadian ballots. We vote for more positions (sometimes as many as 50 or more), and we vote for propositions. The complexity of the US ballot means that hand-counting paper ballots is simply not doable given the timeframe that is expected for same-day results. You&#8217;ll hear this from almost all election officials: hand-counting paper ballots just can&#8217;t be done.\n<\/ul>\n<p>Let&#8217;s be clear: many (maybe all) of the current electronic voting systems are questionable. There are proven security issues that need to be fixed. I&#8217;m afraid of what might happen to our democracy if we use some of these voting machines without further oversight and auditing.<\/p>\n<p>But let&#8217;s not kid ourselves, either. Just because we&#8217;re technologists doesn&#8217;t mean we have the answers. Voting is hard. Cringely&#8217;s columns fail to take into account the points of view of those who have been running elections for years. And to be fair, so did my previous blog posts. Like all IT professionals, we failed to listen to our clients.<\/p>\n<p>The solution to the voting problem will come from a collaboration between technologists and election officials. It will have to include some kind of technology to enable secret votes by those for whom paper is not an option. It will have to include some kind of technology to enable tabulating that is more efficient than hand-counting paper ballots. We don&#8217;t have such a solution. Yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just returned from 2 days at the National Institute of Standards and Technology where we discussed eVoting. I wasn&#8217;t expecting much from this conference, but to my surprise I learned a tremendous amount. Most importantly, I got a nice wake-up call: we technologists don&#8217;t necessarily have the answers just because we can think logically. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}