'Why the current touch screen voting fiasco was inevitable'

[tom bldr <tom_bldr@xxxxxxxxx>]

Good articles are hitting daily on blackbox voting,
this one stands out as it asks "dark questions",
promises "answers" next week.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031204.html

snip

Robert X. Cringely: 'Why the current touch screen
voting fiasco was inevitable'

If you spend any time on the Internet in the U.S., it
is almost impossible not to know about the scandal
involving touch screen voting machines.  I mentioned
it a few months ago, and my goal at that time was to
goad the big newspapers into looking at the story,
with the idea that if there was any truth to it, the
New York Times and Washington Post ought to be on the
story.  Well, now they are, especially the Times,
which this week ran an op-ed piece by Paul Krugman
that ought to make a lot of politicians very
uncomfortable.  
Depending on whom you read, either computerized voting
is being used to help American voters or to hurt
them.  The American Civil Liberties Union said in
California that certain counties in the recent recall
election were disenfranchised by not having touch
screen voting, while other organizations suggest that
touch screens were used to steal elections in
Georgia.  I don't know about any of this, but I do
know about Information Technology, so I suggest we
look at this issue in a way that nobody else seems to
be -- as an IT problem.
Voting is nothing more than gathering and validating
data on a huge scale, which these days is almost
entirely the province of IT.  And like many other
really big IT projects, this touch screen voting thing
came about as a knee-jerk reaction to some earlier
problem, in this case the 2000 Florida election with
its hanging chads and controversial outcome.  Punch
card voting was too unreliable, it was decided, so we
needed something more complex and expensive because
the response to any IT problem is to spend more money
making things more complex.
So the U.S. government threw $3.5 billion on the table
to pay for modernizing voting throughout the land,
which is to say making it more expensive and more
complicated.  That's a lot of money and it attracted a
lot of interest.  One company in particular, Diebold
Systems, went so far as to buy a smaller company that
made voting machines just to get into the market. 
Diebold thought that being in the automated teller
business was a good starting point for changing the
way America votes.
You can read in many other places about the trials of
Diebold as it attempted to build its touch screen
voting system. I'm not here to write about FTP sites
or whether voting machines can or can't be messed with
over the Internet.  We're looking at this as an IT
project, remember?  This isn't politics (at least not
in this particular column) it's engineering.  And one
thing engineers of great big IT systems know is that
they are never on time, never on budget, and sometimes
don't work at all.
Software development projects fail all the time, no
matter what their size. The Standish Group, an
IT-research firm in West Yarmouth, Mass., has been
keeping track of this phenomenon since 1994, and the
good news is that we are doing much better at
completing projects than we used to. The bad news is
that in 2000, only 28 percent of software projects
could be classed as complete successes (meaning they
were executed on time and on budget), while 23 percent
failed outright (meaning that they were abandoned).
Those numbers are improvements over a 16 percent
success rate and a 31 percent failure rate when the
first study was done in 1994.
I can't imagine too many business owners liking those
odds, but the picture does get darker. If 28 percent
of software projects were complete successes in 2000,
then 72 percent were at least partial failures. And in
software, even partial failure generally means getting
absolutely nothing for your money.
According to the Standish Group, more than $275
billion will be spent on software development this
year, covering about 250,000 projects. That means that
if the recent success and failure percentages apply,
$63 billion in development costs will go down the
toilet in 2003 alone.
What does this have to do with voting machines?  It
says that this whole idea of changing by 2004 the way
every American votes was probably doomed from the
beginning.  Whether political motivations were
involved or not, the odds were always against this
thing coming in on schedule or on budget.
Then why do we do it this way?  The "it" in this case
doesn't mean just this voting project.  Why do we
undertake these massive IT projects that almost
inevitably fail?
The answer is simple -- because there is lots of money
to be made whether the darned thing works or not, and
not much of a penalty if it doesn't work. Two hundred
and seventy-five billion is a lot of money to spend on
software development, especially if 72 percent of that
money will be either wasted completely or used to
develop something that doesn't work intended.
Does that begin to sound like the current state of
this voting fiasco?
So we were stupid to expect this thing to work as
planned.  Except that as far as I can tell, there
wasn't really a plan. Here's what I think happened. 
This is, unfortunately, far too common in the IT
world.  After the last presidential election, there
was a government outcry for an electronic voting
system.  Firms like Diebold who make ATMs, check out
systems and kiosk systems said, "Hey, we can make a
voting machine out of one of our products."  That was
probably the total extent of thinking and requirements
put together by the government agencies and the
vendors.
In the case of this voting fiasco, there was a
wonderful confluence of events.  There was a vague
product requirement coming from an agency that doesn't
really understand technology (the U.S. Congress),
foisting a system on other government agencies that
may not have asked for it.  There was a relatively
small time frame for development and a lot of money. 
Finally, the government did not allow for even the
notion of failure.  By 2004, darn it, we'd all have
touch screen voting.
Oh, and there are only three vendors, all of whom have
precisely the same motivation (to make as much money
as possible) and understanding (that Congress would
buy its way out of technical trouble if it had to). 
This gave the vendors every reason to put their third
string people on the project because doing so would
mean more profit, not less.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing
over and over again, somehow expecting a different
outcome.  In this instance, the issue isn't whether
Diebold and the other vendors were insane (they
aren't), but whether the government is.
Now against this backdrop of failure, I can't help but
make one technical observation that I think has been
missed by most of the other people covering this
story.  One of the key issues in touch screen voting
is the presence or absence of a so-called paper
trail.  There doesn't seem to be any way in these
systems to verify that the numbers coming out are the
numbers that went in.  There is no print-out from the
machine, no receipt given to the voter, no way of
auditing the election at all.  This is what bugs the
conspiracy theorists, that we just have to trust the
voting machine developers -- folks whose actions
strongly suggest that they haven't been worthy of our
trust.
So who decided that these voting machines wouldn't
create a paper trail and so couldn't be audited?  Did
the U.S. Elections Commission or some other government
agency specifically require that the machines NOT be
auditable?  Or did the vendors come up with that
wrinkle all by themselves?  The answer to this
question is crucial, so crucial that I am eager for
one of my readers to enlighten me.  If you know the
answer for a fact, please get in touch.
Having the voting machines not be auditable seems to
have been a bad move on somebody's part, whoever that
somebody is.
Now here's the really interesting part.  Forgetting
for a moment Diebold's voting machines, let's look at
the other equipment they make.  Diebold makes a lot of
ATM machines.  They make machines that sell tickets
for trains and subways.  They make store checkout
scanners, including self-service scanners.  They make
machines that allow access to buildings for people
with magnetic cards.  They make machines that use
magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like
university dining rooms.  All of these are machines
that involve data input that results in a transaction,
just like a voting machine.  But unlike a voting
machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold
machines -- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can
be audited.  Would Citibank have it any other way? 
Would Home Depot?  Would the CIA?  Of course not. 
These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. 
If they can't be audited they can't be trusted.  If
they can't be trusted they won't be used.
Now back to those voting machines.  If EVERY OTHER
kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper
trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a
capability in the voting machines, too?  Given that
what you are doing is adapting existing technology to
a new purpose, wouldn't it be logical to carry over to
voting machines this capability that is so important
in every other kind of transaction device?
This confuses me.  I'd love to know who said to leave
the feature out and why?
Next week: the answer. 

snip

Same article reprinted at the "fair and balanced"
(not) SmirkingChimp, with (partisan) reader
commentary:

http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=14051&mode=&order=0

I guess we can also look forward to Paul Krugman's
proposed solutions soon. 

Tom Rategan

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