New voting technology: Touch me, trust me

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 10, 2001

Let me preface this by saying that Pasco, the county where I live, has one of the finest election supervisors in the business. I've known Kurt Browning since he was a 16-year-old high school student working part time in the office where he is now boss.

It was a pure pleasure during last year's Florida election fiasco to see Pasco's supervisor being sought and quoted as an expert on how things should have been done instead of trying to explain why they weren't.

And if Browning says he needs the County Commission to buy an extra $4-million or $5-million worth of voting machines, and that he needs several hundred thousand dollars to teach people how to use them, I have no doubt that he is pointing the county properly toward the future of vote-counting in these United States.

That said, I'm still just the tiniest bit uncomfortable with touch-screen voting, and because I know that there are many people out there more paranoid than I, I don't think I'm part of any silent minority.

Yes, I'm a Luddite. Yes, I have been a speed bump on the information superhighway and have resisted every advance in information processing since they took away my old upright Remington typewriter 30 years ago and made me type on some weird electric thing that used a spinning ball to deliver ink to the paper and allowed me to make more typing mistakes per minute than I would have ever thought possible.

My guess is that most reporters who lived through the early days of newsroom computers and their distressing tendency to swallow hours of work and send the product of those hours spinning off to never-never land are having at least the tiniest case of the "what ifs" over touch-screen voting.

At least when the punch-card system gobbled up votes there was a way to look at and argue over the results. When electronic impulses flying back and forth in one of these Devil's Workshop boxes start going awry, it will make butterfly ballots look like a day at the beach.

It will not, of course, happen, the techno-freaks promise us. Nobody will ever try to tinker with the software because, as we all know, the political establishment is completely honest and has certainly never interfered with any other form of voting.

And technology that allows animators to create lifelike beings who don't really exist, drastically alter photographs and moving pictures to make it possible for John Wayne and others to sell products that didn't exist in their lifetimes, well, that would never be used for evil, would it?

Just because Tom Hanks can appear to drop his pants in front of Lyndon Johnson (as he did in Forrest Gump) doesn't mean the same geniuses could change a vote total from 434 to 834, does it? The kind of foolproof security that lets bright 16-year-olds hack into defense computer systems and enterprising crooks steal credit card numbers by the thousands will protect us, we are promised, from any form of electronic corruption.

The sad truth is that we already put things as important as the sanctity of our elections into the hands of computers and the people who make them. Airplanes can't fly without them; most newer cars rely on them for a variety of functions (now, if we could only make the tires work) and an enormous amount of modern medical technology is computer-based.

If we'll let the darn things regulate our heartbeats, control our traffic and look (unsuccessfully, so, far I might point out) for criminals in Ybor City and Raymond James Stadium, then I guess we can let them decide who the next Pasco County commissioners will be.

I've been using touch-screen technology to make restaurant reservations at Walt Disney World for 20 years and to pour quarters into electronic trivia games in bars for only a slightly shorter time. It would worry me, in fact, if I discovered that whoever came up with a way to vote the most times was able to enter his initials on the screen of the computer on which I vote.

I can't wait for the first dirty campaign trick (and in Pasco County we ALL know who will pull it) in which a candidate implies that most of his opponent's supporters have colds and touching the screen in the same place as they did will spread the infection.

The bright side is that it will give humor columnists grist for their mills long past the point where the word "chad" is only a memory.

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