'Vote flipping' continues to plague e-voting

08.11.2006
During Tuesday's midterm elections in the U.S., reports emerged from across the nation about a problem called "vote-flipping," where a voter selected a candidate on e-voting hardware -- and the machine counted the vote for an opposing candidate.

The problem has been reported in U.S. elections since 2004 as more states move to e-voting machines that are supposed to make the vote counting process more accurate. Instead, for many Americans, the process has led to more questions than answers, and suspicions that their votes aren't being counted correctly.

Stanford University computer science professor David L. Dill, who founded the nonprofit Verified Voting Foundation and VerifiedVoting.org, has been looking at vote flipping and yesterday called for investigations to stop the problem.

"People have been way too quick to diagnose the problem," Dill said. Some who have not examined the issue closely quickly call it a touchscreen calibration problem, others point to different causes. "It could be a calibration problem with the touchscreens, but I'm not sure that anyone really knows yet because no one's looked at it. My answer as a computer scientist is that I want facts ... and all I've heard for two years is speculation."

Dill said he's not convinced of one theory -- that the problem is a conspiracy to defraud voters of their votes and give the election to the opposition. Once a voter makes his or her selections on a machine, a review screen shows them for whom their votes will be tallied, which the voter can confirm or at least review. That ability to review the vote before it is ultimately cast, he said, makes it less likely that fraud is involved.