![]() The project concluded that up to 6 million votes were lost in the 2000 election, including up to 2 million due to poor ballot designs such as Florida's infamous "butterfly ballot," up to 3 million due to outdated registration rolls and up to 1 million due to polling place operations that made voting too inconvenient. Selker was one of the researchers in charge of the Caltech-MIT Voter Technology Project, which analyzed the shortcomings of ballot systems in the wake of the 2000 elections. "I'm very frightened about paper," said Ted Selker, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in user interfaces. The specialists on the other side of the debate acknowledged that today's e-voting systems have problems - but argued that today's paper-based systems had even more serious problems. What I'm most worried about is having an election where no one can be sure the totals are anywhere close" to the actual votes cast, Dill said. "I think we can learn a lot of wrong lessons from 2000. Florida election officials may have looked silly in 2000 as they scrutinized individual punch cards for hanging chads, but at least they had something to review. "I would immediately stop using these (e-voting) machines and use paper systems until they can be trusted," Dill told journalists at a Saturday briefing. These ballots, rather than the electronic tally, would be the votes that actually counted - and would provide a verifiable paper trail if there were any question about the result. "In some sense, the electronic voting problem is the paradigmatic 'hard problem.'"įor now, they say, the only solution is to go to a system that uses electronic terminals or other means to mark on paper ballots. "If you think I sound negative here, you don't understand how difficult it is to build secure computer systems," Neumann said at a Sunday symposium. Their view is that the current generation of software running the e-voting terminals cannot be made secure against tampering - either by insiders or computer-savvy outsiders - and that such tampering could well go undetected. The case against e-voting was laid out by Stanford University's David Dill and SRI International's Peter Neumann, computer scientists who have documented security gaps and glitches in the systems and posted their results online at and SRI's Computer Science Laboratory. The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which concluded Monday in Seattle, provided a rare opportunity for the top supporters and critics of e-voting to state their case in a scientific forum. ![]() Meanwhile, computer security experts and activists have been sounding the alarm about the vulnerability of e-voting systems, warning that hackers could perpetrate wholesale fraud.
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