“The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.” – A T-800
Not surprisingly, Skynet objects and destroys most of humanity. This is usually what happens when sentient computers are given life-or-death authority over all of mankind. The good folks of Cyberdyne should have seen it coming: the same thing happened way back in 1970 when Charles Forbin’s attempt at achieving pax cybernetica led to the immediate subjugation of humankind by his Colossus supercomputer (in what is, incidentally, the best computer-takes-over-the-world movie yet made).
The lesson should be clear: don’t trust computers, and certainly not with anything as important as the nuclear arsenal.
And don’t trust them with our elections, either.
Now of course we needn’t be concerned that our voting kiosks will become self-aware and declare war on the electorate. That’s silly. What isn’t silly, however, is the potential for fraud, corruption, and espionage, and the near certainty that widespread electronic voting will undermine, and deservedly so, confidence in the legitimacy of the vote.
Trust in the integrity of the electoral process depends on the electorate’s confidence that a proper chain of custody can be maintained over ballots, and that contested results can be audited, recounted, and confirmed. Even with those assurances, one can be excused for doubting the veracity of the results in problematic districts. What is essential is that we have a reasonable confidence that the overall process is fair and honest, and that the ultimate outcome reflects the will of the electorate.
What is essential is transparency. Unfortunately, transparency is precisely what’s lost when ephemeral software replaces paper ballots.
Consider the disputes that arise from something as seemingly simple as the handling of paper ballots, where the physical items can be counted, sealed into boxes, and observed as they move from one location to another and ultimately into secure storage from which they can be summoned for recounting should the need arise. Even this entirely observable and comprehensible process is subject to both deliberate and accidental corruption, as we discover again every election season.
What does that process look like when voting is done by computer? It looks like binary word shifts and bitwise xoring, finite field multiplication and modulus operators and countless loops through increasingly scrambled cyphertexts. It looks like math, stuff that only a relative handful of software people (and we’re a notoriously geeky, math-enthused lot) can follow.
Those inclined to embrace conspiracy theories (and that includes virtually all of the mainstream media) have spent the last two years in a tizzy over the possibility that Russia subverted the 2016 election using YouTube and Facebook; a comprehensive investigation and its voluminous negative results are unlikely to quell their concerns.
Imagine if the claim were that a hostile foreign power such as Russia or China — or, if you’re a progressive, Israel — interfered with a computerized election. Imagine the complexity of the forensics, the difficulty of determining what went wrong, and the near impossibility of conveying the findings in a comprehensible way to a skeptical public. Any remotely plausible claim of a digitally hacked election would permanently taint the outcome in the public’s imagination; no amount of arcane expert opinion would convince the losing moiety of the election’s validity.
Most electoral changes that have, as their ostensible motive, improved efficiency and increased ballot access work against the integrity of the voting process. Early voting, extended voting hours and days, mail-in ballots, absentee voting, provisional ballots — all of these make it harder to secure ballots and maintain a clear chain of custody, and invite fraud and abuse. Widespread computerized voting will, if implemented, open the process to vote tampering and election rigging by means cryptic and obscure, and on a scale impossible with paper ballots.