Of all the many things we have to worry about, foreign interference in the 2020 election seems the easiest to solve if we start now. Anyone born before about 1960 knows how to solve it, but many younger people simply won’t listen because the solution seems so weird to them, and perhaps even wicked.
When we go to a polling station we vote on a computer. It may be via an optical scanner or a touch screen, but somewhere along the line our vote goes into a computer and is then transferred to other computers on the Internet.
What is the one indisputable fact about computers connected to the internet? Answer: they are totally insecure. We should surely have learned by this time that when we enter private or secret information of any kind we might just as well broadcast it over the radio or post it on the front page of The New York Times. Trusting the entire electoral process to the Internet is not just asking for trouble, it’s begging for trouble.
Those of us who were born before 1960 remember – assuming we remember anything – how we used to vote in the ancient days before computers. I seem to recall voting on a piece on paper by placing one or several Xs on it. Most of us could make crosses on paper, it was simple and democratic. These crosses were then added and counted by ordinary human beings, citizens, in secure conditions and held, also under heavy security, until a result was announced. Citizens did the counting, not a computer that might or might not be connected to Moscow or Beijing, or even Tehran or Kabul. I must have voted dozens of times like this and I never remember seeing KGB officers lurking in the corners of the local polling station.
Then came the mechanical voting machines, designed to simplify voting for those not talented enough to make a cross on a piece of paper. I never trusted those machines where you pulled a lever down to vote, they seemed too much like casino slots, and were probably rigged in the same way. Then, after the machines, came the computers.
The computers are the problem. In saying this I know that I have committed the twenty-first century version of sacrilege. But really, hasn’t anyone noticed that this marvelous gift of computing power has an absolutely poisonous side to it? Everything is connected, including voting machines, campaign offices, and the whole bureaucracy of the election. Wired magazine describes the entire setup as “Absurdly vulnerable,” and they ought to know. So dump the wretched electronic voting machines into a large pit in the Arizona desert. They’re probably made in China anyway, and getting rid of them will be a bonanza for the paper and printing industries. We can start again with paper ballots and all-human counting. It may be tedious and slow, but at least the results won’t be tabulated in the Kremlin.
(Some states, including Connecticut, continue to use paper ballots counted by hand in national elections. In these states there is no possibility of direct interference with voting via the Internet, so there’s nothing to worry about. However eighteen states have been named as having highly vulnerable voting systems, including Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina. Efforts are being made to secure these systems before the 2020 election.)
The paper ballot counted by hand isn’t a perfect system. Election tampering goes back more than two thousand years to the days of ancient Rome. And I’m not suggesting that the results would be any better, only that they would be the real results. We voters are not particularly smart. As Winston Churchill remarked: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter” and, if we insist on voting for useless politicians we are going to get useless politicians, so our situation will be no better than before. But at least, if we have a secure electoral system, we will be able to say with confidence that it is entirely our own fault.
Copyright: David Bouchier
