Chicago “magic pen” snafu illustrates deeper problem for electronic voting

Amy, a Rogers Park resident, posted a truly harrowing story [1] to her blog earlier today. She was one of about 20 Illinois Primary voters in Chicago's 49th Ward told to use a push-vote machine stylus to record their votes on paper ballots [2]. When the styluses failed to leave marks on the paper, they were told by election officials that the pens used "magic invisible ink" to write down the votes. From her blog:

"Jim and I went to vote at 7 a.m. We were given Democratic ballots and pens. But when I got to the booth, my pen didn't work -- it was like a felt-tip marker with no ink. So I went back to the desk and was told -- along with several other confused voters trying to swap out their nonfunctional pens -- that these were "invisible ink" pens that would not leave marks on the ballot but would absolutely be read by the scanners. Except that they weren't. The optical scanners were spitting out ballots until one of the election judges used a key to override the system and get the ballots into the box. After my ballot was rejected once, I got a confirmation that my vote "counted" (when the number on the ballot box blipped from 19 to 20), but Jim was given a regular ballpoint to fill in his, and it counted right away."

Amy's blank ballot was refused by the optical scanner until an election official overrode the machine, causing it to count her blank ballot. Furious, she sent calls to the Trib, Sun-Times [3], a Rogers Park blogger and the Chicago Board of Elections. The Trib posted her story to their home page. Fortunately, there was a happy ending to the whole fiasco. Hours after her blank, invisibly-inked ballot was counted, after she had been on the phone with election officials all day, she heard the first 20 voters from her district were being invited back to vote again.

After spending the day on the phone to various political offices and media outlets, Angela and I found out that the BOE was contacting the first 20 voters from our precinct to come back and cast another ballot. I don't know if it was the press inquiries, the pissed-off phone calls from citizens, or the threat of lawsuits from one candidate's lawyer (rumored), or some angry combo of the above, but something worked. I left work early and ran back to the polling place. The election judges were very accommodating and apologetic, almost grovelingly so, and they marked the "spoiled ballot" box on my voter register and issued me a new ballot. "Can I get a real pen this time?" I asked. And they said yes. As I filled in my little arrow for Obama with visible ink, I started to cry -- out of relief and gratitude and, I'm not even kidding, pride in being an American and being able to vote. Voting is important, y'all. Don't let anyone stop you from doing it.

Only in Chicago, right? There's a lot to think about here: astonishing stupidity, unresponsive election officials, etc., but the most interesting thing here is the part I bolded above. Ever since the hanging chad debacle, states have hailed electronic voting as the solution to voter fraud. Meanwhile, academics such as Ed Felten at Princeton have repeatedly demonstrated how easy it is to beat the machines [4], by installing malicious code using a thumb drive, for example. But this incident demonstrates a more fundamental problem facing proponents of electronic voting, one that no engineer or computer science wiz can solve: poorly trained polling officials. Not matter how slick your system is, how sophisticated its safety measures, how battle-tested and road-ready it is for an election, if the people running it are only too happy to override its sensors so it can read a blank ballot (amazing), the robots will never win. This story serves as a reminder that machines are only as smart as the people running them at the end of the day. We don't need better machines. We need better election officials, people who won't reach for the override key because the scanner's unable to read "invisible ink." If you've got a story from voting today, share it with other readers over here [5].