We have long-standing traditions of things like a postmark deadline on the eve of the election. So for the week after the election, late mail is still dribbling into the election office—and all those late envelopes are checked for their postmarks and, if the postmarks are acceptable, counted.
Yet the Post Office does automatically bar code every envelope that goes through its scanners these days. The Post Office has the records to tell you when that bar code was applied. So postmark deadlines are a real problem because the Post Office has reduced the extent to which classical postmarks are still used. For example, in Miami, they have this giant spreadsheet showing one column for each candidate for each office; one row for each precinct.
After they had all those data, then they would go through the tapes printed out by the voting machines at the precinct—the summary tapes that showed the total number of votes—and they would compare it with that spreadsheet for the purpose of ruling out any error in their central tabulating software because there have been such errors.
At that point, the Board of Elections then signs off on the report of canvass. And the report of canvass is then forwarded to the state, which goes through the same process. A growing number of states do postelection audits before they sign the official canvass reports, and in other states, like Iowa, we do a postelection audit after signing the report of canvass.
Although the Iowa law says that the audit cannot change the outcome of the election, at least you discover [if] you made a mistake. So it can take several weeks after the election to put the election to bed. Sophie Bushwick is an associate editor covering technology at Scientific American. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.
See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. The U. These guidelines, which are voluntary for states, outline specifications against which voting systems can be tested. They address all the requirements listed below—security, functionality, privacy, usability and accessibility.
The VVSG 2. States that use federal standards to evaluate their voting systems typically do so using this set of standards. Local jurisdictions select and purchase voting systems, but before they are able to do so the system must go through a testing process to ensure that it meets state standards and in some cases federal standards as well.
Voting system vendors are responsible for ensuring that the system is tested—often through a federally accredited Voting Systems Test Laboratory or VSTL— to the required standards. Once testing is complete, approval is issued at the state level and local jurisdictions may purchase the system. Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia use some aspect of the federal testing and certification program in addition to state-specific testing and certification of systems:.
Three states refer to federal agencies or standards, but do not fall into the categories above:. Eleven states, the American Samoa and Puerto Rico have no federal testing or certification requirements. Note that even states that do not require federal certification typically still rely on the federal program to some extent, and use voting systems created by vendors that have been federally certified.
University Partnerships. Some states partner with universities to conduct certification and testing of voting equipment. Connecticut law Conn. Create Account. However, there is great variability within each type in terms of how each is used. The overall mix of voting technologies used in the U.
In , a plurality of voters used mechanical lever machines, with a significant fraction using punch cards Figure 2.
Scanning technologies had only recently begun to be used; the vast majority of voters who cast their ballots on paper had those ballots counted by hand.
From to , mechanical lever machines and hand-counted paper ballots began their gradual decline in favor of a growth in optical scanners and DREs. In response to the Florida recount fiasco of , Congress passed the Help American Vote Act HAVA in , which banned the use of lever machines and punch cards in federal elections, and also required that all precincts have at least one voting machine accessible to voters with disabilities.
The effect of HAVA on the selection of voting technologies is clear—the decline in the use of punch cards and lever machines accelerated, while the use of DREs spiked before leveling off and the growth in scanned technologies continued apace.
The two maps in Figure 3 illustrate how the geographic distribution of voting technologies has changed over the past generation. While there are exceptions, in mechanical lever machines were primarily used east of the Mississippi River, while punch cards dominated in the West. More rural areas primarily used hand-counted paper.
By , scanned paper dominated the western U. Only a handful of very small counties continue to use hand-counted paper ballots. Still, the rise of automation in casting and counting ballots can be explained in terms of special circumstances that are related to administering elections in the U. The most obvious one is the length of American ballots. The U. Without automation, it would take weeks if not months to count ballots in many places, with a significant chance of human error.
In addition, in the history of election reform in the U. A major topic of the policy debate about voting technologies since has been the role of computers in recording and tabulating votes. The use of electronic voting machines that rely solely on electronics to record votes, without any paper backup record, has been especially controversial.
Despite the fact that the research of Roy Saltman and Rebecca Mercuri questioned the wisdom of using paperless voting systems before , the explosion in the use of DREs after led to a corresponding expansion of the controversy. The opposition to DREs was spurred on by political activism within the computer science community. Notable among the leaders was Professor David Dill of Stanford University , who founded Verified Voting , which has continued to be a significant voice in opposing paperless voting systems and advocating for post-election audits.
In large part due to the work of this community, the use of DREs has declined in recent years. To guard against vote selling, voters are not allowed to take VVPATs with them and thus are not considered receipts.
The computer science community has also helped to identify problems associated with voting via the Internet. A few countries around the globe have experimented with voting via the Internet, notably Estonia. Norden, Lawrence, and Christopher Famighetti. Jones, Douglas W.
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