What with the recent news about flawed electronic voting machines and outright vote manipulation, the topic of voting machines is surfacing again. I’d like to throw in my two cents.

Rather than pushing for more oversight, printed receipts, and more inspection of software (the expensive solution), I’ve maintained for a while that there’s an alternative that’s both more transparent, and a lot less expensive. Call it a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Voting machines (RAIV), analogous to RAIDed disk drives.

In almost all aspects of voting, there are at least two observers (signing in, ballot counting, recounts, etc.). The only place without observation, of course, is in the voting booth itself. This was not a problem in the days of paper ballots, or even of mechanical lever machines (hard to hack). But in the days of electronic voting machines, it’s time to look at the machines themselves.

Completely trustworthy software has never been achieved, and approaching it is incredibly expensive. The alternative, I suggest, is twofold:
1. optically scanned paper ballots (a true audit trail that supports manual recounts)
2. count each ballot at least twice, using at least two different machines!
If the tallies don’t match, it’s time for a manual recount.

If the voting machines are developed, supplied, and overseen by different organizations, that provides for a pretty strong check and balance. With the cost of a scanner and a laptop costing well under $1000 these days, and plenty of universities itching to develop open source voting software (it’s amazing what a small grant will fund), the cost of a single Diebold machine would more than cover multiple counting systems at a polling place – say one each from the local election board, local party offices, and an election watch organization – using different hardware, operating systems, and software.

Note that NASA uses this model for flight control software on the Space Shuttle. Five machines run mission critical software – four from one vendor, one from a completely different vendor, running independently developed software. The machines vote, and if there’s a disagreement, alarms and sirens sound.

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