Part II--Learning from the developing world
India, with its 680 million eligible voters, has some 700,000 polling places, many of them in villages that don't even have electricity.

Yet, in its 2004 election, India used over half a million electronic voting machines (EVMs). These machines were built in India, they run on six-volt batteries, and they have two parts, each the size of a laptop. One part is the ballot, the other a recording device. The two parts are connected by cables. At the end of the day, they are disconnected and no further votes can be recorded on that machine.

The Indian EVMs have three great advantages:

1. They don't require literacy (they can present the ballot choices in any form--as symbols, colors, even photographs of the candidates).
2. They can be loaded with the new set of choices at each election (thus saving the high cost of printing and transporting ballots--elections become dirt cheap).
3. And they can run on rechargeable solar batteries and are so portable they may make voting accessible even in remote villages in places like Botswana and Afghanistan.

India is no anomaly. Brazil now votes entirely on touch screen electronic machines, from the metropolis of São Paulo to the jungles of the Amazon. The Philippines is moving that way. The list goes on.

In fact, electronic voting will probably become standard in the developing world before it does in highly industrialized nations, because new democracies have no old infrastructure to clear away and no entrenched traditions to overcome. Ten years from now, we may see elections in Afghanistan conducted on a single uniform model of EVM, while the United States is still using a motley mix of levers, punch cards, touch screens, and the like.

In short, if electronic voting can produce error-free elections, the developing world may well be the first to know.

Saved by the machines?
And why shouldn't electronic devices rescue voting?

I know the arguments. Companies that make the machines will steal elections. Voting is too complex. The software will always have glitches. And so forth.

Of course there are problems with the technology, and they must be confronted and solved.

But when I hear about impossible complexity, I remember those colored marbles in Botswana. In the end, doesn't counting votes boil down to sorting marbles?  Is voting any more complex than recording financial transactions, which our society does millions of times a day? Surely the number of people with bank accounts exceeds the number of registered voters. And surely the number of financial transactions each year far exceeds the number of votes cast.

Yet, we don't see bank errors routinely. Those who deposit $210.22 into their accounts are almost certain to get $210.22 credit. Ditto for withdrawals. And ATM machines rarely route people's deposits into the coffers of their manufacturers.

Oh, once in a while I do catch the bank making an error, and I always let them know about it, loudly and angrily, but so far--alas!--it has always turned out to be my error, not theirs, and I've had to leave the bank all sheepish and hangdog.

So if billions of dollars can flow in the proper amounts to the proper accounts, why can't millions of votes do the same?

You know why.

With money transactions, every dollar withdrawn or deposited has its own monitor--someone watching to make sure it gets allocated correctly: the money's owner.

Votes, by contrast, are anonymous and move in great herds, like the buffalo of yore. When you read that Al Gore got 50 million of them, you can't climb up on a cliff and spot your own vote amongst that great array.

But what if you could?

A modest proposal
Imagine a world in which, after you vote, you get a receipt showing your votes--just like you do from an ATM. This is the paper trail backup that activists are calling for in the 34 states where touch screen machines are currently coming online (so far, only Nevada will be ready to provide such receipts in the fall 2004 election).

But now, go further. Imagine if, after the election, you could pull up a record of your vote, just as you check your bank account. And if your voting account didn't match your receipt, you--yes, you--could go down to the election commissioner's office and raise a ruckus. I bet that would stop election error dead.

Yes, of course, there's the question of privacy. A fundamental safeguard for democracy is that people must be able to keep their votes secret to save them from pressure and intimidation.

But again, consider the world of financial transactions. You can't look at my bank account; I can't look at yours. We're protected by our PINs. The bank, of course, can look at both of our accounts, but that's because we want it to. The bank is a party to the transaction; it has to have access.

If we wanted to, we could set up a system of voting accounts accessible only to their owners. Giving voters the power to track their votes would give us clean elections, in my opinion. No such thing was possible in the past, but it's feasible today.

Technology can get us there.

And if it can, the developing world might very well get there first.