Khanna 1

Selena Khanna
Maddy Parker
Ms. Sobotka
LD Debate
30 November 2015
Negative
EVM//NEGATIVE
In 2013, hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. frustratedly waited in lines venturing out of
doors and around street corners not for a new iPhone or gadget, but for voting on an electronic touch
screen machine. Thus, I disagree with the statement that "electronic voting machines should replace
paper ballot voting".
CONTENTION ONE: Machines will fail or malfunction, thus wreaking havoc for voters come election
day.
Technology has made life easier in terms of simplifying common tasks like banking or publishing a
book, talking to friends or paying for things online.
When it comes to voting, however, technology is stuck in 2002.
In a study from NYU School of Law,
next year 43 states will be using electronic voting machines at least a decade old & the price tag for
replacement machines could top $1 billion.
Laptops designed in the 1990's lasting 10 years are bound to result in failure.
Biggest risk:
Machines fail or malfunction
Electronic voting machines can malfunction in unpredictable ways during polls
Machines have been known to flip votes, double them, subtract them, and misreport tallies.
A video from the 2012 US presidential election showed a voting machine automatically switching votes
cast for Barack Obama to mitt Romney &
In one US county election, a malfunction ignored over 5,000 cast votes, roughly 1/3 of the total votes
cast in the election.
Maryland had to pull machines out of circulation in the middle of an election because the test screen
went out of calibration. This means that the screen would register a voters touch about an inch below
the candidate he or she selected, potentially casting a vote for the wrong candidate. And theres no
telling whats getting reported.
Fourteen years ago it took an entire month for Americans to figure out who it was to succeed then. The
ballots in Florida had to be recounted during the 2000 presidential election largely due to failed voting
technology that caused votes to not get counted or incorrect votes.
The Election Commission of Pakistan Director General Information Technology Khizar Aziz candidly told
the parliamentary body that the software used by EVMs could be manipulated to affect the results. He
said that EVMs installed at polling stations were vulnerable to hacking via Bluetooth signals and other
forms of wireless connectivity. In fact, he told members that the machines could even be tampered
with while in storage.

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Lines will increase at voting booth

Result: crisis in confidence and voting system
With decade old electronic voting machines states are using that are falling apart, voters are slowly
losing access to their voting rights.
CONTENTION TWO: Machines can be easily hacked, placing unreliable distrust in voters, as well as
producing inaccurate results.
Not to mention:
Phenomenon of hacking
Has permeated every level of government over past years
If someone hacked we wouldn't find out immediately IF we even did
In 2008, researchers at Princeton University found that it took seven minutes, using simple tools, to
install a different computer program in a voting machine that steals votes from one party's candidates
and gives them to another. That machine, the Sequoia Avantage, is still used in at least six states by 9
million voters, according to Roger Johnston, who heads the vulnerability assessment team at Argonne
National Laboratory.
Previous pilot programs in Washington, D.C., and West Virginia ran mock online elections for overseas
military in 2010. But Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor, and his
team of students hacked the D.C. internet voting system almost as soon as it was up and running
CONTENTION THREE: Funds and cities, states, race, or residency greatly contribute to voting and
voters all over the nation.
City voters who tend to be democrats are more likely to encounter long lines due to voting
restrictions, according to a 2012 report from the New York Times
More affluent countries & cities are able to spend more on election administration, them having
better staff and machines.
Places with lower incomes and a weaker tax base don't have the funds to replace equipment & hire
desired staff, so voters end up getting served differentially depending on where they live
& even without ID laws voters face obstacles at polling centers having to wait hours to vote in some
regions partly because of outdated and too few electronic voting machines
According to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, Black and Latino voters had to wait the
longest to vote and had fewer machines to vote on.
During the 2012 presidential election, Florida also suffered from long wait times up to six hours in
some polling places that disproportionately affected the states large Latino population. The state and
its voting practices have been mentioned in controversy before.
Lines are longest when waiting for electronic voting machines in part because only one voter can use
them at a time and it takes everyone a few moments to figure out how they work, said voting rights
activist Rebecca Wilson.
The 2000 presidential election in Florida spotlighted many problems with voting technology like the
design of ballots, the way ballots were counted, & the problems with things like punch card ballots.
Theres nothing to move on to. Most states are in the midst of a budget crisis and cant afford to
upgrade machines, (points out Wendy Underhill, director of the National Conference of State
Legislatures in Denver.)
-The biggest difficulty to replace them is the main issue of money. These machines were purchased
with federal money which is not coming back. In some cases the states pay for new necessities but its
usually the county that pays for it, said Wendy Underhill, director of the National Conference of State
Legislatures of Denver. Residents have to go to their accounting commissioners and argue that these

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are priorities, but to others it's difficult to make a case when you're up against school needs and
perhaps even buildings damaged by fires, etc.
CONTENTION FOUR: Voting will vary based off of how voters cast their votes and how these
machines cooperate with the voters.
Theres also the question as to whether electronic machines are trustworthy in the first place.
Voting technology experts arent keen on letting voters use systems that have even the slightest
possibility of being compromised. To ensure people are able to exercise their voting rights, there must
be a way to check over each entry because the electronic machines can have bugs or bad lines of code
just like a personal laptop.
All major tech companies such as Apple for example send out bug fixes for security patches.
One of the issues with any kind of voting is that it's nearly impossible to determine if something has
gone wrong.
Paper ballots are still the dominant voting system in the U.S., with only about one in four voters using
an electronic voting machine during election time, according to The Washington Post.
The error rates with paper ballots are low, and ballots tend to be counted by a machine or by hand in
the event of a recount or audit
With electronic voting machines, votes made on an individual machine are stored on a memory card
that is read by a computer. But theres no way to make sure the votes cast were correct. Theres no
physical proof that candidate A got more votes than candidate B.
Another option could be using biometrics like fingerprints or retinal scans to authenticate voters and
make the online process more secure. But that brings its own risks. Imagine having your eyeball or
fingerprint scan attached to your vote. This option could compromise voters privacy as the voter
should be the only person who knows who they voted for.
Encrypting the voting transaction could work in theory but theres always the possibility of a major
security leak, similar to the Heartbleed glitch that devastated 63% of the worlds websites earlier this
year. The glitch went undetected for two years & exposed consumers social security numbers,
banking information, usernames and passwords for mobile apps and websites.
With as many complaints that are being received about electronic voting, switching without waiting
for newer or more updated technology will only result in a loss of votes & voters.
In 2004, Carteret County in North Carolina simply lost 4,500 votes because of a memory problem in
the electronic machines. Similarly, a large report from Verified Voting, Rutgers Law School, and
Common Cause documented more than 1,800 complaints about electronic voting machines in the
2008 election and more than 300 about the 2010 election.
The report recommended that more states with electronic voting machines keep a paper trail -- a
practice that some swing states like Ohio and North Carolina have adopted. Others, like Florida, are
pushing for that system.

Questions
As a result of the 2000 presidential election, President Bush enacted the Help America Vote Act (HAVA),
which required states to upgrade their voting equipment from the punch cards and lever machines that
plagued the 2000 election. States then went on a spending spree with millions of federal dollars,
buying state of the art touch screen voting machines. This was almost 15 years ago. By now our
technology is on the verge of crashing if it hasn't already. How are voting machines beneficial for us if
we're stuck in line for hours unable to do anything about the poor system, not to mention our not even
knowing if our votes are being correctly cast or if they even are at all because of our inability to
change these machines due to the cost and lack of effort to change them?

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What if there are acts of boycott or losing voters? During the last federal election, in 2012, about
201,000 Floridians decided not to vote because of the long lines, according to an Orlando sentinel
analysis.
How will we have accurate votes from not knowing who we even voted for if the majority of voters
were to have voted for one candidate on an EVM, but due to a failing or malfunction the other
candidate wins?

APA Cited Sources

States ditch electronic voting machines. (2014, November 2). Retrieved November 27, 2015,
from http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/222470-states-ditch-electronic-voting-machines

The big 2016 danger may be electronic voting machines. (2015, September 17). Retrieved
November 27, 2015, from http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/17/the-big-2016-danger-may-beelectronic-voting-machines/

(n.d.). Retrieved November 27, 2015, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/electronicvoting-machines/

Study: Electronic voting machines in 43 states are out of date. (n.d.). Retrieved November 27,
2015, from http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/study-electronic-voting-machines-out-ofdate-43-states-213632

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Voting Machines - ProCon.org. (n.d.). Retrieved November 27, 2015, from

http://votingmachines.procon.org/