Voters trust touch-screen machines, studies show

March 26, 2008 (Computerworld) Eight years after the "hanging chads" and other voting problems in Florida threw the 2000 presidential election into an uproar, U.S. voters have come to trust touch-screen electronic voting machines. In fact, they prefer them to paper-based optical scanning machines, according to new research on e-voting technologies.

A study by the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, found that voters were generally most comfortable with some models of touch-screen machines, often called direct recording electronic (DRE) machines, when compared with paper ballots and machines using buttons and dials. The Brookings study has been published in a new book, Voting Technology: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot and is based on the input of 1,536 voters in Maryland, Michigan and New York.

A separate study, "Trends in American Trust in Voting Technology" (download PDF), conducted by independent IT consulting company InfoSentry Services Inc. in Raleigh, N.C., found that public trust in DREs is about the same as in 2004, when the group's annual studies began. Sixty-seven percent of the 1,000 respondents to the telephone survey this year trust DREs; 68% held that view four years ago.

The Brookings researchers tested five DRE systems and found that the error rate of the worst-performing machines could be 3% in a presidential race. In more-complex races, the rate at which voters voted for the wrong candidate was even higher.

"You might think, 'Hey, a 3% error rate, that's pretty good,'" said Paul Herrnson, a political science professor at the University of Maryland and lead author of the study. "But ... 3% is not good enough in an election, because it can change the outcome. This shows us quite clearly that there's room for improvement." The researchers tested DREs from five companies, including Premier Election Solutions Inc., Election Systems & Software Inc. and Hart InterCivic Inc.

In addition, voters appeared to approve of verification systems such as printouts that accompany some DREs -- even though the verification systems didn't significantly cut the error rate of DREs, often caused confusion and prompted voters to seek help from poll workers, according to the study. The research was conducted by political science and computer science professors from the University of Maryland, the University of Rochester in New York and the University of Michigan.

Some of the study's results were surprising, said co-author Richard Niemi, a political science professor at the University of Rochester. Niemi expected volunteer voters who took part in the research to favor paper ballots because they're familiar with them. Instead, the top-rated DREs got higher marks from voters based on ease of use and confidence that their votes would be recorded as cast. "I certainly expected ... that the paper ballot would be the standard by which everything else would be compared," Niemi said.