Electronic Voting in US-Swiss Cheese or Safe Bet? EVote Cui Bono chronicles the What and Where while raising the eternal Question: Cui Bono- Who Benefits? Electronic Voting was the magic bullet that was supposed to prevent reoccurence of voting glitches typified by the Florida meltdown of 2000. But did it really live up to its promise? Shoddy software, shady procedures,media dishonesty all contributed to exacerbating voting problems and voter disenfranchisement. United States, home to the Silicon Valley, went in for electronic voting in a big way after the 2000 Presidential elections. The idea was to leverage technology to fortify the voting rights of the citizens and ensure that every vote counts. A number of states starting with Georgia aggressively pursued various available options and spent big money. In the case of Georgia around 50-60 million dollars - on vendors and their electronic voting solutions. The Independent Testing Authorities (ITAs) were supposed to ensure the quality,reliability and integrity of the Voting machines. ITA certification was treated as indisputable proof of the security and dependability of the Electronic Voting Machines. An examination of the procedures followed by ITAs revealed a Swiss cheese approach. Industry standard software and hardware evaluation practices were not followed and the very process of certification was hidden behind the veil of proprietary/trade secrets. Over enthusiastic election officials with little or no knowledge of software/hardware made poorly informed and often questionable multi million dollar purchases of suspect and substandard electronic voting systems.The media abdicated its watchdog responsibility and blissfully ignored the assault on logic. Even today the fact that electronic voting anomalies do not register very high in the radar of public consciousness is a damning indictment of the public officials charged with ensuring that every vote counts and the fourth estate who were supposed to hold the officials to that standard. As Dan Wallach, Associate professor of Computer Security at Rice university and Coauthor of the Princeton Study on Diebold Election system says in the documentary -Voting is all about transparency, The loser in the election may not be happy that he has lost an election but should be convinced that he has lost it fair and square. Two congressional elections and one presidential election have been conducted on these buggy electronic voting machines till date. There is no saying how many of those results have been vitiated by malperforming voting software. In the absence of a verifiable audit trail that captures and preserves express voter intent there is no way to crosscheck the results from the electronic voting systems with actual will of the voters.After splurging millions of public dollars on these defective machines some states like Florida went back to paper based voting. Through out the whole process one question keeps popping up - Cui bono - Who benefits?.


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