Voters Think about Voting Machines
The annual State Certification Testing of Voting Systems National Conference gave me an opportunity to put together a talk based on unpublished public opinion research I have done in recent years about public attitudes toward voting machines and election security. I recently wrote a blog post on Election Updates about the first part of this topic, attitudes toward voting machines. (I will soon get to writing about election security.) Here are the high-level take-aways from that post. If you’re interested in more, please read the longer blog post here.
The research I presented was based on questions I have been able to place on my own module to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and on other surveys over the past few years. Starting in 2012 I began asking respondents what they thought about the three major types of voting technologies — optical scanners, electronic voting machines, and hand-counted paper — and which machines they would prefer to use.
Opinions in 2012
Let’s begin with the opinions in 2012. In that year, I found that electronic machines (often called direct-recording electronic devices, or DREs) were generally preferred by respondents compared to optical scanners, and that both types of technologies were preferred overwhelmingly to hand-counted paper. DREs were preferred over optical scanners by a 56%-25% margin. DREs were seen as being easier to use by voters and easier to produce an accurate count than were optical scanners. While DREs and optical scanners were seen as being equally safe from vote-tampering by bad guys, hand-counted paper was regarded as being easy for dishonest people to tamper with.
Not surprisingly, respondents who lived in counties that used the electronic machines favored them 74%-13%. Surprisingly, even respondents who lived in counties that used scanned paper ballots also said they would prefer to use the DREs by a 50%-30% margin. In short electronic machines were the preferred way to go for most Americans, and were seen as the most functional voting technology.
Opinions today
Things have changed in the ensuing years. Prompting these changes has been a new focus on the security of the voting process, and especially the security of the computers that help to manage the process. In 2016, when I asked the question again, about which machine respondents would prefer, optical scanners inched up a bit, but support for DREs plummeted. When I asked the question again a few weeks ago, on the YouGov Omnibus, support for DREs had fallen even further. Not only that, but users of optical scanners no longer preferred DREs, but now gave a plurality nod to those scanners. The following graph shows the details.
Digging down deeper into the responses, it was clear that the edge in perceived functionality of the DREs had declined. In addition, while both DREs and scanners are still regarded as safer from vote tampering than hand-counted paper, the gap has narrowed.
Thus, as criticism of DREs has grown in public discourage, and computer security has become a more salient issue in election administration, the bloom has come off the DRE rose. This is good news for those who have long advocated that DREs be abandoned for paper.
There is a caution here, however. Although support for DREs has declined significantly over the past five years, DRE users still believe it is the superior technology compared to optical scanners. This suggests that as election administrators transition away from DREs over the next several years, they may find themselves needing to deal with local public opinion that may be skeptical of the move, and regard opscans as an inferior technology.
