From today’s NY Times comes a disturbing story about rumors circulating among African-Americans in Florida that if they vote early, their votes won’t count.
I have a couple of attorney friends who are flying to Ohio to serve as poll-watchers; apparently both parties are deploying thousands of lawyers to battleground states next week, just in case. Yesterday I sent one of my poll-watcher friends a Donuts and Bacon ’08 t-shirt as a way of thanking her on behalf of Americans everywhere.
We think of ourselves as the “leaders of the free world”, but our system of voting is an embarrassment when compared to elections in other parts of the world. We spend billions of dollars and thousands of lives to impose our style of government around the world, so it’s nearly criminal that our own system of elections didn’t get fixed, particularly after the 2000 debacle. The fact that most elections are mostly run by small-town drones in each county across the country means that failure is practically built into the system. Ideally we’d have national standards for elections with a certification process that includes proven best practices (like a uniform ballot design, a ban on closed/unauditable voting systems, etc.). Most importantly, accountability must be built into the system: if a county fails to run a certified election, the results would be thrown out and election repeated at the county’s expense. If the county fails twice, that county’s government would be decertified — everyone would be thrown out of office and the election is run again by the state. (The throwing everyone out of office part may sound extreme, but we do this kind of thing with incompetent school boards all the time.)
This is fundamentally a political problem, but as a nerd I look at this as an information technology problem, and I know a lot of other nerds feel similarly. There have been lots of stories since the 2000 election talking about the inherent security flaws in closed touchscreen voting systems, how companies that make them like Diebold are run by Republican party heavy-hitters, etc. But just saying “no” to what’s going on today is not enough; it’s too easy. We need to come up with our own ideas for making clean elections happen.
It would be nice to have a way to audit votes. That way, no matter how screwed-up the voting procedure becomes, we have a way of figuring out that the vote that goes into the ballot box actually gets counted for who or what the person was voting for.
The main barrier to fixing this problem are the people and institutions who have an interest in preventing people from voting. I’m talking mainly about the GOP, which shamefully opposed sensible initiatives like motor voter in the 1980s and who may attempt to disqualify voters who have been thrown out of their homes due to foreclosure. (News flash: you don’t have to have a residence to vote.)
Imagine that you could call an 800 number or visit a web site on the morning after the election to verify that your vote was counted the way you cast it. Next-day verification wouldn’t totally eliminate the mystery of how (or whether) votes are counted (because it’s possible that the verification system could be compromised as well), but it would go a long way toward increasing voters’ confidence in the system. But the ballot obstructionists probably wouldn’t accept this; they’d make some lame arugument like “people will sell their verifications,” never mind that this kind of thing never happens in the real world. So we need to come up with practices to ensure the integrity of the vote that are immune to these (largely bogus) challenges.
There are at least two ways that I can think of to do ballot verifications that would make it difficult or impossible for people to engage in election malfeasance — ballot hashing and statistical sample audits.
With a ballot hash, every vote you cast would be assigned a random number value. After you’re done voting, you can add up all the numbers to come up with a single value (called a check sum) that represents all your votes. The next day you could call an 800 number or go to a web site to verify your check sum, verifying that the vote you cast was actually counted the way you intended. If the check sum didn’t match, you could challenge it or re-vote. This is the important part — if there’s no way for you to go to city hall and say “stop the tabulation machines, something’s crooked here” this exercise would be pointless. Most importantly, nobody would be able to correlate your check sum to any particular initiative or candidate (and the check sum would be calculated manually by you anyway) so it would be impossible to sell.
Doing a hash would be optional, but if one half of one percent of voters in each precinct did it, it would go a long way toward ensuring the integrity of the system.
A statistical sample audit could also be a good way of verifying whether votes were counted properly. Statistical sampling is how pre-election public opinion polls work today. In a statistical sample audit, a fraction of voters (maybe one-half of one percent) would be designated audit voters. Their ballots wouldn’t look any different than normal ballots so they wouldn’t be treated any differently — until after the votes were counted, when they’d be permitted to go to city hall and manually examine their ballots to ensure they were counted. This would be done in the presence of an official (a ballot worker or maybe a judge), and the auditor wouldn’t be allowed to take their ballot with them to ensure that this didn’t become a vector for vote-selling. If enough ballots weren’t there or the votes didn’t match up, the whole election would be thrown out and redone. This would be a big logistical challenge, maybe not as elegant as the ballot hash, but certainly not insurmountable (particularly in a world in which we see fit to blow away other countries’ governments in the name of democracy).
One logistical “problem” with these ideas is that it would take more than one day to declare a winner of an election. This is a bogus argument, though: nowhere is it written in stone that election day has to last a single day, and rushing the process of voting certainly doesn’t provide a better outcome, as we learned in 2000. At any rate, with the increase in early voting across the country, the traditional notion of election day has already extended to weeks. (We actually voted two weeks ago at City Hall.) Our current tradition of voting on Tuesdays is a dumb holdover from the 19th century when people had to travel in ox-carts to the county seat to cast their vote; as part of an electoral certification process, we should make every state accommodate early and absentee voting as the preferred method of voting and open polls over a two-day period (ideally a Friday/Saturday, so that the 25% of people who said they didn’t vote in 2006 because of work conflicts could do so).
"Yo Voté" by nathangibbs on Flickr
Finally, there is an extremely simple way to ensure that each voter only votes once, and it’s been going on in developing nations around the world for decades. When you vote, you stick your thumb on a stamp pad that stains your thumb purple for a couple of days. That way there’s no question as to whether you’ve voted or not, so you couldn’t vote twice. This would destroy a lot of bogus aruguments pertaining to voter reform, the moronic ACORN fright wig, and much of the nonsense associated with foreclosed homeowners being disenfranchised.
Update: Wired’s Threat Level blog has a story about a small California county that did a ballot audit using optical scanners. Lo and behold, they were able to find a discrepancy of 197 votes between what the machine counted and the correct count, due to a software error.
