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Analysis: Reforming Political Technology
Our system for electing presidents takes too long, has grown outrageously expensive, and remains technologically primitive. Most ironic of all, the country that helped give birth to the Net administers its political system in an inconvenient, mish-mashed network of ancient and inconvenient systems, confusing methodology and out-of-touch bureaucracies, all right out of the 18th century.
That means it's time to begin moving towards a digital voting system. New electoral technologies don't have to be -- shouldn't be -- rammed down anybody's throat. People who don't want to drive long distances, ponder complex ballots or wait in long lines shouldn't have to. Those who want to use the Net to register and vote ought to be able to do so; those who prefer the current system could keep on using it. Inevitably, the country and it's political processes will become fully wired, as they should be. Science and technology -- however far from infallible -- could also help address some of the other problems surfacing in last week's election fiasco.
Our political media has suddenly discovered voting procedures, and the challenges that have long faced the average voter. We are hearing about poorly-designed ballots, suspicious tabulation delays, endless lines, possible vote fraud. And that's just out of Palm Beach County in Florida, one of the richest communities in the nation. Imagine the potential scandals and sloppiness still lying uncovered in the rest of the country.
It's easy to be cyncical about votes from Chicago cemeteries, but the primary problem may not be political corruption, but technological incompetence. From local municipalities to state legistrators, government has lagged way behind the rest of the country and private industry when it comes to using digital technology to gather and tabulate information. All kinds of institutions, from retailers to universities, can gather certain kinds of information rapidly with at least passable accuracy. Networked digital systems are far from flawless, but they're far more highly evolved than our lumbering electoral process.
It's time -- past time -- to start considering national online registration, voting and tabulation. For safety and accuracy as well as cost, new technologies can be backed up by software, paper and human beings, in much the same way companies like Amazon, L.L. Bean, or for that matter, Microsoft, deal with consumers and online ordering, and double-check identities to confirm purchase and identity.
In an odd way, this election debacle is about voting theory and primitive balloting systems as well as politics. Even the sophisticated predictive polling operations hired by the networks broke down under the strain of a voting operation out of Jefferson's time, not ours.
As badly as we may need campaign finance reform to keep corporate money from polluting politics, we may need technological reform even more. Those punch-a-hole ballots in Florida are ludicrous (19,000 people were disqualified in Broward County alone because they filled out their ballots improperty), and anyone involved in politics knows hundreds of stories all over the country that are as or more horrifying. There are no uniform standards or procedures for collecting and tabulating votes. It's astounding to track reported voting precincts online on sites like Votes.com and Cnn.com, only to be reminded they are dependent on ancient and unreliable tabulation systems in many parts of the country, in this supposed Information Age. Where's that bridge to the 21st century when you need it? If he ends up winning, maybe the Net's Daddy will remember how he almost lost it.
Shouldn't Americans be able to register from their computers at home or work, as well as at government agencies, post offices and other public facilities? With ISPs and now as cheap as cable television service (which reaches the vast majority of Americans), there would be almost no reason not to vote, and tens of millions of citizens could begin participating in the political system. Polling places could be computerized, machines made available to those who can't afford or don't want home computers (much as voting booths are). The results could be tabulated, stored and archived instantly, replacing a patchwork system of paper, punch, machine, computer and mail balloting.
Registrars could e-mail or snail-mail confirmation of registration, and of voting, in the same way many online commercial sites confirm that orders have been placed. If Amazon can do it, can't the federal government?
There are serious about digital politics and online voting, and plenty of technical problems. One of the biggest would be political zealots, crackers and vandals, people breaking into a political system for fun or for uglier motives. It would definitely happen. But hacking a federal election is different from breaking into Microsoft or the New York Yankees' website. Tampering with elections is a felony with serious jail time. There are serious design issues relating to ballots, bond issues and referendums. Aside from that, only about half of the country is yet wired. Millions of people don't yet have computers or know how to use them.
Possibilities of fraud also exist in any system, including the present one. But perhaps voting records could be cross-checked by independent polling entities, or even by official spot-surveys. If irregularities surfaced, officials would investigate.
The system doesn't have to be completely digital, and can be backstopped in various ways . Voters could receive paper registration and voting receipts, either at the polls or by mail. Human beings could spot-check voting patterns, as software programs check for fraud. Teams of programmers and techs could be trained to monitor the system. Computers could randomly check for fraud a lot quicker than elderly volunteers screening neighborhood address lists.
Naturally, there are plenty of questions about e-voting reform. We might examine the experiences of other countries where digital voting technology works, as in some of the Scandanavian or South American countries, who have been experimenting with it for years.
There are also privacy and authentication issues. In many states, citizens simply affirm their identities in order to register. Digital registrants may need passwords, social security numbers, addresses or pseudonyms to protect their voting choices, techniques most Netizens use when they buy things online or access their local paper's Web version. We may need other means of assuring phobic voters that they aren't being monitored improperly. But the truth is, evil-doers could get their hands on paper or machine ballots now if they really wanted to. It's a serious felony, as would be the case with e-voting.
Most Americans have voluntarily agreed to give up some measure of privacy for retailing convenience. Will they be willing to take some risks to use technology to reform voting? Or should citizens be given a choice of digital and paper voting? As more and more functions, from filing for divorce to renewing licenses, become digitized, online voting and registration seem more feasible. Web-page design and architecture has evolved to the point where election choices might be clearer than on those Palm Beach or other confusing ballots. Write-in votes and absentee ballots can also be transmitted online or, when computers aren't available, by paper or e-mail. A new system doesn't have to be absolute. It can simply take advance of new technology to organize a process that seems tailor-made for the Net, which is all about moving point-to-point information quickly.
There's no question there's potential for mistakes and abuse, for manifold technical difficulties. But that possibility clearly exists now, as "Decision 2000" showed, or in any system devised by human beings. Certainly digital polling would work better than those Palm Beach ballot cards.
Beyond the nuts and bolts of counting votes, the larger question of what a vote should consiste of is also up for grabs. The Internet, mathemeticians Donald Saari and Steven Brams argue in a Discover magazine piece, is a natural laboratory for testing alternative voting methods. Six scientific societies in America use a method called "approval voting," they report, most notably the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
Approval voting, which Brams favors, dates to the 13th Century, when Venetians used it to help elect leaders. In an approval vote, Saari explains, a person casts one vote for every candidate he or she considers qualified for the office, rather than just one. The voting is conducted much like a survey or an opinion poll, except the results are calculated to determine the winner. If this year's election had been decided by an approval vote in February, John McCain would be president, by a comfortable margin, since for much of the year more Americans approved of him than the two candidates who eventually led their tickets.
Saari advocates an election method called the Borda count election, in which each voter ranks all of the candidates from top to bottom. If there are five candidates, then a voter's leading candidate gets 5 points, his second-ranked candidate gets 4, etc. In the end, the points are added up to determine the winner. The Borda count, once used in the Roman Senate, was named after a French physicist and American Revolutionary War hero named Jean-Charles deBorda. This method is used to rank college football and basketball teams.
Neither one is likely to take root in the U.S. anytime soon, but in the wake of the current outcry about the role of the electoral college, perhaps systems like these deserve greater consideration.
It's increasingly likely that the uncertainty and confusion over this election will go on for weeks, even months. It's ironic and appalling that the country which has produced the most sophisticated information technology network in world history can't even count up the votes that will determine its most important asset, its own political system.
This has the effect of rendering all Jon's questions somewhat meaningless and replacing his answers with more questions. I think that's a useful effect...
Jon appears to be advocating a sort of populist control of authority- the classic 'vote in your pajamas' scenario. While the problem of political corruption is serious, I'd like to look for a second at some of the underlying assumptions- primarily, the assumption of a hierarchical authority.
If it is possible for invidivuals to specify their values so directly through technological means, might it be possible for this to take the place of hierarchical authority? True anarchism is not simply the destruction of government but a school of thought resisting _all_ imposed authority, governmental, economic and social: for this reason it is always somewhat socialist, for this reason it cannot be considered outside of a community.
Slashdot discussions are anarchy of communications, because while CmdrTaco and the Slashdot staff make the site available, in practice you do not have to get permission to speak- though an amount of authority still persists, it is far from what you'll find on a news.com or msn.com. "Permission" is a key concept to anarchy: it's not an abstract hypothesis for how to set up constant Darwinian struggle, it is a concept for community guidelines, and the question to ask is 'Whose permission must I get in order to do this?'
- Whose permission must I get in order to make a post to slashdot?
- Whose permission must I get in order to walk down the street?
- Whose permission must I get in order to open a store?
- Whose permission must I get in order to mug passersby?
- Whose permission must I get in order to run an Internet server?
- Whose permission must I get in order to buy a pair of shoes?
- Whose permission must I get in order to listen to music?
- Whose permission must I get in order to distribute music that I didn't compose?
- Whose permission must I get in order to distribute music that is mine?
Plainly, for some of those actions there's going to be resistance from the community- permission to mug community members is not likely to be forthcoming even from an anarchist community, which may be a surprise to some! At the same time, this question reveals the power structures behind many current systems, and it's not always a pretty sight. For instance, if you wish to make a business selling productivity software to as many people as possible, you need to get the government's permission, sure (and it's largely a formality and some taxation) but you also need to get Microsoft's permission. Without it they will use their power to deprive you of resources and render you unable to conduct business.If you produce music, you need the RIAA labels' permission to distribute it widely, as they have a lock on distribution- except that the internet has undercut this radically! To the anarchist community the idea of 'distribution without permission' has to be more exciting all by itself than the typical corollary of 'damaging record company income'. The record company income is not itself a problem- the fact that you have to get permission from their authority in order to access mass media _is_. If Microsoft seized control of online music so that it was all totally costless and administrated through special 'MS content producer accounts', it would be just as repugnant to anarchist thought even though MS is not (quite) government: in this event you would, practically, have to seek permission from Microsoft in order to distribute media.
In this light, it's interesting to look at Katz's questions again: what is being established and why? He is arguing for technology-implemented direct manipulation of authority- yet the authority we have in the USA is based on a concept of public servants, not a concept of fascism or divine rule. This is the strongest argument I can see for what Jon is advocating- the authority we have is in essence community facilitation on a large scale, and only as hierarchical as it is because technology hasn't permitted anything more decentralised.
It may be possible to use technology in the service of community to approximate the anarchist ideal as it intersects with the American Dream: one day the state I live in, Vermont, might (for instance) reject the authority of the RIAA and DMCA and force them to negotiate from a position of equality, rather than an IP-derived position of assumed authority. One thing is for sure- using technology, it becomes much more practical to ascertain the status of USE: it may be difficult to search for 'patent information' denoting the property of ideas, but it's easy to search for usage information. Since usage rights are central to anarchist thought (as a community-derived replacement for hierarchical authority) it's plainly handy to be able to quickly access all information about how a thing is used- something that has historically been a lot more subjective.
But that said, here's some standards *I* would like to see, assuming that they can even be implemented, which I have my doubts about.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Motherjones suggests The United States needs International Election Observers like any other Banana Republic. Given that the Republican districts in Florida primarily used OptiScan systems which show significantly less error than the Punch Card Systems used in primarily Democrat area such as Palm Beach county, one wonders if this was just one of many approaches used to skew election results. There have been many accusations from Florida regarding voting irregularities, from a previous Republican mayoral candidate who had a an election overturned from absentee ballot fraud who was involved in an "Get out the vote" absentee ballot vote drive, to a large number of allegations regarding voter intimidation and outright fraud. Welcome to the United States, where we citizens don't have the right to vote unless we agree with the decision of our power brokers.
This just disgusts me.
But the regions that have common issues are usually NOT state-wide, and certainly aren't in the same place as the state boundaries. Let's take the PNW as an example, as I live there, too.
Western Washington has MUCH more in common with Western Oregon than with Eastern Washington.
Also, the regions that have REAL issues are usually not as large as a state would be, even IF those state regions were homogenous. Puget Sound has issues completely different than those of, say, Portland/Vancouver. And even smaller than that - Seattle versus the 'East Side' - very different issues.
If you look at how people voted during the election - there were major differences by region even within the small states, yet all you see is the total of the EC votes for that state going to one candidate or the other.
The United States may have started out as a conglomeration of states, true, but it's over 200 years later, and things are VASTLY different now. Implementing laws (say, gun control) in one state and not all is pretty ridiculous - people will (and have) just go over the state border and bring them back in. Same thing for state-by-state abortion laws, etc. The age where a 'state' in this country really made sense is long, LONG gone.
...and completely negate the idea of a secret ballot. great.
By "ID", I mean the same ID you get on ballots in many places today: a unique number, on both the ballot and a tear-off stub, which could (in theory) be used for you to verify that your vote was counted correctly.
Imagine how much harder election fraud would be, if, instead of each district reporting "16,835 people voted for Gore", each district put a text file online saying:
PLMBCH000001 went to Gore.
PLMBCH000002 went to Bush.
PLMBCH000003 went to Buchanan.
A letter to the editor I wrote to Discover:
I just finished reading your recent article, "May the Best Man Lose".
The author unfortunately underestimates one of the greatest weaknesses of the plurality system, and so fails to realize that this weakness applies nearly as strongly to the Borda count: both voting systems encourage voters to lie!
Of course, the media today doesn't call strategic voting "lying", they call it "not wasting your vote". It is considered standard practice to give your vote not to the candidate you prefer, but to the poll-leading candidate you dislike least.
This practice would not change under a Borda count system. Voters who prefer Nader to Browne to Gore to Bush will still be encouraged to vote for Gore above either Nader or Browne, because that way they will add 3 points to the separation between the leading candidates rather than 1 point, and their vote will have almost three times the impact in the election.
Strategic voting makes independent and third-party candidates nearly irrelevant, and gives the Democrats and Republicans a chokehold on politics. That bipartisan chokehold, by the way, is why we may very well soon see a constitutional amendment to eliminate the electoral college, but we will never see a superior system of voting replace the plurality system. The electoral college is much less damaging to our democracy (and had less of a detrimental effect in this presidential election) than the plurality system, but removing the electoral college will result in only a minor power shift from the Democrats towards the Republicans; changing the plurality system would result in a major power shift away from both.
I was surprised to see that one important voting system was not even mentioned in your article: Instant Runoff. In that system, voters rank their candidates by preference. If no candidate has a majority of first place votes, the candidate with the fewest first place votes is removed from consideration, and from the rankings of voters who voted for him. (i.e. if Alice's second place choice was dropped, then her third place choice becomes her new second, her fourth becomes her new third, etc.) Once a candidate has a majority of first place votes, that candidate wins. The results are not guaranteed to equal Borda count results, but they often will. I don't think strategic voting is impossible, but it's a lot harder.
> The popular vote vs the electoral college.
> I mean, come on! 100Million people >vote, one candidate has a majority, and he's >facing the distinct possibility of losing by less
> than 500 votes in a single state?
The time to address this is *before*, not *after* the election. The campaign and election were held under the framework of the electorate. You can't just change the rules now without starting over. And there are bigger problems with that than most people consider. For instance, where does the money come from? The electoral college is a great
way to give a voice to states with less population. You think little old ladies in Florida are a problem now? Wait until the suggestion that farmers in Iowa give up some of their political power takes hold. You'll see plowshares beaten into swords before that happens.
> No universal ballot
> Some one tell me again why >presidential ballots aren't designed by the >federal government, and are allowed to be >different
> everywhere?
That's the way it ought to be. It vastly increases the complexity of any attempt to control an election. Consider that the federal government that you would put in charge of the election will always be controlled by the incumbent party -- the
challenging party cannot ever regard this as fair. We have state boundaries and state governments and state laws for very good reasons. Are you suggesting that we do away with statehoods? That notion has led to significant bloodshed in the past. States' rights and sovreignty are considered by many to be among the most important freedoms.
All the people who support the integrity of the Constitution when it comes to the 1st amendment seem to be willing to wipe their asses with it when other parts of it don't make them happy.
Just because something seems to make sense in the midst of a crisis does not mean it is a better approach. Do people not realize that there would be potential problems with any other system of voting?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Our system for electing presidents takes too long. Rubbish. Under normal circumstances it does NOT take long. This happens to be a very close election with an increasing amount of political fighting instigated by a poor loser (that would be Gore).
the country that helped give birth to the Net administers its political system in an inconvenient, mish-mashed network of ancient and inconvenient systems, confusing methodology and out-of-touch bureaucracies, all right out of the 18th century.
This is an adequate example of Katz's historical myopia. If it's older than he is, it can't be any good -- or so says Katz. Of course this is pure nonsense. Katz has no problem with that good 'ol "ancient" First Amendment, though.
What part of a punch card system comes from the 18th century, Katz? Which modern American bureaucracy dates from the 18th century, Katz?
Science and technology -- however far from infallible -- could also help address some of the other problems surfacing in last week's election fiasco.
This is laughable. Everyone in the Gore campaign is sputtering and fuming about the errors and failures in Florida, and Katz wants to replace it with...another fallible system! What a "brilliant" idea! Note to Katz: fallible sytems fail. That's why they're fallible. Absent physical data as we have now, exactly how would we verify an election if we were to go to a digital election system as you so blithely recommend?
We are hearing about poorly-designed ballots Baloney. That ballot was NOT, NOT, NOT poorly designed. As has been demonstrated in various news reports, 2nd graders have been able to successfully fill that ballot out. Whining about that ballot after the fact is pure sour grapes. The ballot was designed by Democrats, approved by Democrats, and sent in advance to every registered voter in the county. No complaints. If these whiners really did screw up, they were a) incompetent (because it was NOT hard to fill out that ballot), and b) unworthy of the privilege of voting, because they failed to exert even a tiny bit of energy to get help with it at the time they were voting -- which shows the contempt in which they held their privilege.
And that's just out of Palm Beach County in Florida, one of the richest communities in the nation. Imagine the potential scandals and sloppiness still lying uncovered in the rest of the country.
In Katz's demented worldview, having less money implies carelessness about a solemn privilege. He has no evidence for such an assertion, but he makes it nonetheless. I'm sure the poor would be pleased to hear about this.
Networked digital systems are far from flawless, but they're far more highly evolved than our lumbering electoral process.
Katz doesn't really care whether the process is error-free; he just wants more "highly evolved" errors. Great, Katz.
As badly as we may need campaign finance reform to keep corporate money from polluting politics,...
We don't need any such thing. It's called "Freedom of Speech", Katz. See that First Amendment you love so much.
There are no uniform standards or procedures for collecting and tabulating votes.
Katz assumes that if the national government inflicts national standards on everyone, then we won't have problems with the election system we use. Dumb, Katz. Dumb.
they are dependent on ancient and unreliable tabulation systems in many parts of the country
So Katz would replace them with...new and unreliable tabulation systems? Great, Katz. No thanks.
There are serious about digital politics and online voting, and plenty of technical problems. One of the biggest would be political zealots, crackers and vandals, people breaking into a political system for fun or for uglier motives. It would definitely happen. But hacking a federal election is different from breaking into Microsoft or the New York Yankees' website. Tampering with elections is a felony with serious jail time.
Katz is also terminally naïve. Even though there is all sorts of computer crime going on even as we speak, and even though people commit felonies all the time, he thinks that crackers would be scared off of tampering with a computerized election. Wake up and smell the reality, Katz.
Approval voting, which Brams favors, dates to the 13th Century,
But Katz! That's "ancient!" You don't really mean that, do you??? What hypocrisy.
Katz, you fancy yourself an informed critic, but you are desperately far from being informed at all. The shallowness of your historical perspective is simply appalling. You far too readily condemn systems and ideas that have stood the test of centuries, in favor of the latest modern fad. Hint, Katz: there's nothing new under the sun. Your "ideas" have been done, and we don't use them because they don't work.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Don't pretend that this somehow justifies us overturning the results of a lawfully conducted and lawfully counted election! This is a motivation for overhauling the system in the future, not for overturning what has already been lawfully done. ex post facto, dude.
Again, arbitrarily inserting words in my mouth. Thanks for your input. Election law requires that a voter exercise due care and give due attention to the process of executing their vote. You can argue until the cows come home about what constitutes an "adequate diligence" and whatnot, but it seems to me that we're stooping pretty low on this one; call me elitist if you want, but this is the kind of decision lawmakers and judges make daily, and many of them set a much higher bar for "due diligence" and "appropriate care" than I would. And it worries me that "elitism" is (once again) being used as an inflammatory mark against those who disagree with the political ends some wish to see accomplished.I do not disagree with you that there may be room for improvement in the layout and format of ballots - in Palm Beach County and at large. I would love to see computerized voting stations printing out bar-coded hard copy ballots, so we have a physical ballot count to validate the computer count. But as a matter of present case law, there is no right to ballots being a "perfect user interface", and as a matter of present statutory law the election was conducted properly, and as a matter of constitutional law we are able to redress concerns raised by this election (that, if they're such a big deal, should have been raised and addressed long ago) for the purposes of future elections.
The fact that 19K ballots were discarded in the presidential tally for double-punching is not a surprise - because it happens every time there's a presidential election in PBC! (1996 it was 16K IIRC.) Why is it that only after the fact, when it became apparent that Gore was going to lose, did these thousands of people turn up, hell-bent on telling the world that they screwed it up? If they're so certain, why didn't they address the problem at the appropriate time, when they were in the polling location casting their vote? Why is the system unfair now, after the fact, when all the mechanisms were in place at the appropriate time to address their confusion? You can't change the rules after the game has been played - remember the ex post facto clause in the Constitution?
The only answer I've heard anyone make is "I was too embarassed to ask for help". Which is not surprising given the pride and snootiness that permeates much of PBC. But find 19K (mostly Democrat) friends who made the same undeniably stupid mistake and it's not embarassing any more?
I'll probably get marked as flaimbait for saying this, not to mention ruin my chances of ever getting elected to public office in PBC, but I'm getting tired of seeing so much pandering to this kind of irresponsibility and foolishness.
The ACM Risks Forum ("Risks Digest") has lately been full of talk about elections, vote-counting, and electronic voting. Most notable is this item:
Security of electronic voting in public elections
which contains many pointers to discussions on the topic of "net voting". Also see issues 21.11 and 21.12, which contain some interesting comments on the current recounts going on in Florida and whether machine counting is more or less accurate than hand counting (spoiler: Peter Neuman and Lauren Weinstein disagree with the Bush campaign's contention that machine counting is more accurate).
--Jim
Never happen.
Why? It would require an amendment, which requires a 2/3 state vote to pass. There is no way in hell any of the small states would do that (since they get a boost from the EC). That would be like voting to lessen the impact of their voice. With a straight popularity contest, all a candidate would have to do is woo FL, CA, NY, and TX, and to hell with those other insignificant states.
Finkployd
In 1996, 16,000 Palm Beach County ballots were discarded. In 2000, of the 19,000 ballots, only a small percentage were discarded due to multiple presidential votes. As a resident of West Palm, I have yet to hear from ANY of my friends or family (Republican or Democrat) who found the election difficult. Long, yes. Mechanically difficult, no.
The people crying fraud out my friggin office window seem to be blissfully unaware that a Democrat designed and another Democrat approved the ballot. Where's the fraud?
On another topic, on Friday night, a whole bunch of us went down to the protest with signs like "Vote for J.R. "Bob" Dobbs", "fnord", "Garage Sale", and a blank, black poster board. You can see us behind the announcer on CNN and on Larry King Live. :) Tonight, I'm going to carry a "First Post" sign.
--
Evan (Long dark hair in a neat ponytail, dark trimmed beard, glasses. On Friday, we were on the Bush side of the street)
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
> The ballot followed the procedures outlined by law for laying out a ballor
Not. See this note on jurist, and read the part about allegations of a confusing ballot. IANAL, but it certainly sounds like the ballot does not conform to the requirements of Floridian state law.
> Instead, the dems us ed a telemarketing firm to stir the pot and get people to complain when it became apparent they they weren't going to win Florida.
Actually, the problem was reported long before the outcome of the election was clear. By 11:24 AM Florida time, there had already been enough complaints to prompt a FAX from the DNC to contact county officials, asking them to post a clarification. A note was then distributed by the county to the actual voting sites, arriving mostly between 1:00 and 2:00 PM. (I have seen at least once source claiming that the clarification never did reach all the sites.)
See th is Salon article for a pretty good review of the situation, including a link to a scan of the memo.
Also, now that a bit of information about the disqualified ballots is finally leaking out, it turns out that there was indeed a high fraction of Gore+Buchanan punches (over 2x the number of Gore+Bush punches, IIRC).
It is at best misleading for you to portray the current dispute as a post hoc attempt by the Democrats to throw a fair election.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Ironically, the state that has a reputation for being one of the most technologically backward states in the nation, my adopted home state of Louisiana, has one of the most technologically advanced voting systems.
In Louisiana, the voting is 100% digital. With the exception of absentee ballots, no vote ever touches a paper ballot, its all done electronically.
Here's how it works:
The voting machines contain an embedded computer and consist of a panel that is a programmable array of pushbuttons and LED's.
A PC software application programs the machine, assigning the buttons and LED's to certain functions, and the same application prints out a paper overlay, that they actually call a "ballot" that is placed over the button and LED array on the voting machine.
The paper overlay contains detailed instructions and the names of candidates. A black square is printed on the overlay above each active button. An arrow points from the candidates name to his/her assigned button. When the button is pressed, a green LED directly behind the arrow lights up. The LED shows through the paper at the arrow, and confirms the selection.
Any selection can be cleared and re-entered as many times as desired. When the voter is happy with his/her selections, he/she presses a "cast ballot" button that registers the selections in Flash EEPROM.
When the polls close, all the machines are taken to regional collection centers where their data ports are plugged into collection computers that spool the votes out of the machines and directly into an Oracle data base. With the exception of omitting an entire machine (or precinct!), no human error is possible, it's 100% electronic.
This is a far cry from that system in Florida where 19th century technology mechanical machines count punched holes using rotating wheels with mechanical metal feelers! Each time a ballot is run through one of these machines there is a risk that additional punch-outs will fall out, rendering that ballot invalid.
And hand counting, give me a break! Studies have shown that reasonably intelligent and diligent human beings can't even sort white marbles and black marbles from one another once they have been overcome with the monotony of sorting several thousand! It surely would be even worse staring at hundreds of thousands of ballots with little holes punched in them!
Louisiana's system is a huge step in the right direction and should be a model to the other states with more primitive systems. Throughout the 20th century, Louisiana was a national laughing stock due to continuous allegations of voter fraud. They've made it a priority to start out the next century with a robust solution. I think they're doing an excellent job in that regard.
I disagree with almost all this analysis. The problem in Florida is that the voting method is too high-tech, not too low-tech. The machines can't count valid ballots correctly because the chad wasn't always punched out fully.
In the UK, we vote with pen and paper, and they're all counted manually. The system is transparent, and so has public confidence. It only takes a few hours to count all the votes.
If you vote by computer, how can you ensure public confidence in the outcome? How can you refute allegations of 'hacking'? How can you recount if you need to?
I do agree about the need for electoral reform, but that's not likely to happen because of the difficulty of amending the Constitution. (The only change which could happen is states allocating electoral college votes in proportion to their popular votes, but even that's unlikely because states gain from being able to swing a large electoral college vote).
One other factor which I've not seen mentioned in the extensive coverage the last few days is, why are the electoral officials themselves elected? The electoral officials should be non-partisan civil servants, otherwise people won't have confidence in the impartiality of their decisions.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
Pen/paper/punch ballots are the SIMPLEST form of voting out there. Could you imagine when everything is on computer, and the server goes down? watch complexity rise to a near-infinite level as they scramble to put back what was discarded.
Then you add in the 3r337 h4x0rz and you are in for a world of hurt, reliability issues with the outcome become of paramount concern.
The "complexity" of the WPB ballot came from ignorance on the part of the voters. And who said that those 19,000 ballots didn't include those who voted correctly after realising a mistake. And why would either side double-punch those ballots? Those are the questions, and they all too often come up this century..
Lowmag.net
One of the critical concepts in the american voting system is anonymity. The current system, for all its flaws, achieves this. They know that I voted, but they don't know who I voted for. This was done because people in power (at any level: bosses, politicians, even husbands) were able to force people to vote one way or another by retaliating if someone voted "incorrectly."
A lot of the "vote on the internet" stuff that you see doesn't have this anonymity. Electronic booths to replace the levers and punchcards are a good idea. Voting booths that might permit traceable votes aren't. If we're worried about people making it to the polls, we need to look at the absentee ballot handling (Oregon has a fantastic system for this) and perhaps we should declare voting day a national holiday and strongly discourage businesses from remaining open.
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Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
There are many problems with election fraud that we don't see because we've developed voting methods that work to counteract them. These methods don't work with online voting. Do you really want to take the risk of huge amounts of voting fraud? I don't.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
This technology is from the 70s.
When I first voted in 1980 in Delaware, they had mechanical voting machines. You pulled levers inside a booth and it advanced mechanical dials indicating who was voted for. At the end of the day, those results would be phoned in, the machines locked up, and the results later certified by officials checking the dials.
Now we have computerized voting machines. Loud audible tones are heard when a poll worker sets it up for a vote, the watchers hear this so they can be assured no one gets more than one vote, the voter goes inside a booth and presses buttons to indicate who to vote for. You can change your mind and unselect it, all candidates chosen are lit up by bright red LEDs and those races where you haven't voted have a reminder LED blinking.
The votes are recorded into a cartridge and also into the machine. At the end of the day, the cartridge is somehow uploaded to a central place and the machine itself folds down into a self-carrier that can be sealed for later reverification if needed.
From what I can gather, the system also advances analog counter dials as a backup if the electronic part fails. (I couldn't get near the rear of the machine at my polling place but at a friend's poll I tagged along to, I was actually able to wait for her by sitting behind one of the machines and checking it out visually!)
In a primary election this past September, the two Republican governors were within 44 votes of each other. A recount was quickly done and lo and behold, the result was again 44 votes.
These computerized machines have been in use for about 6 years. When is the rest of the country going to catch up?
Ballots: For reasons which should be obvious to all. Whether the Palm Beach County ballot was "simple" or "confusing" appears to be a matter of whose party you support.
By standardizing the ballot, we could ensure that these allegations are no longer an issue, and that if a usability issue becomes a problem, at least the effects are uniform across the state.
(I'd argue that if we go to an electronic system, the order in which the candidates are presented should be randomized on a per-voter basis.)
Process: The more important issue to me would be standardizing the process whereby votes are counted or recounted.
This election is likely to turn on chad - bits of paper from punch cards that either fall out of the card or remain attached by a corner.
That's bad. But at least chad affects both candidates identically. Or does it?
Ballots Again: An election in which voters in heavily-FOO counties vote with #2B pencils, and voters in heavily-BAR counties punch cards (with attendant risk of "chad" not being counted by the counting machines) will skew the results for FOO.
Indeed, even if we use the same technology (say, "fill in the dot with the pencil"), but FOO-county voters use #2B pencils, and BAR-county voters use #2H (hard) pencils, the lighter markings produced by the "hard" pencils will lead to a higher "uncounted" rate, and a skew to candidate FOO.
Process Again:Because the Bush team screwed up and didn't demand a recount in heavily-Republican counties (and the deadline passed on Friday), and Gore was smart enough to demand a recount in four heavily-Democratic counties, votes in those four counties count more than votes in other counties.
(Which is to say that while the "old farts" in Palm Beach may have been "stupid" if they couldn't tell Gore from Buchanan, the Bush team made an even dumber mistake - effectively giving the election away because they didn't understand how the mechanical technologies of the voting machines affected the results. The "old farts" can be excused. The guys who are being paid millions to run a campaign can't ;-)
But because our ballots aren't standard, it's possible that votes in heavily-Republican counties may not even have used a punch-card system. If that's the case, then votes in Republican counties count more (by about 0.001%), and Gore's just evening the score.
(Evidence: The fact that almost all counties show an "uptick", not a "downtick" in the number of votes cast, and that the hand recount in the four precincts last week showed a 33:14 advantage for Gore, in line with the ~2:1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans in that county.)
So because the laws call for recounts, but don't specify how the recount must be conducted on a statewide basis - it's up to each county to decide - both teams have the option of calling for recounts until they get the result they want, leading to a crisis of legitimacy (in the minds of the people, even if not in the eyes of the law) if the results differ.
Bottom line: How to make sure this never happens again.
If all voters in Florida used the same ballot and ballot-marking technology, there would be no controversy over whether "a misleading ballot in one county" could swing the result:
If all counties in Florida were required to use the same ballot-counting technology, there would be no controversy (the issue hasn't surfaced in the press, but it's clearly a possibility) over whether the counting technology could skew the results.
Finally, if all counties in Florida were required to use the same recounting technology, and agree to it in advance of the recount, we wouldn't be having the flurry of lawsuits we see today.
The voting technology, default counting process, and recounting process (including number of recounts) must be laid down in law, and must be laid down before the vote is taken.
(The reason for that should be obvious - it appears that old Republicans had no trouble with the Palm Beach County ballot, but old Democrats had trouble with it. It appears that Republicans think hand counts are a great idea in Texas, but fraught with inaccuracy in Florida. It appears that Democrats think that a machine recount is adequate for all counties in Florida except for the four most havily-Democratic ones.)
The only thing that's certain now is that all parties involved have lost sight of what's at issue - what constitutes a fair recount. "Fair" has ceased to be an issue of ensuring uniform error rates across the state and between candidates, and has been redefined by both sides as "that which may give our candidate the lead".
The problem with the punched card system is NOT that it is low-tech. The problem is that it buries the processing behind a wall, where cheating can take place and be undetectable.
It already WAS a "high-tek" replacement for paper ballots. And the problems we see now are exactly the problems we'd see in spades with a more electronified solution.
Katz says you don't have to ram a new system down people's throats. But you DO ram the results down their throats. That's the nature of elections. They'll only swallow them if they believe in the system. But they've seen how computers can go wrong, and now they've seen how punched cards can go wrong. So don't bet on them EVER accepting a netified election.
"Pay the Two Dollars!" Count the bloody ballots.
(It's a LOT better than counting the bloody bodies after the people stop trusting the elections and go back to pre-election methods of conflict resolution.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Electoral College is there for a reason: To keep a few states with large populations from running roughshod over the bulk of the states.
Go to any news site and look at the election map. (Here for instance.) This election is EXACTLY what the electoral college is INTENDED to address.
Further: The partitioning of the vote into states limits the ability of a corrupt political machine in one big state to swing the election. With it a cheater can only capture the electors of his state - which MIGHT swing the election, but only if the other states split just right. Without it his fake votes could swamp the genuine voters any time the election is at all close. And we'd be recounting the WHOLE COUNTRY, not just a few counties or a couple states.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Technology is an handy baton to wave, but I don't think the most severe problems in our electoral system are technological. Even if every voter in this country had a trusted-ASIC smartcard reader and a token shipped to them (which they manifestly don't), you would still have to cope with issues like the inconvenience of registration, human duplicity, and collusion/coercion.
Rather than try to graft cryptography on top of the voting process, I would rather see human reforms. For example:
1) The notion of voter registration is quaintly arranged to make voting more convenient for the government and the parties in power, not more convenient for the voters. Let's figure out a more efficient way to check the validity of a voter's identify at the polls, and scrap the idea of registration before voting day.
2) If campaign money is speech (Buckley vs Valejo!) then my voice is being drowned out by the roar of corporate cash. Let's investigate public financing so that we know in advance who has bought the candidates - us!
3) Just exactly why isn't voting day a national holiday?!?
Technology can help us solve our problems, but it's important to realize that voting in America is defective in ways that go far beyond mere ballot mechanics.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Much better would be Instant Runoff Voting, which still can be manipulated by strategic voting, but not nearly as much as the Borda Count or a simple majority. The best solution would theoretically be Condorcet voting, but remember that this is America. Not so many Americans would be able to grasp the concept of how a Condorcet vote is tallied. Then again, CNN could make a killing making pretty illustrations of the results.
The other system Katz recommends is approval voting, which is simply dumbed-down IRV. And someone who doesn't grasp the concept of ranking candidates in order of preference is probably voting for the candidate whose hair they like best.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
That ballot design is not a new one, if memory serves; it's also been used in Chicago, as Mr. Daley is no doubt aware. In addition, 4-5% isn't that high of a discard rate, for PBC or elsewhere...
And, FWIW, Gore only called for hand counts in certain Democratic counties. That introduces additional inaccuracies in the margin, which is what matters, since hand counting is biased towards finding additional votes. The ONLY fair hand-recount is a statewide hand recount with uniform standards (e.g. standards for dealing with chad), and where each ballot is handled a minimum number of times (because this can loosen chad).
It's analogous to rolling 200 fair six-sided dice, rerolling all the dice that showed 1 or 2, then re-rolling those that still show 1 or 2, and then reporting that the dice have an average of 4.8 or whatever instead of 3.5. Any self-respecting statistician would die of laughter.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Think there's a problem with people buying/selling votes now? Just wait until people can do so in the privacy of their own home. As it stands, there is no way for a vote buyer to ensure that the seller did, in fact, vote according to the agreement -- only one person in a booth at a time. The same security cannot be had in a non-seclusioned voting environment.
Katz argues that people shouldn't have to drive long distances to vote, so they should be able to vote in their own homes, electronically. There just isn't enough security this way. I guess, IMHO, the ideal voting scheme is electronically, in a private booth, where you may have to drive a long distance.
sig: sauer
Who would have thought that Gore would beat Bush in a popularity contest, or that Bush would beat Gore in a college?
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Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
"The country that helped invent the most technologically advanced information network in world history can't eliminate bureaucratic lines, create simple ballots, or tally up the votes that will determine the future of its own government."
Could this have anything to do with the fact that the country has nothing to do with it, it's up to the individual states? Don't tread on me...
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
A system in which strategic voting is really hard is Condorcet voting. In Condorcet voting, strategy is only possible when the public prefers A to B, B to C, and C to A, and even then, it's tricky. Condorcet also satisfies many rigorous fairness criteria that instant runoff (and other methods) fail.
While it is important to realize the problems with simple majority voting, it is also important not to fall into another, less obvious, snare, like Borda or instant runoff. Instead, look at the results of hard logical and mathematical analysis. People who study this generally agree on Condorcet. (There are some variations, so to be precise, they agree on the basic idea.) See electionmethods.com or other sites
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Secondly, all this talk about thousands of people claiming they were confused is a fraud. It has just been discovered today that Al Gore's people hired a telemarketing firm to call thousands of Gore-friendly voters (in those close Florida districts we are hearing about) on election night, asking them to complain about confusing ballots. Over 5,000 people were called by that firm in the first 45 minutes, once the decision was made to start making a stink about the election.
All these "disenfranchized" voters picketing the streets in Florida is a total lie. Every one of those people is a Gore activist trying to reverse the loss of their favorite candidate, regardless of the legitimate outcome.
The democrats now claim to have somehwere around 8,000 sworn statements from people who think they accidentally voted for Buchannan, even though he only got about 3,500 votes in the disputed district.
The ballot that Jesse Jackson is waiving around and calling unfair is the same style as was used to elect his son in Chicago.
This ain't about a poor election system, folks. It is about a PR campaign to undermine the nations confidence in the process which left Al Gore on the losing side.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Nobody complained to Wexler until Gore's people had a telemarketing firm call 5000 Democrats in that district, asking them to put up a fuss. This is not a groundswell we are seeing, but the spin of a Politcal Action Committee. (...and I'm sure Senator Wexler knew it, too.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The reason pure democracy is dangerous and would take away more freedoms than a republic is because it is simply mob rule. A republic can shield some of the smaller groups from the majority when they are wrong. A good example is racism. In the past, minority groups were not treated equal with the majority. It doesn't mean all American white people were bad then, just that they had looked at minorities (even other whites such as the Irish immigrants) as 2nd class people. If you were black/native american/irish/chinese/etc would you really want to be alive back then if they had a pure democracy? I sure wouldn't. It's only because it was more of a representive form of government that we were able to gain the freedoms for the minority groups. If we were in a democracy now, we would all eat at McDonalds, shop at Walmart, be Christian, pass laws that fear technology like computers, but use it to lease movies to watch on our MPAA approved DVD players, we would close the borders from those evil foreigners from Mexico China and India that want to come here to be citizens, and we would be even more sheep than we are now.
If you have ever been any part of any minority group (even the "geeks" Katz is always bitching for) you would know that mob rule such as democracy destroys freedom of choice and freedom to have different opinions. Democracy is a dangerous thing. It is the cousin of communism and I hope to never live in a country that is a pure democracy. I don't want laws passed against me to infringe on my constitutional rights.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
As I see it, the main problem is that balloting is controlled by each individual county. Lacking a common standard to which to conform, counties are free to invest as little as they can get away with. For many, this means that they end up using decades-old machines employing a century-old technology. For others, it means hand-marked paper ballots. Another factor is bureaucratic inertia ("we've always done it this way and it works fine"). I don't favor a national law forcing a uniform method (it would probably not be constitutional anyway), but it would be a great start to have each state come up with a modern standard, and have each county conform. It would cost money, but the present mess makes it clear that it would be money well spent.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no