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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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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!
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
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.
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.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no