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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.
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.
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.
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!