Suppose some adult who had never played baseball, even for fun as a kid, was quickly taught the rules and played for a day. How well do you think they would play? Suppose they tried again two years later and then again a few times, each with a two year gap between tries. Do you think they would know what the infield fly rule was, much less be able to hit a pitched ball?
That’s what it’s like for the people who administer the voting machines at the more than 170,000 voting precincts in the US on voting day.
You might say it doesn’t matter, because they’re all skilled computer administrators. Sure. That’s like saying they’re good golfers, so when they walk onto the baseball diamond and stand on the pitcher’s mound, it’s no problem.
The kids who practice hard in Little League play the same game of baseball as the New York Yankees, just at a different level. What if the rules varied dramatically from place to place? What if some places had balls, but the bats were flat and there were wickets, like in Cricket, because each league makes up its own rules?
Even worse, suppose that many leagues decided that physical bats and balls were too old-fashioned, and that they should play video games instead? But each county and state would decide the rules for the video game its administrators would control and make different decisions? This is just like the mess with paper ballots and varying levels of automated counting and voting.
What about the makers of the equipment that was supplied for the game that was played every two years? They would have to carefully understand the updated rules each jurisdiction (county, state) would require and update their sporting equipment and video games to follow the requirements – and get it right the first time so that on game day, it would actually work and the inexperienced administrators wouldn’t screw it up too badly. What small company could manage to address such a semi-custom, always-changing market like this and do it error-free?
You’ve got people without experience playing a game once every two years with a wide variety of radically different, changing equipment made by tiny suppliers. That’s not all!
Suppose the point of this voting equipment is to enable local people all over the country to vote on their favorite baseball players. Suppose that officials in each state, county and town (there are over 3,000 counties and over 89,000 local governments) decided what and who should be on each ballot, and exactly how they should be named. There are local Little League players, players on local adult leagues and several levels of professional teams. Officials at each level control what the names are. Suppose one official decides that the player Mr. Berra should be called “Lawrence Berra.” Another decides he should use a more recognizable name, “Larry Berra.” Another decides that a widely used nickname is best, “Yogi Berra.” When it comes time to add up the votes, there’s a reasonable chance that all three Berras could have vote totals. This may sound like making fun, but it happens often in real life!
People feel strongly about baseball. They root for their home team, and can throw vicious insults at players for rival teams. Suppose it’s voting time for the best players. Fans come into the jurisdictions and vote in whatever way it’s supported. The inexperienced administrator controlling the local version of widely varied, changing equipment is in charge of counting the votes correctly, and other officials at the thousands of higher levels are in charge of summing up the votes they’ve been given for people who aren’t named consistently. This is baseball – the stakes are huge.
To give an idea of the intensity of the feelings, there is a widely read book called “Red Sox Fans Are from Mars, Yankees Fans Are from Uranus: Why Red Sox Fans Are Smarter, Funnier, and Better Looking (In Language Even Yankee Fans Can Understand)” How careful and strictly rule-following do you think the voting administrators in the Bronx and in Boston’s South End are going to be working with their peculiar, rarely-used semi-custom machines to do the counting? Not to mention the county and state-level administrators?
Suppose Yogi Berra isn’t elected a favorite baseball player and fraud is suspected as the reason. What can be done? The natural response is to conduct an audit of the voting that is considered suspicious. The trouble is, none of the systems (or people) involved have complete, secure, unalterable audit trails! Someone could have changed the settings on a paper ballot scanning machine and no one would know. If you tried to audit for the whole state, you’d have to go to the many places scanned paper ballots were kept, set up machines for the different rules in thousands of different towns (who’s on the ballot, where they are and how they’re named). Given the problems with inexperienced people and varied equipment, there will be problems during the audit just as there were during the original tally. Auditing electronic votes is even harder, if it can be done at all. And the audit will certainly take a long time, when everyone reasonably wants accurate results soon after voting closes.
Today’s voting and auditing is a highly suspicious mess for many reasons. Decades of incremental changes haven’t made it better. Can anything be done to achieve true voting integrity?
Yes. High integrity voting with near-real-time results can be achieved, but it requires a revolution in the voting process – not much for voters, but a complete re-start of the voting systems and counting process.
The main points of the new system are:
- Eliminate electronic voting machines. These are costly, widely varying devices that require skilled, accurate, bias-free administration.
- Eliminate paper ballot scanning machines that also count the votes; they are also computer systems requiring setup and administration!
- If people vote at a voting location, they fill out a paper ballot in private. They take the ballot to a screened-off desk and feed it to a scanning machine connected to a simple off-the-shelf computer with screen. After scanning, they see the image on the screen and can verify it’s accurate, or re-scan. The image is then converted to the intended votes which are displayed for confirmation. Upon confirmation, the voter may optionally be given a print-out record of their votes, like a receipt. The voting totals are instantly updated in a multiple secure Clouds.
- If ballots are received in the mail, the process is much the same, except a poll worker does the work at a voting station that isn’t screened off.
- The voting location is continually monitored with security cameras, including all handling of paper ballots, before and after scanning, and when boxed in a storage room. The rule is that ballots can go into the room but they can't be removed.
This revolutionary process eliminates all the local custom equipment and human administrators, with the attendant risk of error and corruption. The new centralized system needs to be designed and administrated carefully to assure effective and secure results.
If the typical government or corporate bureaucracy were in charge of building such a system, we could expect the usual results. But for a small, entrepreneurial group using COTS equipment and software taking an open-source approach with full transparency of results, for example publicly showing vote totals as they were made within seconds, it could be done quickly and rolled out incrementally.
Of course government politicians and bureaucrats would have to support the approach and give up their iron-clad control of the process. But once it was proven in small-scale practice, the only reason to resist would be their support of the existing expensive and fraud-enabling process.
There is a great deal more to be said about how such a system could be implemented, some of which I have described here.
https://www.blackliszt.com/2020/12/how-to-build-a-secure-auditable-voting-system.html
This isn’t the whole story of how to achieve voting integrity. There are the important issues of accuracy of the voting rolls, voter ID and preventing duplicate votes. But a system of this kind would be a big step ahead.
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