Rick Nelson

A technical solution to voting problems?

Is there a technical solution to the vote-counting problems plaguing the Minnesota senatorial election? The problems are spelled out in the Wall Street Journal article “The Minnesota Recount Folly: We've Been Down That Road” by Trent England, director of the Citizenship and Governance Center at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation. He recounts vote tally fluctuations in several counts of ballots cast during Washington State 2004 governor's race. England seems to suggest that some chicanery was involved in obtaining a final vote total that ultimately resulted in his side losing: “Election workers in King County (where Seattle is located) ‘enhanced’ 55,177 ballots to make it easier for tabulating machines to read them…. Nine separate times, King County ‘discovered’ and counted unsecured ballots” (scare quotes around “enhanced” and “discovered” are his).

In response to the article, letter writer John Fallisgaard writes, “An alternative theory as to the inconsistent reproducibility of vote counts might be one of vote counting precision. As any manufacturing person will tell you, there is no perfect production system that guarantees 100% perfection. I suspect the Minnesota voting system has a "design" tolerance no better than 1,000 ppm.” He notes that credit card companies, for example, get better than 1-ppm levels of accuracy and suggests that an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars on information technology might let states set up a similarly accurate election system.

I doubt such a system would provide the accuracy and confidence levels necessary to ensure a fair election even if money were no object. As Fallisgaard notes, credit card transactions are accompanied by multiple feedback mechanisms necessary to ensure accuracy: a paper receipt issued immediately after a transaction at a POS terminal or ATM, and a follow-up monthly statement. An ATM-like voting machine might dispense a paper receipt telling us how our vote was recorded, but there is no guarantee that the machine isn’t maliciously programmed to report a different vote than what’s indicated on the paper receipt. As long as we want to preserve the secret ballot, we don’t exactly want government election officials sending us an end-of-the-month statement—the final feedback mechanism that would indicate whether our vote was accurately recorded—telling us who they think we voted for. A sophisticated IT-based voting system would just replace the opportunity for manual chicanery with programmer chicanery.

On the other hand, given the problems of elections in Florida (2000), Washington (2004), and Minnesota (2008), perhaps, as WSJ letter writer Phyllis Anderson puts it, “Cyber corruption would be a relief at this point.”

Posted by Rick Nelson on January 5, 2009 | Comments (3)