Transparent and Verifiable

Because the country has been so deeply divided the past five or six years, and that divide has reached chasm proportions, elections have tended to be acrimonious both during the campaign and after the ballots have been counted. Both the 2000 and 2004 elections were close, so close that the former required Supreme Court intervention, and the latter is still being litigated in Ohio and Washington.

Democrats feel that both presidential elections were stolen. Republicans believe that the Washinton gubernatorial election was stolen. The means used for the larceny? Ballots: the actual, individual votes and the way in which they were counted (or not counted).

Congress responded to the outcry over the 2000 election by passing the "Help America Vote Act of 2002." Hanging chads, dimpled ballots a problem? Well, we'll go to electronic voting machines and give the states the quatloos to buy those Diebold machines election commissions have been jonesing for.

That should have meant that the 2004 elections would be incontestable. Unfortunately, new problems arose. Exit polls (a usually fairly reliable tool used not only by candidates but also the media) simply did not match up with the certified results. They weren't even close. Folks much more conversant with statistics and analysis than I am have told me that the results were simply impossible.

One of the problems was that there was no way to verify the machine counts. No hard, countable paper ballots existed to compare to what the machine said. Why would we want to have such paper ballots, especially after 2000? Well, given the frequency with which electronic data bases have been hacked recently (Nexus Lexus, for example), resulting in the dispersal of individuals' private information into the hands of identity thieves, having a concrete way to make certain that there has been no tampering with the software programs on the machine would be a start. One of those concrete ways would be a paper receipt.

Senator Hillary Clinton (joined by Senators Boxer, Kerry, Lautenberg, and Mikulski) has introduced the "Count Every Vote Act of 2005." The complete text of the bill can be found here in PDF format. The entire bill is long and complicated, but one key provision looks to help remove the potential for election fraud by requiring the paper trail:

‘‘(i) The voting system shall produce an individual voter-verifiable paper record of the vote that shall be made available for inspection and verification by the voter before the vote is cast.

‘‘(ii) The voting system shall provide the voter with an opportunity to correct
any error made by the system in the voter verifiable paper record before the permanent voter-verified paper record is preserved in accordance with subparagraph (B)(i).

‘‘(B) MANUAL AUDIT CAPACITY.—The permanent voter-verified paper record produced in accordance with subparagraph (A) shall—

‘‘(i) be preserved within the polling place, in the manner, if any, in which all other paper ballots are preserved within that polling place, or, in the manner employed by the jurisdiction for preserving paper ballots in general, for later use in any manual audit;

‘‘(ii) be suitable for a manual audit equivalent to that of a paper ballot voting
system; and

‘‘(iii) be available as the official record and shall be the official record used for
any recount conducted with respect to any Federal election in which the system is used.’’

Surely the company that gave us receipt-spitting ATM machines can figure out a way to do this without printing our names on the receipt of a cast ballot. Then contested elections can use the saved "paper ballots" for a manual recount at which all candidates can be present to be certain there is no further fraud.

Senator Clinton's bill, SB450, contains many other important provisions, including how to handle provisional ballots (a subject for a future post). The bill is currently in committee. Hopefully it will make it out to the Senate floor with no drastic changes.

As some wise person indicated at Eschaton recently we can justify this bill by saying something like, "Look, you Republicans don't trust us Democrats, and we Democrats don't trust you Republicans. Having a way to check the count is in both of our interests."

Heh-indeedy.