[Update: I wrote this post while doing nine other things and failed to make elementary arguments supporting my claim that voting for Debra – or getting your friends to vote for Debra – will make a massive difference in how voting is handled in the U.S. (hint: it will; go see Brad Friedman at HuffPo – and remember that he’s a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist while I’m a committed debunker of those theories and we completely agree on this) and see my letter below.]
As an aside, if you live in California and are a registered Democrat or Independent, the most important thing you can do to improve voting is to vote tomorrow for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State.
There’s been an interesting and long (if thinly populated) comment thread on my post regarding RFK Jr’s risable Rolling Stone article.
Note that while I’m passionate about improving voting systems – meaning improving the accuracy, auditability, transparency, and trustworthiness of the systems (meaning human, physical, and technical) we use for voting, I’m very dismissive of Jr’s claims.
I’m dismissive because my biggest concern is building the political will to make the changes we need to make to get us where we need to go. And as long as the argument is framed as “we need to fix the system to keep your side from doing all the bad things you do” – which is fundamentally the position of two of the commenters – two things happen. Instead of a bipartisan reform movement (the only way it will succeed), we get a wedge issue. Worse, instead of an issue where we can calmly agree on facts and work outward to plans, we get a conflicting array of unproven (and unprovable) assertions which quickly degenerate (as the thread has) to “did so!” and “did not!”I’ll make my position clear – again – in saying that both sides have and do game the system, and that I do not doubt that both sides have committed fraud. If you’re a Democrat, you should want to fix the mechanics of voting to make sure that Ohio can’t happen again. If you’re a Republican, you should want to fix the mechanics of the system to make sure Washington State doesn’t get done to you again.
I think it is highly unlikely that there has been ‘massive’ organized fraud in recent elections. That doesn’t mean that elections – local and national haven’t turned on votes that were a) from people who shouldn’t have been able to vote; b) that never were placed, because of people who were unfairly kept from voting; c) that were – at a retail level (i.e. in the hundreds or thousands but not tens of thousands). Like bad calls in baseball games, I tend to see them as averaging out.
But the game is being watched more closely – there are cameras that can secnd-guess the umpires’ calls – and there is more at stake.
So we need to work together to determine what it would take to have a system in place that both sides – that all Americans – can trust.
As I noted at the top of this post, tomorrow there will be an election in California where we have a chance to mark the low point in electoral trust in this country, and to begin – not in arguments on blog pages, but in reality – to build a system that we all trust.
We’ll do it by voting for Debra Bowen. If this issue matters to you, and you live in California and can vote for her, do it.
If you can’t, find your friends who can, and tell them to vote for her.
That way we can turn this argument from sniping to building, and start debating the ways that we can build a system that each of us will trust.
That’s Bowen for Secretary of State.
[Update: Here’s the email I sent to 1,200 people in my address book. I got about 100 positive replies and about 50 dinner invitations…
I’m sending this to everyone I know in California, and asking you all to vote for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.
Sending out mass requests isn’t usually my thing, but this is important enough for me to put that discomfort aside.
Why? Secretary of State is a downballot race that few, if any, people pay much attention to – which means that getting a small group to vote for Debra will make a big difference. And it will be a difference that will mean a lot to all of us.
Because one of the critical functions of the office is overseeing election procedures and technology in California.
In the last decade, the mechanics of elections – something that only the hardest-core of hard-core political junkies cared about – have suddenly become news. This month’s Rolling Stone has an article by Robert Kennedy Junior challenging the handling of the Ohio presidential balloting in 2004 (note that Mother Jones had an article in November that disproves many of his claims). But the article is evidence of a growing loss of faith in the mechanics of our political process.
[horrible metaphor alert!…I’m wincing reading this now…]
The fuel provided by this loss of faith combined with increasingly bitter partisanship on both sides is about to be ignited by the implementation of deeply flawed technology in the form of voting machines using technology and procedures that no corporation could use under Sarbanes-Oxley.
I believe, more than anything, that people’s faith in the electoral process is what ties us to our political system and provides legitimacy to our government at all levels.
To defend that we need voting systems – technology and processes – that can be defended when challenged, that are widely perceived to be fair, and that restore confidence in our political process.
Debra gets this.
She gets the nitty-gritty technical and procedural details that it will take to make this happen. I’ve listened to her opponent, Deborah Ortiz, and she doesn’t.
It’s important that you vote on Tuesday, but I’m asking you all to please, please vote for Debra because I think that it’s critical that in 2008 and thereafter you’re confident that your vote was actually counted.
Her campaign website is at http://www.debrabowen.com/ and it’s not too late to donate a few bucks, if you’re so inclined.
For those that I haven’t talked to in a while, howdy, things are going well, and please drop me a note and let me know how you’re doing.
To everyone, please understand that I wouldn’t send this if I didn’t think it was vitally important. Thanks for taking a moment to read it. Feel free to contact me with questions – this is obviously important to all of us.]
Why do you believe that voting for Debra Bowen is the most important thing someone who believes in improving voting can do?
I’m legitimately curious about this, but your assertion doesn’t seem to have an argument attached to it. 🙂
Hmmm.
Where’s the argument?
Also –
“in saying that both sides have and do game the system, and that I do not doubt that both sides have committed fraud”
this – again, is false equivalency. False equivalency doesn’t legitmate – it is by it’s very nature illegitimate.
If in an argument, a Republican says it is night outside, and a Democrat says it is day outside, you don’t split the difference and say it is “dusk”.
If a kid steals some candy bars from a 7-11, and a gang of crooks steals several million from a bank, you don’t say “I do not doubt that both sides have committed theft” and follow this up with “Like bad calls in baseball games, I tend to see them as averaging out.”
At any rate – I came over here when you ventured outside your domain to Washington Monthly – and I can understand why liberals seem to come here for a bit, and then leave again.
It gets tiring – not to mention uninteresting – to constantly not have valid points I raise addressed.
Well, I think here is the argument.
“I found this.”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-friedman/america-needs-debra-bowen_b_22236.html
AL said: “And as long as the argument is framed as “we need to fix the system to keep your side from doing all the bad things you do” – which is fundamentally the position of two of the commenters…”
Well, as one of the two commenters you’re referring to here, I can state (and I share HR’s exasperation here) that this is not what I said, or meant, in my comments. I’ll let HR speak for himself on this issue.
I will counter that as long as you keep framing the argument by erecting false equivalencies and raising straw-men, then it is doomed to irrelevancy outside your little circle of like-minded right winger’s here. I’m not sure this is your intention, but that is certainly going to be the effect.
Moving right along, it is somewhat heartening to see that you agree with Brad Friedman from Bradblog on Debra Bowen. Brad has been one of the most vocal critics of the Republican shenanigans in Ohio 2004 (and defender of RFK Jr. btw). Nice to see you can put aside little disagreements like this and join together to support someone who looks like a great candidate out there.
It would be nice to hear why you support her; Brad has a long list of issues in his endorsement. I don’t think anyone who regularly frequents this site is going to drop their keyboard and check her box on your say-so alone.
I’m with AL. Electoral abuses aren’t the province of any particular party. And I was about to trot out the names of various machines and techniques for subverting voting, but why bother. We know them, we just choose to overlook the ones by our partisans as abberations and ones by our opponents as illustrative.
We have to get back to hard copy, paper voting. The digital issue is the easiest ever to defraud. It doesn’t matter who pushes it, it’s got to be done. Unless there’s a way to ensure a transparent, archivable trail for electronic voting, but I don’t think we’re going to acheive that.
As it happens my mother and father will be working as poll watchers tomorrow. When I go to vote (not in California, thanks be to God) there will a Republican and a Democrat scrutinizing every step, a level of vigilance that has noticably increased in the past four years. Picture ID is rewquired – if you’re paranoid because you’ve got outstanding warrants, too bad for you.
It would be great if it were the same way everywhere, and we’ve been too complacent for too long in assumming that it mostly does. In the current atmosphere, even statistically insignificant malfeasance is damaging.
More federal standards, more federal penalties. Big fat federal penalties. Bring it on.
AL, I’m not a single-issue voter and could easily accept working with you or similarly minded liberals; it would be nice if more liberals were as rational and reasonable.
I take exception to your premise that Democrats and Republicans are both guilty of electoral fraud and it “equals out”. I find very little evidence of significant Republican fraud, and I’m sure if there was any, the liberal press would constantly inflate and propogate it.
On the other hand, we see significant Democrat fraud time and time again, and yet the media all but ignores it (“suppresses it” comes to my mind). This even applies to large-scale fraud that changes the outcomes of elections. Does it register why conservatives are so concerned that the media is composed of over 90% liberals, and is almost exclusively controlled by liberals? Until recently, the media has been very effective in controlling what gets reported, and what doesn’t.
Folks, apologies – I’ve been kinda swamped between election-monkey stuff and work and did this as a driveby. I’ll link to Brad’s post in an update.
Note that I know him kinda well, we get along, except that I harsh him regularly for his conspiratorial view of the world – which makes it harder to build a consensus to actyually do something. Hmmm. Sound familiar?
A.L.
While you are considering ways to improve the integrity of the electoral process, don’t forget the massive potential for fraud with absentee ballots.
Photo IDs should be mandatory, too, but I’m not sure this is required in every state. And “Provisional Voting” is laughable; surely some voter responsibility should be required, like registering a reasonable amount of time prior to voting.
If you think both parties are equally guilty of voter fraud, pay attention to which party favors cleaning up the voting process.
Well, Flap cannot vote for Bowen because of his GOP registration but he thinks that Deborah Ortiz will win because her television commercials are “the bomb.”
Ok Ok a bad joke.
Flap will be voting for the GOP appointed incumbent, Bruce McPherson.
Now, why is Bowen the better candidate?
#7 E.T.
I don’t think AL precisely meant “it evens out” to mean something like both sides have stolen an equivalent number of elections from each other. More signifigant, it’s irrelevenat to the issue of making future elections secure to go over a laundry list of episodes detailing vote fraud by party, unless you are looking at the method and ways to keep that method from being used in the future.
Paper ballots, pictures on the ballots, independent monitors, and a lookout for abuse in absentee ballots. Good stuff so far.
What’s Bowen’s position on election process reform?
ET — as someone who has worked in a polling place as an election officer in every election since 1992, I *love* provisional ballots: they make my job significantly easier.
Some would-be voters with a problematic status (they’re in the wrong precinct, they lost their absentee ballot or it was never delivered, they claim to be registered in one party but are actually registered in another, etc) get belligerent when they are denied the opportunity to vote. The existence of provisional balloting allows me to let them ‘vote’, secure in the knowledge that most likely their vote won’t be counted unless the mistake really was on the part of the county elections department … thereby avoiding the belligerence and the resultant conflict.
Since the legitimacy of the vote is confirmed before the envelope is opened and the vote counted, it seems like a good compromise to me; and it’s one that California has had since well before I started working elections.
A dem who’s interested in honest, accountable voting?
Sorry, my suspension of disbelief has an elastic limit.
Provisional ballots? Please, spare me. I’ve been voting for a long time; anyone that befuddled about such a simple process has no business at the ballot box.
It is in the interests of ALL political parties (or should be…) to insure that elections are well-managed; moved polling places, indifferent (or poorly-trained) poll workers are faults to be laid at the feet of the various county election boards [and the party that dominates it…].
Perhaps I’m simplistic, but I’ve NEVER, in my whole voting life, experienced a poorly run polling place. But then again, I’ve only lived in ‘red’ areas. All the shabby tales seem to involve dem-controlled areas.
Coincidence? You decide.
HR and Walter’s, I think everyone’s frustration (yours included) stems from arguing, if you will, at cross-premises. We all can agree that the current system remains susceptible to fraud, which continues to be actively practiced. It should then be possible to separate our discussion into two parts: first, “How do we re-organize the voting system so that its structural resistance to fraud is as robust as possible?” and second, “How do we implement that structure?” I believe your arguments about who is responsible address the second question, while AL is aiming at the first.
Again, the problem as AL (and I!) see it is not WHO is gaming the system, it’s THAT the system can be gamed at all. If we can redesign the voting system so that it can’t be gamed (idealism, but a worthy goal), the identity of the parties trying becomes irrelevant to the health of the system once it is fixed, although we can and should debate who we should trust to actually make the changes stick.
We can’t hope to achieve consensus on how to implement any reform untill we can hammer out an agreement as to its structure, and arguing opposing positions that aren’t even dealing with the same premise is the surest possible way to destroy faith in the dialogue necessary to make that happen. There will be plenty of time to hash out who should effect the changes after we have decided what those changes should be.
-Piercello
About identifying voters —
It used to be, you needed a stable address to vote. If you moved in the last 6 months or so, you were disenfranchised. Considering that each year a quarter of the population moved, that was a lot of people.
Would it be bad to use a variety of the same ID methods we use for everything else? When you get a driver’s license, have it track which precinct you vote in. One driver’s license, one vote. If you move and don’t update your driver’s license, it doesn’t help you vote in your new precinct.
If you’re on welfare, your thumbprint should serve. And if the welfare people don’t adequately establish that you’re a citizen when they start giving you money, why not?
Without communication among the various databases, a few vote frauds might slip through. If you used to have an address in one precinct but now you’re on welfare somewhere else, maybe you get to vote twice by standing in line at two polling places. If you move from one state to another and manage to get 2 drivers licenses, maybe you could drive to your former state and vote again. It doesn’t look like a big problem and it’s potentially fixable.
There’s no particular reason to duplicate all this identity effort with poorly-funded election systems, sometimes run by political partisans. If you can show who you are well enough to do transactions worth thousands of dollars, that ought to be enough to vote too. Unless those ID methods fall under significant suspicion.
The most important voting events are – despite the belief of the party elite – those local events like city councilmen, code enforcement boards, local initiatives and tax policy. These affect people in the most direct ways, contrary to the media focus on national elections.
These elections deserve to retain their local character, their local focus and their residency requirements. Removing the establishment of residency would be disasterous to these elections.
Piercello — excellent comment. Reduced a dozen comments to one clear analysis of the disucssion.
Are elections local or national? Everybody wants to argue about presidential elections, but those are supposed to be handled by the states for goodness sakes. If Florida wanted to, they could eliminate presidential elections right now and just have their leglislature pick who they want their electors to vote for. Remember — we’re not a democracy. We’re a representative republic. The difference means something.
Having said that, there is nothing wrong with the national government setting up a certification program for voting systems. If we can have five-nines quality with ATMs we can certanly have it with voting.
There are a lot of obvious solutions, including an anonymous triple-biometric reading coupled with your vote and two paper audit trails (collected by both parties) encrypted using PKI. Then you just use the net with a disk backup for counts. That should be bullet-proof (although it would not prevent voting in the wrong precinct) Combining this with a driver’s license encoding should handle that. You could come up with a lot of other systems. These are old problems and have been solved many times in many ways.
Should they be open source? Should they use some certain kind of database? Certainly you could come up with various solutions here as well. It’s not rocket science. If local governments are speccing out bad systems and purchasing bad systems then that is, once again, a local problem. Read your constitution.
I do not want the Feds in the business of running local politics. It was bad enough to lose all of our state’s rights in the last 150 years. Next up is the local governments? Any student of world history can tell you that there is a balance between centralized and distributed control. Going too far in either direction is very bad. Yes we had problems with Katrina. Yes we have problems with voting. But keep your head on your shoulders and remember why the government is structured the way it is. Emotional reasoning will not replace hundreds of years of trial-and-error.
I completely agree that getting into the “who is doing what” game is non-productive. A good enough system should resist fraud from all parties concerned. If the discussion centers on assigning blame, the fix will never be found. Instead we will just keep yelling at each other. Not a good use of time.
Piercello,
I would agree with Markham – good comment. Like with Poling’s suggestions, I agree.
I suppose it would be good to “agree on what can be agreed upon”, and then remain mum about disagreements. In this case, we all want an election system that we can trust.
The concern I have is that what you call “the second part” – and I commend you on your clarity here – the implementation, if you will – will have a tremendous impact of the success of the 1st part. But if there are interested parties that will FUBAR the implementation of the good ideas- then this prevent the implementation, even with a good system such as the australian one.
And “partisan blinders” as it were – (and this may apply to me to, but since I trust my own judgment, I would need conclusive convincing otherwise) – would prevent “the other side” from assigning accountability to the BLOCKERS of the good idea, in this case if they are Republican.
CPT — I’ve also never experienced a poorly run polling place, but then again I ensure that by running them.
Here’s a case where, I think, the need for provisional ballots is indisputable: someone requested an absentee ballot and the post office never delivered it, or delivered it to their neighbor, etc.
We can’t just let them vote a regular precinct ballot because, well, they could be lying.
But neither can we turn them away and not let them vote, if they’re telling the truth; that would encourage malfeasance by politically prejudiced postal employees.
There are three basic rules: everybody can only vote once, you can only vote if you are eligible, and you have to vote where you are supposed to vote (or the vote is ineligible. Is the entire vote thrown out? Or only the part you are ineligible for? At what level of government should this be decided?)
HR — blaming the pubs for blocking the bill kind of takes us full circle, doesn’t it? It’s still something to get folks riled up against a PARTY, not solve a problem. Leglislative issues can be tweaked so many ways to blame each party that we just end up where we started — pointing fingers at each other.
I would humbly suggest that it is not the dems who are sponsoring, nor the pubs who are blocking. It is the people who really don’t care about it that much. If the people really were fired up about it, you couldn’t stop a reform from being passed. Then they would be fightng over who gets the credit. A good sign that nobody cares enough and they just want to energize the base is when they are arguing over who gets the blame.
I know I’m not that upset about it. I mean, when we sit down like we are and talk about it, it seems to be one of the biggest problems we have in this country (ahead of most other issues, since they rest on elections) But in general? Really? On a day-to-day basis? Who cares? it’s a four-year complaint, not an immediate threat. The damage that Gore did in 2000 wasn’t just to energize his base and have them believe the system is broken. He also convinced those who voted for the other guy that the dems were just a bunch of whiney complainers that would never be happy unless their guy won. So when you’re raising support for this cause, in a lot of ways you have to un-do the damage Gore did first. Note that I am not blaming the party, and you the dems still have a lot to offer. It was Gore that screwed the pooch here, in my opinion.
Maybe that’s not a PC answer. I don’t know. But I think there was a good reason that Nixon conceded to JFK even though he felt he could fight it. There are several other examples like that. Perhaps the nation comes ahead of your party or campaign. It has nothing to do with who is right or wrong. It has to do with which is more important, the system for choosing people or the people themselves. In my opinion, Gore blew it. And what we got was a lot of hard feelings (on both sides) and not much in the way of a path towards solution. As P said, one side is arguing how to fix the system while the other side is arguing who is to blame. Gore set this party up, and we’re all here whether we like it or not.
HR — In the spirit of trying to find solutions, I would suggest that interested technical people set up an open-source set of voting system specifications. Not open-source code, but everybody coming together collaboratively to spec out the system and creating a set of criteria by which a good system can be judged. By having partisans on both sides agree on what is a fair system, at the grass roots level, it provides pressure on both national parties (and local election boards) to adopt the solution we’ve already created.
I’ve actually architected and programmed a secure voting system (used by the Federal Reserve Board Of Governors — yes, Bernake and cohorts) so I have a little experience in this area. Glad to help if I can.
Just an idea.
HR — the situations in which *part* of a vote can be ineligible are rare; they’re pretty much limited to cases where you voted somewhere you weren’t supposed to (and thereby got a ballot with things on it that you didn’t have a right to vote for).
In general, those cases are treated by invalidating the entire vote; that’s a policy decision at the county level.
Here is what I’m talking about –
“It’s pure crap like this as pulled by Blackwell”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/opinion/07wed1.html?ex=1149825600&en=c29e51ab1bda5605&ei=5087
_This year, Mr. Blackwell’s office has issued rules and materials that appear to require that paid registration workers, and perhaps even volunteers, personally take the forms they collect to an election office. Organizations that run registration drives generally have the people who register voters bring the forms back to supervisors, who can then review them for errors. Under Mr. Blackwell’s edict, everyone involved could be committing a crime. Mr. Blackwell’s rules also appear to prohibit people who register voters from sending the forms in by mail. That rule itself may violate federal elections law._
_Mr. Blackwell’s rules are interpretations of a law the Republican-controlled Ohio Legislature passed recently. Another of the nation’s most famous swing states, Florida, has been the scene of similar consternation and confusion since it recently enacted a law that is so harsh that the Florida League of Women Voters announced that it was stopping all voter registration efforts for the first time in 67 years._
As noble as Poling’s and Markham’s sentiments are, as long as someone like Blackwell – or others like him (and this includes any democrats who pull this BS) use the election levers to rig or suppress the vote, our efforts to design a wonderful, fair, open source voting system, will NOT be taken up by those who are in CHARGE of the election process.
It’s incumbent upon Republicans – as well as democrats – to vote AGAINST, and speak vocally AGAINST, politicians who would abuse the system like this. Even if you are a Republican. Even if that means the democrat wins that election cycle
And do so WITHOUT resorting to the false equivalence argument, because that is just an excuse, a free pass to crooks.
And Daniel,
Yes, it is still worthwhile to go forward with that idea – as you say, it does create some pressure.