A Tour Through the Election Integrity Landscape (Part 1)
Sun Oct 08, 2006 at 07:05:06 AM PDT
A couple of weeks ago, someone asked me to write an introduction to the election integrity (EI) landscape. I thought that was an excellent idea, a nice complement to the diaries focused on media coverage of a specific event (such as the hacking of a Diebold voting machine by the
Feldman-Halderman-Felten team from Princeton).
In this first post, I'll introduce the term "election integrity" and describe how much of it we'd lost by 2002. In the next one, I'll describe some of the ways in which we began to fight back in 2003, and how you can join the effort.
Strap on your headlamp and join me below the fold!
Election Integrity
First, a few words about the term "election integrity," which has become the favored term among people who work in the field. I speculate that someone along the line realized that identifying "election fraud" as the subject of interest was divisive. Once someone mentions "election fraud," discussions will slide into recurrent whirlpools: the necessity of finding hard evidence where claims of fraud are raised, the importance of focusing on the next set of elections, and so on. But the term "election
integrity," however prim, puts the focus where it should be: we must do what we can to ensure that votes are counted as cast, now and in the future.
(By the way, I've never been convinced that attempting to determine whether fraud took place in past elections is counterproductive in deciding how to prevent it in the future. Furthermore, the problem with hard evidence of fraud in past elections -- in the form of violations of election regulations, also known as the law -- is not that there is too little, but that there is too much, including sworn testimony. But I've said too much already. Onwards, ever onwards!)
History: The Secret Ballot from Down Under
Rather than revisiting ancient ballots of marbles or oyster shells, I'd like to look at the first period I consider highly relevant to EI in our own era: the late nineteenth century, when the secret Australian-style ballot began to predominate around the world. Previously, there had been little emphasis on secrecy or standardization in voting. Voters wrote their own slips of paper to specify their choices, or they used ballots created for them by parties. But now, governments began to take on the responsibility of printing standardized ballots that included the names of all candidates. They required voters to mark the candidates on these ballots before casting them into a box, thereby ensuring the secrecy of the casting of the vote. Secrecy was seen as a laudable goal because it freed voters from coercion; no boss could determine how you voted.
Secrecy vs. Accountability vs. Speed
The secret vote sounds great, right? But here we encounter the first of many tensions that make EI more complicated than it would seem at first glance: secrecy vs. accountability. If, once you cast a ballot, you can't point to it and show the world that you really did vote for candidate X, it becomes that much easier for someone else to count your vote for candidate Y. That is not to say that manipulation becomes a given, or that accountability cannot be preserved, only to point out that a system that keeps individual votes anonymous -- even if only involves pen and paper -- requires more careful design and oversight to ensure that the final vote count is accurate. And if we add a second constraint -- getting the vote counted quickly by a small group of workers -- EI becomes quite a challenge.
Hagel's Upset(ting) Victory
Mechanical voting, via lever machines, began to catch on at the very end of the nineteenth century. Computerized voting began to develop slowly. (See History of Voting Systems in California for a historical overview of voting in California -- representative of the rest of the country -- throughout the twentieth century.) But the next timepoint of interest that I want to mention doesn't arrive until right before the end of the millennium: Chuck Hagel's upset victory in the 1996 election in Nebraska, making him the first Republican from that state to win a Senate seat in 24 years. This election took place primarily on voting machines developed by his own company, a fact he did his best to conceal. (See Thom Hartmann's "If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines".) Such a conflict of interest should never have been tolerated, and when it was discovered, a revote should have been performed. However, as a paradoxical consequence of the fact that so much is at stake in how our elections are carried out, election irregularities are rarely examined, recounts are relatively rare, and revotes are almost nonexistent. As Chuang-Tzu told us long ago, petty thieves may be captured, but big thieves keep the keys to the kingdom.
Yet one morning T'ien Ch'engtse slew the ruler of Ch'i, and stole his kingdom. And not his kingdom only, but the wisdom-tricks which he had got from the Sages as well, so that although T'ien Ch'engtse acquired the reputation of a thief, he lived as securely and comfortably as ever did either Yao or Shun. The small States did not venture to blame, nor the great States to punish him, and for twelve generations his descendants ruled over Ch'i.
(Six years later, in 2002, Saxby Chambliss won the Georgia race for U.S. Senate, defeating the popular veteran Max Cleland by a 7-point lead, four days after a poll in which he was reported to trail by 5 points. Sonny Perdue won the Georgia race for governor by a 7-point lead, one month after a poll in which he was reported to trail by 9 points. Whistleblower Chris Hood later told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that he and other Diebold employees had distributed unauthorized patches that could well have changed the vote totals.)
HAVA 'nother Round of Bucks, Voting Machine Vendors
The next election of interest to us was 2000. The media did much to conceal the most egregious illegal acts committed in Florida in that election: valid voters knocked from the rolls because of vague resemblances of their names to those of felons, physical obstacles placed in the way of voters in minority communities. But they also concealed problems with paperless computerized voting machines, ("direct recording electronic devices," or "DREs." In fact, Gore retracted his first concession when he discovered that a machine in Volusia County had discarded 16,000 of his votes. But just as the media ignored the important issues and jabbered about Al Gore's earth tones and sighs until the American public was sick of it, they talked about dimpled, pregnant, and hanging chads until we were ready to scream "Okay! Bring me something else and I'll vote on it!" (A brief aside: the failure of cards to be punched correctly was often a consequence of the fact that the backing framework against which they were punched had not been cleaned of chads from previous elections.) Bob Ney, chair of the House Administration Committee (hence a Republican), touted DREs as the machines that would save us.
Please stay tuned for part 2. You can get a head start on the discussion by looking at the Voting Rights page on the dKosopedia. There will be no quiz (though there may be a poll). Thanks for staying with me so far.
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