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Electronic Voting: How is it so damned hard?
By RickMeasham | November 4, 2008
OK, so it’s the eve of the US Presidential election so I thought it was worth taking a minute to rant about how screwed up the US has gotten their implementation of ballot casting.
At first I just couldn’t understand how they made it so damned hard. Then I saw a ballot paper. For my non-US readers, each November there is (non-compulsory) elections held. It isn’t every four years, it’s every year. So how come we don’t hear about it every year? Because along with voting for the President and VP they vote all the way through many many many public officials. Can you imagine voting for the president of the schools board? Or what about voting someone onto the roads commission? That’s how it works. Don’t believe me? Check this. At the top of this particular ballot you can vote a “single party ticket”. This means you just pick “Democrat” or “Republican” rather than voting Brian L. Denman onto the Drains Commission. No wonder everyone calls themselves a “Republican” or “Democrat”. It’s too hard to be anything else!
OK so the first thing: get rid of all that rubbish. Seriously. If I don’t care who’s on the Drains Commission, why should it appear on the same piece of paper as the President of the USA?
Here in Australia, you get one piece of paper for the Lower House and one for the Upper House. For the lower house you order your candidates (about 5 or 6 normally — see above) in the order of your preference. For the upper house you can number every candidate (there’s about 120 of them!) or just pick a single party “above the line”. Sure that 120 is ludicrous, but at least there’s just two things I’ve voting for, and they are on separate pages. You then take these two pieces of paper and put the white one in the box marked “White ballot papers” and the green on in the box marked “Green ballot papers”. There’s even an official there to make sure you know your green from your white.
Once you vote for someone to hold public office, you entrust things like drains and roads to them. It’s their job to make sure the best qualified person manages the drainage. I don’t want a Liberal or Labor shill making sure my sewerage works, I want someone who has a doctorate in poo.
Next thing: Don’t do it all on one day. Sure it feels like it’s easier, but it isn’t. You’re just confusing everyone. Every 4 years vote for national politicians, the year after vote for state, the year after that for city and the left over year you can have a holiday or, if you must, vote for the drain guy.
But my biggest piece of advice is the main purpose of writing this post. Everything else is just padding because this is so blindingly stupidly simple that writing it by itself would be a waste of pixels.
Electronic voting is useful for one big reason: fast results. It doesn’t make things more transparent, but rather the opposite. Once you cast your (electronic) vote, you just have to hope that the computer doesn’t have any bugs. But at the end of the day, some dude (who you probably voted for) clicks some buttons and declares the results. And then it’s all over bar the shouting (about being removed from the electoral roll).
So get some damned transparency back into the system: voting electronically is a great idea. We should all be doing it. Fast results are good. But those results should be non-binding. They are the unofficial results.
When I click to confirm that I really do want to vote for Brian the Drain Dude (rather than Joe the Plumber?) the computer records it as an unofficial vote (for speed counting) but it prints out a slip of paper confirming my vote for Mr Denman. I’d expect this slip to have (a) the election I’m voting in: “2004 Drains Board” (b) the candidate I’m voting for “Brian L Denman” and (c) a barcode that maps to my computer-registered vote.
Now if the piece of paper that popped out isn’t who I wanted to vote for, I go to an official and complain. They then use that barcode to void the computer vote and I get to vote again. When I’m happy that my piece of paper reflects my decision, I put it in the box marked “Drains Dude” and go on my merry way.
At the end of the day, they press the magic button on the computer and get the unofficial result. This gets reported and we know almost immediately who the winner is. But the official vote comes later. The box marked “Drains Dude” is then opened up and the votes are counted by humans. If this count disagrees with the computer vote by a given percentage, it’s recounted. If it’s still out and is independently verified, then the PAPER votes are the official vote and that result is the official result.
Topics: Politics | 1 Comment »
November 4th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
I should point out that nothing of this is original and most of it is common sense. Pity that common sense isn’t so common when there are commercial interests involved.
(Who said “The problem with common sense is that it isn’t so common” or something similar?)