The headlines following this year’s mid-term elections about vote counting in southern Florida look like the reports of bumbling efforts from an earlier, less sophisticated time, not a modern society evolved through 231 years of election experience. Boxes of ballots found in a school, invalid ballots “mistakenly” mixed in with valid ones, ballot designs emphasizing some contests over others, totals changing heavily in favor of one candidate many days after the election is over, the wrong ballots being used in a manual recount, etc. Our favorite was the report of vote-counting machines “overheating” in the recount effort. Apparently, the very same election workers in Palm Beach County Florida who were so painfully slow in counting all the original votes summoned so much superhuman speed in the recount effort that the machines couldn’t keep up with them. To top it all off, Broward County officials submitted their completed recount total 2 minutes past the state deadline, invalidating that county’s entire recount comedy. They had 5 full days to do the recount (that’s 7,200 minutes) and failed by 2 minutes. Really? Did Broward County purposely miss the deadline to hide the fact that their recount total actually increased the lead of the Republican candidate in the hotly-contested Senate race? Florida US District Judge Mark Walker, presiding over one of the many lawsuits filed by the Florida candidates, said it best – “We have been the laughingstock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this”.
The question is, can this process ever be truly fixed? Sadly, we believe the answer is no, at least for the near future. The reasons why are rooted in both the Constitution and in the citizenry’s comfort level with the privacy of our vote. The best way to illustrate this is to imagine what an ideal modern-day voting system that replaces what we have now would be like.
The holy grail of voting would be a perfectly secure online service, where you just login to a website from wherever you are and vote. There would be no lines, no polling places, no election judges, no need for absentee ballots (since you could vote from anywhere), a uniform ballot format for everyone, bad weather on election day never a factor, much less need for provisional ballots (and instant knowledge on election night of how many of them were cast), instantaneous results on election night (with automatic mathematical analysis of provisional ballots being able to make a difference or not in tight races), no point in recounts, and most significantly – no humans in a position to muddle up the works in the kinds of ways we are seeing right now in Florida and Georgia.
Sounds glorious. So why aren’t we any closer to this then we were twenty years ago? Numerous other services have migrated online in the same time period (banking, shopping, attending college, dating, and even voter registration in Florida), so why not voting? It would be easy to use the singular excuse of the risk of hacking and end the conversation right there. That’s not the biggest problem however, and at some point in the future computer security will evolve to an agreeable level of trust for this purpose. The biggest reason is the first sentence in section 4 of Article 1 of the Constitution:
“…The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof, but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations…”
This rule, that each state can setup its own election procedures, goes against a central tenant of the ideal voting system which would by its nature technologically impose both a centralized and uniform “manner of holding elections” for all. Either Congress would have to pass a law to “make or alter such Regulations” to be imposed on every state, or the Constitution would have to be amended. There is almost no chance of this ever happening, especially with a divided Congress. States will argue that controlling their own voting process is the most fundamental precept of state sovereignty. To them, that dictum overrides all the downsides of fraud, bias, and counting errors that may occur within the state. The best that could be hoped for in the ideal voting future would be 50 separate online voting services, each having all the benefits described above. There is no need for states to sub-divide the voting process further to the county level like it is today. A well-designed online service would know which candidates and questions to present to you based on the address in your registration record. County boundaries would be irrelevant to the voting process in this kind of system. Of course, for national elections, there would need to be the extra step of combining the results of all 50 systems to get the final result. This extra step has a security vulnerability all its own, but it would be limited only to national elections.
The other barrier to the ideal voting service is the ability for it to maintain the same level of privacy for your vote as exists in the present system (even with all its failings). For example, today when you vote at a polling station, there is no record maintained of how you personally voted, only that you did vote. The method used to prove your identity to the polling official¹, and the method used to cast your vote, are two entirely separate processes with no connection whatsoever between them. The ballot has no identifying information connecting it to you personally (provisional ballots being the only exception because of a signature requirement). This is intentional and has always been the baseline level of privacy expected when voting in US elections. Ironically, the complete separation between your identity and your vote is much more easily achieved with older low-tech voting styles than it would be in online voting. Online voting systems can be made to have very robust authentication of your identity, much like online banking. However, it would be very difficult to then entirely isolate the ballot that is cast from the identity that cast it. Simple as it may sound, this is a technical requirement that presently has no analog in online banking, online purchasing or online government services. All of those services, and the software that runs them, actually have the exact opposite requirement of keeping very accurate logs of who did what and when.
There is one more problem to contend with in the ideal online voting service of the future. When election officials in Palm Beach County Florida announced last week that their voting machines were overheating during the recount, they called in two technicians to try and fix the machines. This immediately (and correctly) raised the question of how the actions those technicians were being monitored as they worked on the voting machines. Could they cleverly inject a counting bias into the machines during the “repair” process? Given the sophistication of the machines, would the average election official even be aware if a rogue technician was doing this right in front of him/her? There is a direct analogy to this concern in the ideal online voting service of the future – trusting computer system administrators. Much like the voting machine technician, a computer system administrator needs to have technical access to the inner workings of the service for the legitimate reasons of maintenance and repair. However, that exceptional level of access also enables the possibility for nefarious activities. The level of sophistication in play here is far advanced from that of the mechanical operation of a present-day voting machine and thus far more difficult to effectively monitor.
Interestingly, while many aspects of our present voting systems seem antiquated and ripe for abuse by devious, partisan or just plain incompetent local officials, those same qualities make them remarkably resistant to foreign interference. The complete independence most states insist on having over their individual voting systems effectively blocks any kind of systemic attack from outside on the whole of the US voting system. This is especially true for national elections which require amalgamating the results from 50 different voting processes.
At the very least, changes should be made within states (Florida in particular) to bring greater uniformity to the voting systems and processes throughout the state. This by itself would have would have made Florida’s counting much more orderly a few weeks ago. It makes no sense at all for the quality and capacity of some state voting systems to be held hostage by the whims of individual County officials and their local budget priorities. As the Constitution says, this is a state responsibility.
¹In this past election cycle, 16 states had no ID requirement for people within their state to vote. Having lived and voted in the state of Maryland for a long time, we were always amazed how easy it would be to walk in to a polling place and vote as someone else. It’s totally different here in Florida, our present state of residency, where we are asked to present a valid photo ID. If we didn’t, we’d only be able to submit a signed “provisional” ballot. It would then be left up to the election official to confirm that the signature on the ballot matches the one submitted at the time of voter registration. In other states it’s even more strict. In Virginia for instance, if you don’t present a photo ID at the polling place, you can fill out a provisional ballot but must return with a valid photo ID within 3 days or your vote isn’t counted.