“Inky Wood Pulp Gathering Dust”
We need more than paper trails. We cannot have trustworthy elections based merely on paper ballots—whether they are printed out by computers or marked by hand. All votes are now being counted by computers, so the counting must also be credible.
In addition to paper trails, and open source software, a more modern set of election laws and other stuff, we need to audit the election.
University of Iowa computer scientist and voting machine expert Doug Jones says that without audits after the election, the paper ballots are “just inky wood pulp gathering dust in dark warehouses.”
Jones told an audience at the Statehouse on March 8 that he has himself engaged in audits of voting machines after an election and found egregious errors. He said there are enough innocent errors in every election that fraud can find a place to hide. The way to isolate fraud is to audit elections routinely, find innocent errors, improve the system and then start over again with more audits. Eventually there will be no way to conceal fraud as innocent error.
This sounds like a job for the Auditor. Not the county auditor, who already runs the election, but the State Auditor. His office is not in the election business and he has no axe to grind. Whatever he finds cannot embarrass him but could make Iowa’s elections better. If the Secretary of State is wary of such an outsider peaking under the hood, then the Secretary of State should begin his own routine random audits of every aspect the next election in a few of Iowa’s counties.
We came close to a recount in Iowa in 2000. It took days to call the election in 2004. An ounce of audit now may be worth a ton of spin in 2008 should a recount uncover the problems that Jones believes lie hidden in our own ballot boxes.
April 10th, 2006 at 10:45 am
Many thanks, Jerry, for keeping us informed. Your blog is enormously helpful.
For what it’s worth, though, I believe we should consider returning to paper ballots entirely.
When paper ballots are used, voters can check their own paper ballots, and poll watchers from opposing political parties can see if votes were properly counted. However, both these simple safeguards disappear (at least on the first count) when voters use computers.
Computers can make both fraud and error more difficult to detect. While fraud is always possible with paper ballots, there is at least a chance that honest poll-watchers will see the cheating immediately. With computer voting, we will have to rely, at best, on a relatively small number of computer experts. What if other experts have out-maneuvered them?
If an election was expected to be close, wrong results may not look particularly suspicious.
Moreover, various commonly proposed solutions (voter-verified paper trails, random audits) fail to address a serious problem. Once the media announce the winner of any major election, the results may be difficult to overturn.
There is another advantage to old-fashioned methods. If ordinary people cheat with paper ballots, presumably the cheating will come from various sources and will not necessarily favor a particular party.
By contrast, with computer voting, a few dishonest people at a voting machine company could cause widespread but subtle fraud favoring one party in an election. In short, I believe it is dangerous to rely on any machines that are complex enough to be programmed for fraud by their manufacturers (especially with so few companies in the game). And it seems unwise to resign ourselves to a system in which we will be relying so heavily on recounts that may never occur.
Barbara Bazyn, Chelsea