Mailing It
In: Democracy in the Age of Convenience and
Technology
by Gentry Lange
By the time you read this, the King County Council will have
fundamentally altered the way we vote as a county. The proposal to change
our voting system, put forth by Council Executive Ron Sims, will close all
but a handful of the poll sites around the county, forcing most voters to
vote by mail (VBM). On Election Day, if you do go to one
of the few polls left open, you will find that you are voting on a brand
new Diebold TSX touch screen voting machine.
Many readers are probably aware of the controversy surrounding
Diebold's voting machines, also called Direct Recording Electronic (DRE)
machines. For several years, thousands of activists across the nation have
worked to document the problems encountered with DREs, and there is a
massive amount of evidence that these machines are insecure and
unreliable. But more alarmingly, due to the network capability of
computers, DREs enable vote fraud on a scale never before possible.
Fundamentally, the problem with touch screen voting machines is not
just that they suck at accurately counting votes. The deeper problem is
these machines remove the voting process from public control by making the
computer software that counts votes into a trade secret owned by private
companies and never inspected by public eyes.
Absentee voting systems encounter this same problem in a different
form. Voting by mail removes the physical control over the ballots from
"the people"; voting on computers removes the ethereal control of the
software counting the votes. The underlying problem in both systems is
really that corporations are given far too much control of our election
system.
However, the solution to this controversy is simple. We need to return
to the system of precinct-level hand-audited elections using paper
ballots. The precinct system has always proven to be the least prone to
fraud. It doesn't take a mathematical genius or a computer programmer to
understand, and it builds democracy and community through civic
interaction with your neighbors. In fact, many nations still hand count
entire national elections, including Germany, Switzerland and Canada.
The precinct system uses low-tech means to run highly accurate and
publicly trusted elections. When I go to a polling place, I sign in, then
I vote in private, in a booth or behind a curtain, and then I deposit my
ballot into a ballot box. Anyone who wishes to witness the process is
allowed to, provided there is enough space in the room, and after the
polls close the ballots are then counted on-site. Then the results are
posted publicly at the precinct before totals are submitted to the county
or state.
It is not just the secret ballot that is secret. The whole process is
made secret using a poll-based voting system. The polling place makes the
secret ballot possible and discourages other types of fraud. This system
discourages vote rigging, and greatly reduces potential electioneering by
corporate or private interests. It is much harder to fake your identity in
person in front of your neighbors than it is to hit a delete key on a
computer, or to buy blank but signed absentee ballots.
Voting at the kitchen table invalidates the protections that make a
secret ballot secret. From your boss to your spouse, anyone can influence
your vote. This is the reason secret ballots were invented in the first
place, to reduce this influence and allow you to vote freely and privately
beholden to no one but yourself.
Another issue that cannot be overstressed is that the post office
regularly misplaces, misdirects, or just flat out loses mail. Even a 99
percent delivery rate would mean close elections could easily be won or
lost based on the number of ballots lost in the mail. I fear the USPS has
a greater loss rate than this judging by the amount of mail that is
delivered to my address for people that do not live with me.
When I vote by mail, if somewhere between my mailbox and the ballot box
that ballot is lost, stolen, misplaced, or replaced by malicious intent, I
will probably never know. In fact, the county's final number of votes cast
is simply the number of votes that eventually show up, not the actual
number of votes cast because this number is unknowable in a VBM
system.
Just imagine if the banking industry tried to get away with what is
being proposed here in King County. Would you trust a bank that took all
your cash deposits through the mail, and provided ATMs with no receipts?
My guess is that you would not, because it is a well-known rule that you
should not send cash through the mail, and that you should always get your
receipt when you deposit money in a bank.
Voter suppression in this combined system of VBM and DREs becomes
child's play. By targeting return addresses and zip codes according to
voting patterns, electioneering becomes truly a simple task. If a private
company--physically in control of millions of ballots and using private
software to count the votes--wanted to commit any nefarious deeds, they
would have plenty of opportunity, and no recount would ever catch this
because the ballots would never have been counted the first time.
This is not just outsourcing the system to "experts." Rather, it is
removing the system from public scrutiny. This is not rigging some of the
votes some of the time. This is the potential to rig all of the votes all
of the time.
Absentee ballots and Diebold's touch screen voting machines are far
from the panacea to our voting problems that the proponents claim.
Democracy only works when people participate, but mailing it in is not
participating.
At first, I liked voting absentee. It was convenient, it gave me time
to research the issues and be a more informed voter. However, as an
informed voter, I would never vote for absentee ballots, or corporate
control of our voting machines. But you probably will not have that
choice, because the King County Council is not planning to send this to a
public vote, and as of this writing it looks like Democracy will be voted
down by the King County Council on June 5, by a 5-to-4 vote. [Editor's
update: The county council decided to delay the final vote on this matter
two weeks in order to gather additional information.]
A longer version of this article, with extensive weblinked
references, is available at
gentrylange.com. | 