Voting on My Mind
I have this belief, perhaps misguided, that I am starting to come out of the current time crunch I have been in. The programming work for the get-out-the-vote project is largely done, work is calm for the moment, hopefully for not too long though. My one other task for this week was to do a bunch of baking. My wife is on the board of the Liberty Hill Foundation board, and I am the board baker. They have their annual retreat this weekend, so I had to make a lot of cookies. That all got finished up tonight, so back to politics.
I've been spending some time lately hanging out on The Left Coaster. That's a collaborative blog, all political, all left-leaning. Good people, and less consuming to put in short comments over there rather than writing my own long pieces. Plus it helps keep me on my toes and thinking. Anyway, one of the themes that has come up is questions about voting integrity, and inevitably, the 2000 Presidential election in general, and Florida in particular. I had an epiphany about this election fiasco, and realized that it is a mistake to get caught up in the partisan aspects of it. Forget about arguing over whether Bush won or Gore won, there's a bigger issue here.
This isn't to downplay the constitutional issues raised by the fiasco, nor to invalidate that feeling so many of us have that the only reason we have W pretending to be our leader is due to irregularities. Putting all that aside, here's the real issue: we had an election and now, four years later, after exhaustive research, only one thing is absolutely clear: it is impossible to state with any certainty, and certainly not provably, what the will of the voters in Florida was. That's right, we had an election, a winner was declared, and we have no idea whether or not that result represents We The People expressing their choice. How creepy is that?
Mixed in with all of this are the absolutely horrifying stories about the touchscreen voting systems. The systems that are being deployed fail to meet virtually all baseline criteria for an acceptable voting system. No audit trails, proprietary systems, etc. For more details see this nice article on electronic voting from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Oddly Diebold, a company known for making ATM machines, claims that it is somehow too difficult to build a voting machine which gives receipts. Hey guys, here's a hint: base them on your ATMs.
Certainly the well-documented connection between the head of Diebold and the Republicans fails to inspire confidence. What we need are electronic systems that make it easier to determine what the will of the people is, not harder. Why is that not the primary design rule for all of these systems? And why are election officials accepting delivery of machines that do not meet this standard? I am sure that lots of computer-savvy people would be willing to do free evaluations of these systems. For more information on this whole issue see the web site of the ACM's Electronic Voting project .
There are apparently a number of efforts starting up encouraging people who live in places with these touchscreen voting machines to vote absentee. This provides verifiability and an easy audit trail. It probably makes the lives of election officials hell if everyone votes this way, but they created this mess, they should live with the consequences.
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