Matt Lavine over at Basket Full of Puppies is commenting on a recent voting machine screwup in Orange County. As the comment system behind his blog won’t let me leave a comment longer than 1000 characters, I’ll put my comment here.
He jests:
| Fortunately, these machines (not Diebold machines, but a lesser-known competitor) were equipped with a paper printout that was stored separately and contained the voter’s ID number, which can be checked against the original voter rolls. It’ll take a few more days, but election officials will be able to reassign each vote to its proper precinct–much to the relief of candidates who found themselves losing by literally impossible margins.
Ha ha! Just kidding, of course–you didn’t really think that heavily Republican Orange County, with one of the highest per capita incomes of any county in the nation (and one of the lowest tax rates) would really have invested in cheap thermal printers to go along with their expensive touchscreen computers, did you? No–if you lost your election for clerk of your 800-person village by 1,400 votes, you’re–what’s the official term? S.O.L.
|
Of course, printers are exactly what we don’t ever want as part of an election process—at least, not printers that put our names on our votes. Perhaps as an anonymous stub that goes in a box after-the-fact to verify what I put on the screen, but as nothing more. I hope that I never have to use a voting machine that attaches any kind of personal identification to the vote that I cast.
It goes like this:
| [THUG] |
Vote for Vinnie. Remember ‘dat. |
| [Matt L.] |
OK! Sure thing Mr. {Bossman/Thug/Ashcroft} |
| Matt casts his vote, gets his receipt… |
| [THUG] |
Hey, ‘dat doesn’t say “Vinnie.” Guess it’s lights out, chump! |
| [Matt L.] |
[ Sounds of pain, dismemberment. ] |
Even if you encode things three ways from Sunday, any voting system that links you back to your vote is no longer anonymous, and anonymous voting systems are a keystone of a truly democratic voting process. Now, all kinds of other things may be broken in our electoral system, but anonymity currently is preserved. That matters.
Even if the machines in question had printed a paper ticket for each vote, they would still have been printed for the wrong district. There wouldn’t have been any way to go back and figure out who cast which votes. Point is, it’s no different than someone under the old system lining everyone up in the same district, even if they didn’t belong there—a brain-dead registrar in aisle 7 letting everyone vote in their district, regardless of where they’re supposed to.
So, really, this was a people screw-up; a screw-up brought on by new technology, yes, but a people screw-up never-the-less. And this kind of screw-up is only the beginning. You’ve followed things as much as anyone else: the electronic voting machines are going to give it to the U.S.A. in the A.S.S. They’re untested, underdeveloped technology, and they will continue to be a disaster in every election they’re used in.
So please, don’t ask for a ticket—being able to link an individual with their vote is a step in the wrong direction. Just ask for a well-designed interface on an old-fashioned punch-card machine. They do exist… perfectly usable, reliable, and verifiable after the fact. If anything, ask for a process that has been shown to work, or, at worst, we know how it doesn’t work.
button on the left-hand side of the page links to a nifty server that lets me find out what websites are close to me, physically.