What on Earth is wrong with the United States of America? Millions of people do not trust the results of elections. Worse, there seems to be no satisfactory way to convince them that there was no fraud. Even if there were absolutely no fraud at all, this is nevertheless a serious problem. All the turmoil is highly disruptive and exacerbates polarization. It is also prima facie evidence that election integrity is inadequate.
It is critical that election integrity be so airtight that no one would think it necessary or worth their while to question the results. Citizens must be able to implicitly trust election outcomes. In the event that there should be any question, it must be possible to conclusively and rather quickly prove that the results are correct. One would expect this to already be the case here in the modern cradle of democracy. Sadly, and dangerously, it is not.
Almost needless to say, if elections become cheating contests where the faction that cheats most effectively always wins, our republic is lost—perhaps permanently.
Pertinent History
Beginning with the nation’s founding and continuing until the late twentieth century, the overall trend was toward improving election integrity. Concern for integrity was virtually universal. When problems were identified, serious attempts were made to remedy them. A seminal event was the realization in 1880 that it was quite important to guarantee a completely secret ballot to prevent coercion of voters and outright vote buying.
The high point of integrity was achieved during the several twentieth-century decades during which nearly all voters voted at polling places using hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots, which ensured ballot secrecy. But since then, integrity has declined at an accelerating rate.
A few mistakes were made with attempts to utilize modern technology. The glaring example was the direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines that had no audit trails, so the reported results could not be verified. It is dismaying that the DRE machines were ever approved for service and a very good thing that they have been phased out. A more serious abandonment of integrity is the expanding use of absentee and mail-in ballots! For so many reasons, this is even more reckless than were the DREs.
Requirements for Airtight Integrity
The difficulty of achieving the necessary level of integrity must not be underestimated. The overall process and every part of it must be carefully thought through. Every step must be engineered to make fraud substantially impossible. It must be extremely difficult and highly unlikely that election results could be nefariously controlled or influenced by any special interest group. If fraudulent manipulation should nevertheless somehow occur, its detection, correction, and prosecution must be virtually certain. Furthermore, the evidence required for the successful prosecution of the perpetrators should be readily available.
It is not sufficient just to eliminate fraud. It is also critical that substantially all citizens have high confidence in all results, especially the losers of elections. Even if no fraud has occurred, it is still highly disruptive if some nevertheless question election outcomes. Citizens need to be able to understand all aspects of how elections work. A lot of transparency is necessary to maintain high levels of confidence.
Here is a check list:
- List of registered voters. An accurate, current, and complete list must be maintained of citizens who are eligible to vote and have registered to do so. The list must, of course, show the voting precinct to which each voter has been assigned.
- Positive voter identification and control. There must be positive control mechanisms and procedures which ensure that only those on the registered voter list are allowed to vote, and only once in each election. It must be guaranteed that the positively identified voter actually is the person who votes.
- Guaranteed secret ballot. A completely secret ballot must be guaranteed for each and every voter. There are two aspects of ballot secrecy: 1) If voters wish to keep how they voted a secret, that certainly must be possible. 2) If voters want to prove to anyone else how they voted, that must not be possible.
- Durable audit trail. There must be a durable audit trail (e.g., paper ballots) that forms the legal record of voters’ intents and enables audits that can verify results quickly and with certainty.
- Transparency, supervision, and control. Other than for any brief time when voters handle their own individual ballots, any and all handling of ballots (even including simple access to them) and/or official ballot tallies must be done only under the supervision of election officials and while observers from opposing factions are present and able to closely observe. In order to have confidence in elections, the public needs to have a good general understanding of how elections work and have as much visibility into them as possible.
- Machine verification. If any output of any machine can affect the election results, each such output must actually be checked and verified as a part of, and in the course of, normal operating procedure.
For anyone interested, the book, Elections Are Broken — How to Fix Them discusses each of the above requirements in some detail. This webpage will just cite some highlights.
Minimize Mail-in Ballots
Mail-in voting cannot possibly satisfy requirements 2 or 3. It should be strictly limited to those with bona fide compelling reasons — primarily military personnel stationed far from home. In no case should mail-in ballots exceed 1% of all ballots. There are lots of vulnerabilities. A really obvious one is that voters can easily prove to someone else how they voted. That enables vote buying. When political parties are willing to spend $100 million hoping to influence one race, vote buying will happen if it is at all possible — no matter how illegal it may be.
Signature Matching Is Worthless
Signature matching must not be relied upon for positive voter identification. A photo ID (or other truly positive method) is necessary. It is worse than worthless as it creates a false sense of legitimacy and security.
The first problem is that people simply do not always sign their names the same way. Signatures can change radically as people age, suffer from arthritis, or perhaps undergo injury or surgery on their writing hands or wrists. The appearance of someone’s signature can be significantly affected by the texture of the surface upon which they are writing, the position they are in, whether they are hurrying, how they feel, how much Starbucks coffee they have drunk, and many other similar factors. Trained handwriting experts sometimes have difficulty and, in any case, require some time (at least 15 or 20 seconds of scrutiny) to determine whether two signatures match.
During an election, voters frequently must be processed quickly. The poll workers certainly are not trained handwriting experts. Poll workers who would have the confidence to challenge a voter’s signature for a mismatch are few and far between. This alone renders the process unreliable, and that assumes that the poll worker actually attempts to verify the signature. The next time you check in to vote, watch the poll worker and see if any effort at all is made to compare signatures. It is a rather safe bet that zero time will be spent verifying the signatures of most, if not all, voters.
In-person Voting at Polling Places Is Required
Substantially all voters must vote with their neighbors at their friendly, local polling place. This was fine for hundreds of years when it was a lot harder to get to polling places than it is today, so it cannot possibly be a big problem! Making election day a national holiday would be a good idea.
A private voting booth in a supervised polling place is the only hope for guaranteeing a completely secret ballot. It also is the only way to be certain that the voter that was positively identified is actually the voter who fills in the ballot.
Thanks to modern technology, it’s harder to ensure a completely secret ballot. It must be illegal for anyone to possess any device capable of capturing and/or transmitting an image or facsimile of a ballot while in the voting booth or ballot box area of a polling place. Penalties must be stiff, even for first offenses, and enforcement must be taken seriously. Notices should be prominently posted. Provisions could be made for people to check their phones at the door and reclaim them on the way out. Alternatively, each voter’s phone could be locked inside a bag that the voter carries along while voting, and the bag would be unlocked after the voter’s ballot has been deposited into the ballot box.
It s challenging to maintain all of the requirements for airtight integrity. The difficulty increases rapidly for voting and counting processes that are spread out over large spaces or long times. That is why all critical operations must be carried out on election day in polling places that are operated and monitored by trained staff following carefully designed procedures and in the presence of observers from opposing factions.
Use of Modern Technology
People do not trust machines. They are entirely correct not to trust them. It is impossible to guarantee that any machine of at least the complexity of a paper stapler will function correctly all of the time. Mistakes certainly have been made in the past attempting to utilize machines. Does that mean modern technology should not be used? NO! If carefully and properly utilized, modern technology could serve to improve both the efficiency and the integrity of our elections. In fact, we should have been taking advantage of computer technology for the past quarter century.
If citizens are to implicitly trust elections, they must be able to understand everything about elections and there must be a lot of transparency so that voters can be sure that elections are working the way they understand that they should. Voters certainly are not going to understand computers or any complex machine. But we can surmount that problem by adhering to a simple rule. Every output of any machine that could affect the election outcome must be checked and verified as a normal step in the election procedures.
The above rule may sound difficult, but it is not at all impossible. In fact, there is already a system available that complies with the rule and is waiting to be put into service. See the (next) page of this website about Election Manager.