How To Fix Our Voting System
As I was watching a story on CNN this morning about the possibility of using biometric technology to replace credit cards (and wondering whatever happened to the mandatory bar-code tattoo idea), this all too frequent question popped into my head : How are financial systems able to count our money down to the exact penny, but we have trouble collecting and counting votes with a decent degree of credibility?
The reason for this difference is that fraud and identity theft ultimately hurt the financial companies, not the consumers. Whenever your credit card is stolen, all you have to do (usually) is cancel the card and dispute the charges. At the end of the day, the criminal shopping spree is funded by the credit card company or bank. For that reason, it’s really in their best interests to make their systems as secure and fool-proof as possible.
With voting systems, however, there isn’t the same level of accountability. With hundreds of thousands of votes uncounted for one reason or another, we’re expected to accept the reasoning that they would equally help all parties on the ballot. Besides, as long as it doesn’t change the outcome, who gives a shit about the uncounted ballots, right? And all that voting equipment is soooo expensive. This kind of sloppiness would be unheard of in any financial transactions, so what would happen if we applied the same level of risk to our electoral process that we do to our bank accounts?
Nevermind how this rule would apply to the current political situation, what would happen if every undervote, overvote, “spoiled” ballot, and miscellaneous vote problem were always counted against the incumbent? Just imagine for a moment the amount of pressure there would be on our elected officials to fix this problem if they were facing opponents who would instantly gain thousands of extra votes without having to kiss any additional asses? I know it’s an incredibly stupid idea, but I guarantee we’d have all these Diebold hacking, paper trail lacking, chad hanging problems solved pretty goddamn fast.
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Part of the problem is that, despite the hit they take on fraud, our financial institutions haven’t been able to quash it, and for big mistakes, they can take as long as they need to uncover what happened. That’s not the case with elections, though. We’d probably still have the problems, but at least we would probably have a better investigative system for controversial elections. Here’s a side note. With all the controversy over the lack of paper trails accompanying touch screen machines, few people are making a racket about the old voting machines we use in New York. The lever-based machine doesn’t give you a record of your vote, and if you aren’t certain who you voted for when you leave the booth, tough luck. There’s no way of checking before you leave. The truth is we rushed into the Touch Screen systems because people were worried that rich people got to use them while poor people didn’t. Probably the best system to use is Marksense, which leaves a paper trail and doesn’t require the poking of holes.
Comment by E-Rock — November 30, 2004 @ 11:17 am
I used to work in customer service at a bank, and you will not believe the massive losses that financial institutions take on fraud and just general mistakes. They do have some good solutions, but all those solutions require knowledge about a person’s account information to be shared freely with the person monitoring their accounts. That kind of transperancy defeats the whole purpose of the secret ballot. I don’t think the two are comparable.
Comment by Amanda — November 30, 2004 @ 11:29 am
e-rock and amanda do make good points. e-banking isnt infallable.
however, you’ll note that the average person throws one helluva fit when fraud or error hits them at in the pocketbook, and yet stares at the tv blankly while it appears their vote may have been taken away. mabey when people care about their democracy more than a $10 overdraft fee we’ll finally get a democrat into higher office than dogcatcher.
Comment by josh — November 30, 2004 @ 12:31 pm
There are three easy ways to fix our voting.
The first, everyone uses a paper ballot and puts an X next to the position they are voting for. All ballots are counted by hand. Pretty easy to count (although it would be slow in some large precients) and I believe the chances of fraud are fairly low.
The second, everyone uses a paper scantron ballot. This solves the problem of the speed of the count, but keeps the benifit of a hand recount being viable in the case of under/over voting and or a close race.
The third, hire 5-10 geeks. Give them 6 months and a few thousand dollars. They’ll have you a completly electronic touch screen system with a verifiable paper trail easily done. Hell, I could probably whip up the software myself in a few weeks. You wouldn’t even have to pay the guys. Just post a message on slashdot.org or start a sourceforge project and the nerds will do it for free, and I can’t imagine each machine costing more than a few hundred dollars to make.
Comment by Andrew — November 30, 2004 @ 3:00 pm
No shit. There’s no reason why we can’t have a voting system that requires little more than a self-booting CD that installs Linux, a personal firewall, and some open-source voting software on a cheap-ass Intel-based computer from the local Best Buy. Luckilly for us, there’s already a few projects out there to develop this sort of thing.
Comment by greg — December 1, 2004 @ 10:42 am