I was distressed to stumble upon Nathan Cemenska’s article about all-vote-by-mail (AVBM) systems, because until people understand where the potential for fraud enters the system, we cannot have an intelligent discussion about how to prevent it.
In his own words, in his first paragraph, Nathan writes:
I do not know what risk of fraud is present in AVBM systems, but I do think that smart technology and procedures can probably reduce whatever risk of fraud is present and make AVBM a very attractive option.
Why should anyone bother to read the rest of what he says, when he’s already conceded he does not know, and implicitly, cannot imagine, risks to the AVBM system, and yet is confident, in his admitted ignorance, that smart technology and procedures can “probably” reduce whatever risk of fraud is present.
Let’s look at the potential for fraud in AVBM systems:
1. Votes can be bought, sold, and inappropriately coerced.
Without the privacy of the in-person vote, who is there to ensure the voters are voting the way they really wanted to?
What’s to stop a political operative from wandering through poor or indigent communities proffering money in exchange for a signed piece of paper that the operatives can then fill out and submit for that person?
What’s to stop an abusive spouse from insisting their partner vote a certain way?
What’s to stop an employer from insisting his employees fill out and turn in the ballots to him for inspection, assuring them he will mail them for them? Don’t say “the law” because people break laws every day, especially when it’s in their perceived interest to do so. And subordinates often do not report the crimes of their managers for fear of retribution.
2. Ballots can easily be “lost.”
While I trust the post office, in general, to deliver the mail, do I trust people to guard those ballots with their lives? I mean, if some political operative goes to a mail carrier in a private place and says gee, if a few ballots from this area don’t get to the post office, there’s a lot of money in it for you, how many of them are so incorruptible as to say no? While many would, one hopes, there will always be those few that will take the money.
The same holds true in the elections offices. No matter the screening procedures, some people can always be bought. Who is watching the employees every second to make sure some ballots aren’t – deliberately or even by accident — omitted from the count?
3. Computers are doing a lousy job reading mailed-in ballots.
See today’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle, detailing how the audits showed that many ballots were not being counted correctly because people filled out their ballots in an ink too light to be read properly. At a polling place, people are given the proper pencils or pens or ink stampers (Los Angeles uses an ink-stamping system) to mark their ballots in such a way that the optical scanning systems can read them correctly.
4. Mailed ballots often go unaudited.
As the story above demonstrates, without an audit, potentially race-altering outcomes from mailed in ballots would have gone undetected. California is one of the few states that requires mailed in ballots to be audited by hand at all. How many other states have not correctly counted their mailed in ballots? We can’t know, because we’ve never checked. I don’t think we should have to rely on faith to know that our votes were counted correctly. As Ronald Reagan used to say, “Trust, but verify.”
5. There are forces in this country with the ability to intercept mail and change elections.
In 1975, Senator Frank Church headed a Senate committee which investigated the CIA’s activities in America – activities which were, according to the CIA’s charter, illegal.
The committee found that, among many other acts, the CIA had opened mail of private American citizens.
What’s to keep certain politically loyal factions in the intelligence agency from opening ballots and tracking who votes which way, or worse, altering ballots to affect a certain outcome? Thinks that’s a ridiculous scenario? Then you don’t know what the CIA has already provably, according to that Senate report, done.
Some argue the CIA only does the President’s bidding. Can anyone doubt that, if true, we have had presidents who would have tried to affect election outcomes if they thought they could get away with it? And if they did get away with it, how would we know?
This is not conspiracy theory. It is a matter of the historical record that the CIA has altered elections abroad. There’s no question that they have the capability to alter elections at home.
And the Church committee proved something else: no one really wanted to know too much about what the CIA had really done, domestically. The end result of the Senate investigation was not punishment to the CIA for breaking the law, but a loosening of the laws so that the CIA could operate more easily domestically. In other words, if the CIA wanted to alter elections in America, they have the ability, and the knowledge that they would likely never be held accountable. That’s the historical record.
I haven’t even detailed all the problems with votes counted by computers – and not just by the much-protested DRE (direct recording electronic) systems, but by the more popular, if equally vulnerable, optical scan systems. Code can be written to miscount on election day, by design, and by accident. Even if the code is “reviewed,” was the reviewer bought and paid for in advance? In the past, vendors have been able to choose the lab that would “certify” their results. Would you let a suspected murderer choose who conducts his DNA test?
I’ve served on the staff of two presidential campaigns. I’ve also been a programmer. I can tell you two important things from these experiences: 1) there are people that will stoop to anything to get their candidate elected, and 2) programmers can hide what they do so completely that even another programmer might never catch it. These two things combined necessitate that we should not trust our elections solely to computers, but must audit the results vigorously against a paper record marked by the voter to ensure the computer counts are accurate.
The only safe vote is one conducted in a private booth in a public place, such that the voter cannot sell his vote nor be forced to vote a certain way, and the only system that can guarantee an appropriate outcome is the one that involves the most possible transparency, i.e., counting ballots by hand at the precinct before the ballots ever leave the polling place. That’s how elections used to be conducted until the first introduction of computers to count punchcards in 1968. And guess what happened, according to Walter Cronkite? It took LONGER to count the ballots by computer than it did previously, because the ballots had to be first transported to headquarters, and then fed, one at a time, into a machine.
Speed and convenience should never trump the accuracy of our vote, in a Democracy.
