(N.B. This is the first in a series of posts about election reform needed in Missouri.)
In these modern times there are two significant ways to illegally alter the outcome of elections and neither involves hundreds of illegal immigrants or dead people voting. They are electronic election fraud and insider results manipulation. Using hand-marked paper ballots, recently replacing electronic touch-screen voting throughout Missouri, is a significant protection against electronic election fraud, a vulnerability that opened a state’s entire election outcomes to manipulation by one technically-savvy outsider. Having a permanent record of the voter’s intent where electronics haven’t been in between the voter and a record of his/her vote doesn’t prevent electronic manipulation of computer records of the vote, but it does make it possible to catch that kind of effort. Adequate random sampling in combination with hand recounts from the paper ballots to compare with electronic totals can catch accidental (or illegal) electronic mistakes.
Because insiders have so much control of any process in the current election management system, building better protection against insider manipulation of the results requires a different fix, hand-counting ballots at the polling place. Missouri State Senator Denny Hoskins—a Republican running to become the minder of elections for Missouri as Secretary of State—introduced a bill (SB917) this legislative session that would have mandated hand-counting of ballots. It would also have made electronic counting of ballots illegal. He was thoroughly excoriated by the local newspaper, the Saint Louis Post Dispatch (Newspaper editorial lambasting hand-counting). As is often the case in matters requiring more than a 30-second elevator speech to understand, both the paper and the Senator were wrong…and right.
Unlike the implication of the newspaper’s editorial, hand-counting at the polling place isn’t some misguided luddite desire for a return to a simpler era. Hand-counting at the polling place is all about involving many more actual people in the counting of ballots that makes insider fudging of election results much more difficult. And, unlike the full effects of Senator Hoskin’s bill—which would have ended electronic counting of ballots—hand-counting doesn’t mean elections need to take longer. One needn’t abandon scanning ballots into a system and counting it there just because hand-counting is also done. Polling place hand-counted totals break the final results down into many smaller parts that have to add up to—or nearly add up to—the electronically-counted results. So, hand counts don’t have to be absolutely perfect. If the totals from hand-counting in polling places don’t vary significantly from the computer results (e.g. as in changing who the winner is), there is no reason to be overly concerned about election fraud.
Hand counts only serve as an easy way to broadly test electronic results for insider manipulation. Adding hand counting to the election process would mean that any insider effort to manipulate totals would potentially require a conspiracy of hundreds of election workers to defeat. Today’s election rules only require recounting a random-sample of 5% of the polling places—a protection of the vote totals that only requires a small number of insiders to defeat.
To further insulate results from powerful insiders, hand-counting at the polling place should also require the hand-counted results to be very public. The counts should be posted (along with all the signatures of the counters) on the inside of a polling place window immediately after the counting is completed where it can be easily seen (and photographed) by the public outside. Additionally, poll workers should also have to post the same hand-counted results immediately to a very publicly-visible online database. These additions to a hand-counting process at the polls would put enough information in the hands of the public—independent of the easy control of insiders—to be able to catch insider fraud.
Yes, it will cost something to do this. Annually, adding a second shift to do the counting at each polling place might—using pessimistic assumptions—cost the state an additional $6 million (out of the state’s discretionary spending of $1.9 billion, about one-third of one percent). Given the heightened public concern about election transparency in recent years and the very real benefits of having election results that are much harder to manipulate, this expense seems more than reasonable.
Senator Hoskins’ bill is flawed, but the dismissal by the Post Dispatch of his proposal for hand-counting is the bigger error. New social organizing tools have brought many public institutions, including election management, under increased scrutiny. Just because the demands for change coming out of those concerns may be mostly reactive rather than insightful doesn’t mean these concerns should be dismissed out-of-hand.
The benefits of invisible computer-driven electronic vote-counting are speedy results and a sense of accuracy. But, what is lost by not having the count watched over by actual people is confidence in the results. Hand-counting in combination with the existing process of scanning hand-marked paper ballots into a computer for electronic counting can make elections much more secure while keeping reporting of results timely. It’s time to acknowledge that the concerns on the right of the political spectrum for election transparency deserve a much more reasoned and thoughtful response that can improve confidence in election results for all of us.
Good article, Phillip! I hope you send it to the Post Dispatch. Forced by our legislation to go down to one electronic voting machine per polling place to accommodate disabled voters, here in Columbia the director of elections instructed the poll workers to STILL ask whether voters wanted to vote by hand on paper or by machine (not DRE but machine that marks and prints a paper ballot). After our fifteen years of work this really angers me! I think the language of the legislation needs to be tweaked to fix this -- but who is going to go back to get it done?! (: