Voting Technology: “You Won The Election, But I Won The Count.”

This is the second essay in a series on the future of voting technology.

So much of what we saw on Star Trek 50 years ago is now part of our lives. We have personal communicators and replicators (3D printing). We take vital signs with a smartwatch and children learn to edit genomes of living organisms. In contrast with these leaps forward, when holding elections much of the world has returned to, or never even left, paper ballots filled in by hand. Why will voters across the United States soon queue up at polling stations, staring at their super-computing phones while waiting to pencil-in bubbles on a sheet of paper? 

Voting sits at the flashpoint of sociology, politics, technology, and psychology. It must support everyone in a democracy, yet be immune to the strongest subversions.  

This week’s focus is the problems that voting technology must solve. Critical voter needs include:

Technologies may advance, but humans don’t. At least not nearly as fast, and not noticeably over several hundred years. Voting technology’s history shows the complications, our attempts to solve them, and likely future directions. 

History Illustrates the Difficulties Facing Voting Tech

Americans, that is, land-owning male Americans aged 21 and over, began their democracy experiment in 1783 with a common practice: voice voting in front of a judge. 

Shouting your vote in a crowded room was not secret and frequently not safe! Secret ballots, driven by labor movements like England’s Chartists, appeared in the 1830s. Inventors launched multiple innovative secret voting processes and the most successful still survives: sliding a paper ballot into a locked box.

Writing candidates’ names on a piece of paper was a burden for the illiterate. In the mid-1800’s political parties figured they could help voters and themselves by distributing pre-printed ballots loaded up with their candidates’ names. The paper slips resembled train tickets, and trains were the flashy, high-tech transportation of the time. The name stuck: political parties ran “tickets” of candidates.

To curb vote forging and literal ballot box stuffing, a government pre-printed paper ballot was developed in Australia in 1856. This “Australian ballot”  listed all approved candidates’ names with blank check-boxes next to them. Voters just marked-in next to their choices. Many elections still use the Australian ballot design today. 

Hand-counting paper ballots takes a lot of time and labor. It’s also vulnerable to fraud. Foiling chicanery is a constant voting tech challenge. As 20th-century Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, famously declared, “You won the election, but I won the count.” Thomas Edison’s first patent, in 1869, was for a tamper-proof electric voting machine for legislative bodies, “The Electrographic Vote Recorder and Register.” 

The Industrial Revolution’s fascination with levers and gears brought the “lever” machine in 1892. Easy to operate, hard to foil, and conveying security through sheer size and physical feedback, lever machines were polling station fixtures for more than 100 years. (Frustrated with electronic paper ballot scanners, New York City even lugged out 5,000 of the 800-pound metal monsters for its 2013 election.)

Unfortunately lever machines, which were giant mechanical computers, had thousands of sensitive parts. They also kept no individual vote records. The devices themselves may have been hard to compromise, but the voting process was not. In mid-Century Chicago, it was just a matter of ensuring that poll workers were all from Mayor Daly’s Democratic party. A precinct manager could then vote for all registered voters who had not cast ballots (like dead ones, thousands of whom were on the voting rolls). 

Lever machines gave way to the next technological craze: electronic computers. 

IBM, then the epitome of a fast-growth high-tech innovator, introduced electronic computers to voting in the mid-’60s. IBM’s system electronically scanned and tallied punch-card ballots. Those cards became an immutable record of every vote cast. Verifiability, ease of use, and fast, accurate counting made it hugely popular. Until dangling chad.

Chad is the dot of paper that gets punched from a punch card.  Electronic scanners can’t read a punch card with dangling, or dimpled, or “pregnant” chad that’s not fully punched. Voters won’t fully punch through a card that’s awkwardly designed. The 2000 Palm Beach County, Florida, ballot was a disaster. The state was unable to discern what was and was not a vote, and U.S. Supreme Court effectively determined the winner of the Presidential election. 

2000 was also the height of the personal computer age. Paper cards with dangling chad gave a healthy reason to evolve voting to the next hot technology. Touch screens and styluses debuted in polling stations, along with internet connections, lots of software, and plenty of hackers.

In the 2010s, new voting systems forged two contrasting trails. Embracing the latest slick technology some areas, notably Estonia, introduced internet voting including voting by smartphone. (Estonia’s first major use of online voting was the 2007 parliamentary elections.) They offer excellent accessibility, convenience, and, provided they are not hacked, fast, accurate, verifiable, transparent results. Plus, the expense should ride computing’s exponentially declining cost curve to deliver universal affordability. Supporters say it will “demonetize” and “democratize” democracy (ironically). In 2019, twelve years from its first availability, only 43% of Estonians used online voting in their parliamentary elections. 

In contrast, many governments prefer the relative security and physical verifiability of paper ballots coupled with intelligent distribution and tally schemes. They accept the logistic and long-term cost burden of managing paper in return for security and voter trust. 

Needs Are Known; Solutions Are Elusive

Our two hundred years of applying technology to voting confirm the needs and challenges.

Voting must be Accessible. Systems, including the staff and service cost, have to be cheap enough for all eligible voters everywhere to have access. Long lines at polls happen when hard-to-repair machines with proprietary parts break down. Voters living abroad or with disabilities need the same ease of access as those going to the polls in person.  

Trust and transparency are vital. Electoral systems have to deliver results that reflect the will of the voters.  The environment must establish sufficient trust so that results are accepted as valid. The perception of fraud can be just as damaging as actual fraud. Americans may see this truth first-hand in November. 

Accuracy is paramount. A voting system needs the designed-in ability to recheck the final tally, to audit it, against a secure and permanent individual vote archive. A vote properly cast must be a vote correctly counted. Election officials voided the 2018 congressional election in North Carolina’s 9^th district. The winning candidate’s employees had altered or disposed of mail-in ballots from hundreds of elderly, rural voters.

A system needs resilience against cheaters and hackers (especially when they are running the precincts). Voters themselves must be safe from bribery and coercion. Ironically, any system that allows a voter to prove his/her choices to another person also compromises the voter’s safety. 

Finally, while it is tempting to spare no expense for something as socially vital as voting, the practical reality is that governments and citizens have to be able to afford an election’s equipment, service, maintenance, and processes. While budget tradeoffs can be made, the lower the voting system’s cost the more likely it is to be fielded and used correctly

Harder Than Self-Driving Cars

Voting is a different and harder problem to solve than, for example, creating a self-driving car. A security breach in a robo-car may be disastrous for many, but a breached election system impacts every person in a society. If consumers don’t trust self-driving cars they have many transportation options. If voters don’t trust an election their governance alternatives are limited and often revolutionary.

Voting tools have been inspired by the most sophisticated technologies of their day. Pre-printed forms; jungles of gears; punch cards; touch screens; smartphones and blockchain databases: there is always an aspiration that new technology will perfect elections. Nevertheless, for the next four weeks the U.S. will see millions of citizens filling-in 1850’s-style paper ballots. Paper and pen meets voters’ needs extremely well, as we’ll see in the next post in this series. But after voting with paper ballots U.S. voters will watch the election returns on their smartphones. 

Cover Images retrieved from Smithsonian Institution: www.si.edu/object/eslate-voting-system; www.si.edu/object/acme-ballot-box-1880; www.si.edu/object/photograph-young-woman-demonstrating-use-voting-machine