John R. Patrick on Election Attitude
This is such a timely topic that we really wanted the opportunity to hear Dr. John R. Patrick speak before the election. As John pointed out at the start of his talk, in recent years he has published books on, and talked to us about Net Attitude, Health Attitude, and now Election Attitude. “Attitude” is how you approach a topic, problem or opportunity. All the pundits keep telling us that there has never been an election year like this one. But when we get to Election Day, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, will the result of our collective decisions about who should be our elected representatives accurately and completely represent each vote? Even before we vote, will everyone who is eligible actually be able to cast their votes? The first part of John’s talk was about how and why we vote, then the problems of the current system and after the break, he continued on to potential solutions.
One of John’s key points is the complexity and depth of this issue. It could be said that the problem begins with the fact that the framers of the Constitution left the particulars of voting to the states. Since the ratification of the Constitution we evolved fifty unique systems of registration and voting. After the debacle of the 2000 election, Congress gave block grants to the states to buy new voting machines. So now, sixteen years later, we have twelve-year old voting machines. Do you use your 12-year old laptop? Of course not, it would be unreliable and you could not get parts. Many of the companies that manufactured the voting machines are no longer in business, making spare parts nearly impossible to obtain. Over time the number of working machines dwindles. Most of the machines produce some sort of paper audit report – but even today, not all do. So in the grand scheme of things we switched from paper ballots to mechanical machines that had no paper audit trail and now back to paper – in most cases. Here in Connecticut, we vote on paper ballots, but how reliable are the machines that scan each ballot?
Ballots are another part of the problem. Each polling location serves a different mix of districts for everything from U.S. Congressional Representative to your representative in the state legislature. This means that each polling place has a unique ballot. They are printed on card stock that reminds me of IBM punch cards. It’s important they are stiff enough to reliably feed thru the high speed scanners in a recount. When we used the old mechanical voting machines, there was no paper ballot so a surge in voter turnout meant only that the polling place was busy more of the day. Now such a surge could result in running out of ballots and one polling place cannot simply borrow some from the polling place across town. Problems can be even more basic. John reported how the truck delivering ballots in a recent election in Florida got lost. As a result some polling places could not open on time and likely some people lost their opportunity to vote.
Would voting by mail be a solution? John feels that while it offers some benefits, like removing barriers to disabled or sick voters, it introduces its own set of problems. Nearly every state has some form of voting by mail. Here in CT this is absentee voting. In CT the process is: first, you ask your town clerk for a ballot, either by mail or in person. You get a ballot and two envelopes. After you fill it out, the ballot goes into the inner envelope. This envelope protects the secrecy of your vote. This all goes into the outer envelope which you must sign, enter your address and then mail. When I voted absentee I did all this in the town clerk’s office and gave them the completed package. So technically I did not mail it. On Election Day, the envelopes are sorted and the sender’s name and address are compared to the voting rolls. If you entered the address where you were mailing the ballot instead of your registered voting address, your ballot is discarded. If your name does not match exactly as you are registered, your ballot is discarded. If your ballot passes the voting rolls, then the outer envelope is opened and the security envelope is placed with other valid ballots. In theory at some point, the polling officials open the inner envelope and your votes are added to the votes cast at the polling place. The theory part is that counting these votes requires extra work and they are often not counted unless one of the elections is so close that the absentee votes could tip the results. Of course there is no way for you to know if any of this actually happened as your ballot could have been lost in the mail. In Oregon and Washington State where voting by mail is the default, ballots are mailed to every registered voter.
Could vote by mail be “hacked”? In a district known to regularly vote red or blue, a postal worker could be bribed to take hundreds or thousands of ballots and throw them in the dumpster. This would happen over a period of time so the conspirators just might get away with it even if the postal worker were caught. Do this in enough districts and it could “fix” the election.
After the break, the topic turned to voting over the Internet. John feels that the solution is to adopt an “election attitude” and build a secure, auditable election voting system. Of course the nay sayers immediately scream that the Internet is not secure and therefore Internet voting can never be secure. Our election system is “distributed”. There are 50 states, each with many counties with one or, as here in CT, many polling places. Here in New Milford there are seven polling places with two of these located across the street from the other. So to influence an election, the counts from many polling places must be altered. Next there is limited time to complete the “hack”. Servers involved in voting would be vulnerable for only a short time – hours or perhaps a couple of weeks with early voting. Compare this to an e-commerce server at Walmart. It must be available 24/7/365 so the hackers can take their time and attack when they choose.
Of course there are servers that do not get hacked. This is not easy. It requires knowledge and a budget but it can be done. Next we need a secure, auditable and verifiable means to record the votes. John feels this is the Blockchain. A blockchain is a “consensus-based distributed ledger” kept by a number of servers running the same software. All of the servers must agree on each transaction as it is recorded. Once a vote is recorded, it cannot be altered on one sever as this would put it out of sync with the other servers and the change would be rejected. This is the technology upon which the digital currency Bitcoin is built. Last the voter must have a secure platform from which to vote. John feels the solution is our smart phones. These devices have sufficient computing power to handle modern encryption so voting data can be encrypted from the voting software all the way to the server accepting the transactions.
During the question and answer session, John spoke about some of the actual trials of Internet voting that have taken place. These range from a trial for military personnel to a Republican primary in Utah. During this pilot, Mormon missionaries serving overseas were able to vote from 43 countries. Amazing!
I have vastly simplified all of this even from John’s talk; in fact I eliminated much of his talk because there is simply too much to describe here. This topic is fascinating and I urge everyone to read John’s book, Election Attitude. In it he presents both the problems and possible solutions in his thorough yet easy to read style.
The bottom line is that John will be back next May.
There is a review of John Patrick’s book, Election Attitude – How Internet Voting Leads to a Stronger Democracy, in the October, 2016, issue of DACS.doc and on the website with additional reviews on Amazon.