October 19, 2005
Bob Williams (EFF) on Election Reform
Bob Williams of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation spoke about election reform at Monday's Downtown Seattle Republicans meeting, held at the College Club. Williams was interviewed by Stefan Sharkansky (Sound Politics blog contributor, articles in The Stranger). The event was filmed for Seattle Channel (show times).
Having a keen interest in election reform, I thought I'd hear what Williams had to say. Inspired by Bernie Ellis, a small bunch of us are searching for election reform allies. Certainly, strangers things have happened...
The outspoken Sharkansky has tenaciously investigated problems with the 2004 election in King County. I applaud Sharkansky's efforts. Every election should be similiarly scrutinized, just as a matter of course.
The problems uncovered by various parties include insufficient ballot security, more ballots than voters, incorrectly counting some ballots as well as incorrectly not counting others, persons voting twice, dead people voting, and military personal not receiving their ballots in time. I had heard additional horror stories from poll workers.
Williams and EFF offer plenty of advice. The election was the result of criminal negligence. The politicians, many of them Republicans, aren't doing their jobs prosecuting fraudsters. One bit, stating that we have all the laws we need, they just need to be enforced, reminded me of all the environmental activism meetings I've attended.
Some of the suggestions are pretty good. Like having election observers on-hand from all parties to witness the count. Other suggestions, not so much.
Williams wants every voter to re-register. All 9 million of them. Apparently, that'd ensure the voter database was scrubbed clean. Until someone died. Or moved. It'd also have the fortunate side-effect of immediately giving the Republicans an electorial advantage. (Republicans are historically better at marshalling their voters.)
Failing that, Williams wants the entire voter database audited. Ancedotes abound of dead people still receiving absentee ballots, legal and illegal immigrants being registered to vote, and other irregularities.
Well. I have experience maintaining membership and customer databases, mailing lists, and the like. I've even been researching how to uniquely identify people across multiple databases, a problem called "record linkage". There's lots of commercial solutions. (And a few open source ones, like Febrl.) In fact, I was absolutely blown away by one such demo. But the service isn't cheap.
Scrubbing databases of persons is not a trivial problem and there are no trivial solutions. States do a pretty good, cost effective job of maintaining voter databases. Vendors, like Accenture, seem to make a mess of it.
Data quality, like all quality efforts, must be clear upfront about the goals. Perfection is never attainable. There's always a point of diminishing returns, where further quality improvements are cost prohibitive. The key is to state one's goals, test to see if those goals were achieved, and then adjust as necessary.
Another Williams proposal is to require proof of citizenship, in the form of photo ID, to vote. Not just register, mind you, but to actually vote. That's called a poll tax. I'd take such proposals more seriously if the required photo id was freely available to everyone. Also, there seems to be broad opposition to national identification cards.
Williams made the disturbing offhand suggestion that, as an experienced professional accountant, he'd hire someone who knows how to count to actually conduct the vote count. Chase Manhattan was mentioned. Williams will be pleased to learn that we have already outsourced the vote count. In King County, that responsibility has been given to Diebold. However, Williams may be surprised by the suggestion that oursourcing the vote count (aka "secret vote count") is unconstitutional. Indeed, divesting our democracy to corporations is abhorrant to some pretty smart people (e.g. Thom Hartmann).
Williams' thoughts on voter responsibility, repeated ad nauseum in testimony given at the Governor's Election Reform public hearings, surprised me again. (Williams's own writeup.) Apparently, the logic is that if the voter can't be troubled to correctly color in the circle, then too bad.
My experiences designing user interfaces informs my view on this. In brief, humans are error-prone, get over it. If a designer ignores this simple reality, then the designer is at fault, not the user. That's why we do usability testing. (Ideally.) Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" is a pretty good start on this topic.
There's also a legal argument I've heard Paul Lehto say. It goes something like "I do not forfeit my right to vote if I make a mistake." I'm sure the people who got suckered by the butterfly ballot, or didn't notice their hanging chads, would emphatically agree.
I keep chewing on all that I heard Monday night. It's important to follow the rules. Except when the rules don't favor us. It seems a bit, well, incongruent.
It's also troubles me that elections are seen as contests. Like a baseball playoff series. Versus a means to assess the will of the people.
The election problems of Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 were mentioned. Without judgement, of course. Not mentioned were the irregularities of Snohomish County 2004. I wonder why?
It's easy to criticize. Harder to make suggestions. So here's mine.
I'm not original is stating the problem with the Washington State 2004 Governor's race is a weakness in the current "first past the post" election system. When the margin of victory is less than the margin of error, then victories are not completely convincing. There are a variety of voting systems. Many areas have runoff elections. Others have instant runoff voting.
If the voter registration database is a huge source of errors, an easy fix would be to eliminate the registration database. If you're 18 years of age, a citizen, and not had your voter rights revoked (e.g. felony), then you get to vote. Right? I don't see the benefit of requiring an additional registration step. Think of all the cost savings. Unless, of course, the actual goal is to deny persons their voting rights.
Having a keen interest in election reform, I thought I'd hear what Williams had to say. Inspired by Bernie Ellis, a small bunch of us are searching for election reform allies. Certainly, strangers things have happened...
The outspoken Sharkansky has tenaciously investigated problems with the 2004 election in King County. I applaud Sharkansky's efforts. Every election should be similiarly scrutinized, just as a matter of course.
The problems uncovered by various parties include insufficient ballot security, more ballots than voters, incorrectly counting some ballots as well as incorrectly not counting others, persons voting twice, dead people voting, and military personal not receiving their ballots in time. I had heard additional horror stories from poll workers.
Williams and EFF offer plenty of advice. The election was the result of criminal negligence. The politicians, many of them Republicans, aren't doing their jobs prosecuting fraudsters. One bit, stating that we have all the laws we need, they just need to be enforced, reminded me of all the environmental activism meetings I've attended.
Some of the suggestions are pretty good. Like having election observers on-hand from all parties to witness the count. Other suggestions, not so much.
Williams wants every voter to re-register. All 9 million of them. Apparently, that'd ensure the voter database was scrubbed clean. Until someone died. Or moved. It'd also have the fortunate side-effect of immediately giving the Republicans an electorial advantage. (Republicans are historically better at marshalling their voters.)
Failing that, Williams wants the entire voter database audited. Ancedotes abound of dead people still receiving absentee ballots, legal and illegal immigrants being registered to vote, and other irregularities.
Well. I have experience maintaining membership and customer databases, mailing lists, and the like. I've even been researching how to uniquely identify people across multiple databases, a problem called "record linkage". There's lots of commercial solutions. (And a few open source ones, like Febrl.) In fact, I was absolutely blown away by one such demo. But the service isn't cheap.
Scrubbing databases of persons is not a trivial problem and there are no trivial solutions. States do a pretty good, cost effective job of maintaining voter databases. Vendors, like Accenture, seem to make a mess of it.
Data quality, like all quality efforts, must be clear upfront about the goals. Perfection is never attainable. There's always a point of diminishing returns, where further quality improvements are cost prohibitive. The key is to state one's goals, test to see if those goals were achieved, and then adjust as necessary.
Another Williams proposal is to require proof of citizenship, in the form of photo ID, to vote. Not just register, mind you, but to actually vote. That's called a poll tax. I'd take such proposals more seriously if the required photo id was freely available to everyone. Also, there seems to be broad opposition to national identification cards.
Williams made the disturbing offhand suggestion that, as an experienced professional accountant, he'd hire someone who knows how to count to actually conduct the vote count. Chase Manhattan was mentioned. Williams will be pleased to learn that we have already outsourced the vote count. In King County, that responsibility has been given to Diebold. However, Williams may be surprised by the suggestion that oursourcing the vote count (aka "secret vote count") is unconstitutional. Indeed, divesting our democracy to corporations is abhorrant to some pretty smart people (e.g. Thom Hartmann).
Williams' thoughts on voter responsibility, repeated ad nauseum in testimony given at the Governor's Election Reform public hearings, surprised me again. (Williams's own writeup.) Apparently, the logic is that if the voter can't be troubled to correctly color in the circle, then too bad.
My experiences designing user interfaces informs my view on this. In brief, humans are error-prone, get over it. If a designer ignores this simple reality, then the designer is at fault, not the user. That's why we do usability testing. (Ideally.) Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" is a pretty good start on this topic.
There's also a legal argument I've heard Paul Lehto say. It goes something like "I do not forfeit my right to vote if I make a mistake." I'm sure the people who got suckered by the butterfly ballot, or didn't notice their hanging chads, would emphatically agree.
I keep chewing on all that I heard Monday night. It's important to follow the rules. Except when the rules don't favor us. It seems a bit, well, incongruent.
It's also troubles me that elections are seen as contests. Like a baseball playoff series. Versus a means to assess the will of the people.
The election problems of Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 were mentioned. Without judgement, of course. Not mentioned were the irregularities of Snohomish County 2004. I wonder why?
It's easy to criticize. Harder to make suggestions. So here's mine.
I'm not original is stating the problem with the Washington State 2004 Governor's race is a weakness in the current "first past the post" election system. When the margin of victory is less than the margin of error, then victories are not completely convincing. There are a variety of voting systems. Many areas have runoff elections. Others have instant runoff voting.
If the voter registration database is a huge source of errors, an easy fix would be to eliminate the registration database. If you're 18 years of age, a citizen, and not had your voter rights revoked (e.g. felony), then you get to vote. Right? I don't see the benefit of requiring an additional registration step. Think of all the cost savings. Unless, of course, the actual goal is to deny persons their voting rights.
