[EM] First U.S. Scientific Election Audit Reveals Voting System Flaws but Questions Remain Unanswered

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

Kathy Dopp wrote me off list with a helpful suggestion, but I 
responded as if she had posted to the list. I expect that she will 
not mind if I also post my responses here, since I'm seeking broader comment.

At 04:15 PM 5/9/2007, Kathy Dopp wrote:
>On 5/8/07, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
>Ironically, unless we accept some kind of conspiracy theory, it is
>>mysterious why voting machines are used at all.
>
>Part of the explanation is years of propagandizing election officials
>by the voting vendor group-supported "The Election Center".

Yes, but you can't blame them! That what businesses are set up to do, 
promote their product. Puffery is expected, it is not even considered 
consumer fraud..... What is odd is that counting ballots by hand is 
not expensive, nor is it difficult, and the cost of replacing 
hand-counting with machines, unless the machines are general-purpose 
with other common uses, is quite high.

The knowledge of how to hand-count efficiently and accurately, as 
well as the knowledge use common equipment for machine counting, is 
widespread. Any community would have people who would know how to do 
this, and, in any case, standard methods could be developed and books 
written about it, and public-source software made available. Yet, as 
far as I know, nobody is doing it.

Why is nobody putting together vote-counting using fax machines and 
ordinary computers? I think I can guess why. It's because it is not 
worth the effort. I don't write programs to do something that I can 
do in a few hours and that I only need to do maybe once every two 
years. It's not cost-effective. But I also don't buy expensive 
machines to do the same job.

Something is seriously wrong with the way we make decisions, and it 
cuts very deep indeed.

(However, the ballot imaging proposals I'm talking about do set up an 
interest group which would want rapid counting, and which, if they 
had the images, would then create value for them sufficient to merit 
putting together the software. This, of course, would be media, who 
would want to count ballot images, if they were available early in 
the process, as soon as possible, in order to announce preliminary, 
not officially confirmed, results.)

>>Further, if one *is* going to machine-count ballots, the equipment to
>>do so is essentially free. Any fax could be used to scan a paper
>>ballot and the software to read marked ballots has been around for 
>>a long time.
>
>Yes. You can see that is what I pushed for for years (see
>http://electionmathematics.org)

Glad to hear it. Now, you've been pushing for it; why are you and 
others like you not being heard? I'd really like to know!

My own interest is specifically how large groups of people can 
communicate, coordinate, and cooperate. It happens to be the generic 
problem of government, but I see solutions that could vastly improve 
organizational efficiency and make true democracy possible on a large 
scale, with initial applications being most easily set up outside of 
government. The structural concept is delegable proxy, which sets up, 
from the point of view of our present interest, a filtering network 
that would vet ideas and allow good ones to propagate rapidly.

>I'm aware of the pros and cons of the system you mention below.  It
>does have technical drawbacks.

This is presumably about public ballot imaging. I'm only aware of one 
major drawback, which is an alleged increased opportunity for 
vote-buying or coercion. While there are ways to interdict this, I 
would note that the danger of vote-buying is overblown; both 
vote-buying and coercion must be fairly widespread to be seriously 
effective, and thus, since they are illegal and elections have been 
overturned merely upon the suspicion that vote-buying was involved, 
it seems backwards to me to place prevention of vote-buying above 
public confidence in election results.

In any case, there are plenty of people who do get to see the 
ballots, and so the only difference with public imaging is that 
everyone gets to see them who wants to, and not just insiders. 
Incumbents. The people who might be benefiting from vote-buying. Or 
at least observers from the political parties, who carefully watch 
the counting process.

What other technical "drawbacks" are there? Is there a discussion of 
this anywhere?