{"id":164,"date":"2008-11-03T21:31:16","date_gmt":"2008-11-04T02:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/03\/voting-done-right-wait-for-it\/"},"modified":"2010-03-25T22:48:01","modified_gmt":"2010-03-26T03:48:01","slug":"voting-done-right-wait-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/03\/voting-done-right-wait-for-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Voting Done Right: Wait For It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone wants to know the results of an election as soon as possible, including me. I will be spending tomorrow evening with friends, watching election results on live TV. I’ll be unhappy if a battle-ground state is slow to report, and I expect to know who the next president will be before I go to bed. But quick reporting of election results is in no way necessary, and in fact undermines our electoral system<\/em><\/strong>. We should put trustworthiness ahead of entertainment, and count votes deliberately.<\/p>\n

According to the project triangle<\/a>, you can do something quickly<\/em>, you can do something cheaply<\/em>, and you can do something well<\/em>, but you can only do two out of three.<\/p>\n

I propose that official tallies should not be released for 72 hours after polls close, by law. This gives us time to do voting right, and affordably.<\/p>\n

A Hard Problem<\/h3>\n

Engineering a good voting system is a much harder problem then most people realize.<\/p>\n

The system must be resistant to fraud by voters, and election officials, and the politicians on the ballot.<\/p>\n

Voters must vote only once. But nobody can tie a particular vote to someone (that would allow voter intimidation and buying). But their vote must still be counted for the right candidate.<\/p>\n

Tallies must be auditable (in case of a dispute a third party can re-count the votes). The whole system must be perceived as trustworthy and transparent by everyone.<\/p>\n

Oh, and it has to scale to use by hundreds of millions<\/em> of people on election day.<\/p>\n

And all of this has to be built, and maintained, with very limited public funds.<\/p>\n

This is a very hard problem already. Adding the extra requirement, “and final results must be ready two hours after polls close (so results can make prime-time TV)” would, in my opinion, make it an impossibly hard problem. Unfortunately, that is the direction we are moving.<\/p>\n

No Need to Rush<\/h3>\n

Our electoral system was designed in an era when, clich\u00e9 as it sounds, the pony express was the fastest way to communicate intra-nationally. Officials do not take office for several weeks after they have been voted-in. Delaying the certification of a successor until Friday would not incapacitate government. It’s always clear who the current officials are until new ones take office.<\/p>\n

Of course, today we live in a faster, more connected, world. It could be argued that this means we have a modern need for instant results. Fortunately, this does not appear to be the case. The fallout of the Bush v Gore election in 2000<\/a> proved that society and government can function just fine for several weeks without knowing who won an election.<\/p>\n

The Fear<\/h3>\n

Confidence in modern voting machines is rightly low. For the first time in nearly three decades, there will be a decline in the number of people casting their ballots electronically<\/a>. Nobody (lobbyists aside) seems to really think that these voting machines are a working out for us, except that they do give “tallies” faster.<\/p>\n

Personally, I am terrified of an all-electronic election. The reason is simple: it can’t be audited. Digital forensics just aren’t real enough. If someone stuffs a ballot box, they leave a trail of clues, down to the chemical composition of the paper. But there’s no record when bits are flipped to a crooked candidate. Any digital footprint can be faked. “Recounting” an electronic election would be pointless — asking the same program to run the same calculation, with the same data.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are exotic solutions. It might be possible to develop a digital storage media that can only be written to once, and would record forensic information, like the time of each write. Unfortunately, none of these ideas sound remotely cost-effective. Which leaves….<\/p>\n

Good old physical paper ballots. Slow, but sure, they are a proven technology that has earned our trust.<\/p>\n

… then the Opposite of Progress is…<\/h3>\n

So why not simply mandate that paper ballots must be used for an election? Personally, I think that would give us a better election system then we have today. And it’s probably got a much<\/em> better chance of happening then my idea of sitting on election results for three days.<\/p>\n

But I don’t think it’s the best long-term solution. Historically, laws just don’t keep up with technology. And we have every indication that the pace of technological change is increasing. A little over seventy years ago, the Social Security Number<\/a> was born. Today, we are stuck with them. I’m not convinced that paper will be the best medium for recording votes in 70 years.<\/p>\n

Rather then dictating anachronistic implementations, it seems better to codify the right trade offs to make when designing a voting system. Then we can organically reap the benefits of advances in voting-technology, as we have historically<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The real problem is that we, as a voting public, are favoring quick results over reliable ones. This is a social problem, it is not a technological problem. It is best to directly address the social expectations, not the technological details.<\/p>\n

But honestly… it will never happen. We like our prime-time TV and instant gratification too much. Withholding election results, even temporarily, feels<\/em> too dictatorial. We can expect to get our votes counted faster every year. I just hope it’s not at the expense of counting them correctly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone wants to know the results of an election as soon as possible, including me. I will be spending tomorrow evening with friends, watching election results on live TV. I’ll be unhappy if a battle-ground state is slow to report, and I expect to know who the next president will be before I go to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,42,8],"tags":[214,213,217,117,216,215,209],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-security","category-usability","tag-america","tag-electronic-voting","tag-faster","tag-futurism","tag-government","tag-usa-usa-usa","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":586,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions\/586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}