I've talked in the past about how trust in elections is critical. Right now the system simply can't be audited, by design. We have hyper-partisans building, installing, and maintaining closed systems with known flaws. There's no possibility of recount, and no way of knowing that your vote was counted correctly. As a recent example of this, in a recent UK election a candidate received no votes, despite claiming that he voted for himself. Regardless of that particular situation's outcome, it does lead to some more thoughts.
One of the biggest potential security holes in the election system is the secret ballot. Let me be clear: the secret ballot is absolutely critical to having a functioning democracy. We've all lived our lives in a world with nothing but, so maybe it's harder to see that. But consider what would happen if you could prove to anyone how you voted: your boss, your family, your religious group could threaten you into voting how they want. The only way you can be confident to cast your individual ballot by your preferences is if you can never prove to anyone how you voted.
The down-side is that you can never prove to yourself how your vote was counted. I've proposed better voting machines, based largely around maintaining secret ballots. But we still have reduced faith in elections as a whole because of this. But suppose that mixed among the actual elections we also had calibration elections. Elections not for real people, but only to make sure the system works.
A simple question would be asked. "What is your favorite pizza topping" for example; something utterly trivial and subjective. Ballots in the calibration election would be marked and counted with the exact hardware being used for the real elections. The only difference would be the ballots themselves, which would be marked with the voter's name. The voter would also receive an identical copy of the ballot to take home. All the results would be posted to the internet, for each individual to check.
You wouldn't be able to prove that your real votes were counted properly. But you would be able to at least prove that the system works. It would still be possible to cheat the system; nothing's perfect. But I, for one, would have far greater confidence in our elections if this was part of them.
That's a very interesting idea; I absolutely agree that some better form of verification is needed. But I would worry about participation with this. I can see the general public not caring at all about your "calibration election" and you getting really dismal turnout (even worse than normal elections lol)
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah, you'd have to include it in among the real elections to get anyone to show up at all. But really, even if it was only a few people in each precinct, that's enough of a check to at least make sure the machines work.
ReplyDeleteThe bigger concern for me is that there has to be teeth on the other end of it: someone has to commit enough money to fix the problems found! If that's not going to happen, then not only do we have broken elections, we live in a society where nobody cares. I mean, that may be the case, but I'd find absolute proof of that rather depressing.