Vote by mail

We overlook one of the ways in-person voting gives integrity to the results.

We think of ID – is the person handling the ballot who they claim to be, and is this person eligible to vote in the first place.

Can you extend this to mail-in ballots? We've various proposals for managing this, which you may trust or not, depending on your experience with software. The USPS just came out with some guidelines.

But there's another feature to in-person that's almost impossible to extend to the mail-in voting. Independent observers verify that the voters have gone into the booths alone. Nobody looks over the voters' shoulders, and ballots all go into an anonymous box (no box A for our Beneficent Incumbent and box B for the Evil Challenger).

When our youngest daughter voted by mail, the envelope needed a witness, which I was. For the actual "filling out of the ballot" phase, I left the kitchen. Of course. Anybody who knows me knows I wouldn't lean over her shoulder and make suggestions. But there's no way to prove that.

Perhaps a mail-in ballot was in fact filled in by the person who claimed to fill it in, and perhaps that person is a legitimate voter. That doesn't rule out inappropriate influence.

Our town allowed early voting. Mail-in was one way, but another was to show up at City Hall and vote there. That latter seems reasonable enough. It doesn't have the election monitors present, but you can never tell who else is going to show up and ask why two people are involved with one ballot.

Suppose we deprecate vote-by-mail. With exceptions, of course. For most of us, being out of town on election day is a choice. Not all – my parents were posted overseas for years, though with access to the US embassy, which could have coordinated a voting system. And, of course, those in the armed forces don't always know where they will be next week.

So we need to make some provision to cover at minimum as many of our overseas armed forces as are eligible to vote but are posted away from their voting district. I'd think that at bases this wouldn't be hard – finding observers, setting up a temporary dedicated room and a time for voting, having a single place to receive, collect, and mail back ballots… A ship with a long deployment is slightly more complicated – when do you mail things back?

Men in combat are probably out of luck as far as voting goes, though it might be possible sometimes.

But with the understanding that there are some exceptions which we could account for, what do we lose if mail-in-voting is hard? On the plus side, we lose ballot harvesting. On the minus side, some people get posted to a new location for a long time, from well before the candidates have declared to well after the election, and they won't get a chance to vote. In larger cities in the US one might have reciprocal agreements for receiving/sending ballots at the local city hall, but that doesn't help the oil platform guys much.

A system with integrity will have friction. How much of each are we willing to trade off?

Vote shenanigans

Trucking voters in Liberia: "Photojournalist Sando Moore was sitting at home Friday when he got word that loads of buses had begun trucking residents from Monrovia to Bomi County."

John Forkpah, 28, who is a native of Jorquelleh District in Bong County and had spent three years in Monrovia since his graduation from the William V. S. Tubman Gray High School in Gbarnga, was on board the NTA bus on Friday. He said Moye had invited them in Gbarnga to register to vote for him in December. “We are supporters of the Representative Moye and we decided to come Gbarnga to vote for him. He sponsored our trip to Gbarnga,” he said.

..

Peabody said they were promised US\$ 50,00 by the Deputy Speaker to come Gbarnga to register to vote for him. “Rep. Moye promised to give us to US\$ 50,00 if we come to register to vote for him in Gbarnga,” he said.

"Before we arrived in Gbarnga Senator Yallah had already booked a guest house for us to pass the night. He gave us US\$ 30.00 after we showed our voters card to him, he (Elizabeth Collins !) said."

Clearly being a senator is lucrative there too. \$30 x N voters seems like a largish investment for the area. You'll notice that some of the people are originally from Bong and some aren't.

Their vote harvesting seems to involve more transportation than ours does.

I'm regularly instructed that there is no vote fraud in the US, or not at a significant level--almost nobody is ever convicted. I gather there is no adultery in Wisconsin. It is a felony but I never hear of anybody being convicted.

Update: I forgot this quote. "We are marching to Zion, the beautiful, beautiful Zion, we are marching all the way to Zionnnn….the beautiful city of gold”, they sang while clustered at the back of a pick-up.". I don't know if the "gold" was because the reporter didn't hear it right or the singers had something else on their minds.

Opportunities for fraud

New ballot found in McFarland village president race decided by one vote.

McFarland Village staff found the unopened absentee ballot Monday morning in a bin used to store and transfer absentee ballots in last week's election and subsequent recount, Village Administrator Matthew Schuenke said.

"It was found sealed within an envelope used for absentee voting and it is not open," he said. "The contents are presently unknown, but it does appear to contain a ballot."

No. Just no. There is no clear chain of possession. Absentee ballots in general have that problem and in my not-so-humble judgment should not be widely encouraged. But this is just crazy.

Counting votes

If the interlocks are broken, it does not matter whether someone has been monitoring who went in and out of the radiation area. When it is time to button up and turn on the beam, a search team goes in to make sure nobody was left behind. (And sometimes the safety officer hides a dummy in the experimental hall, to keep the search team on their toes.)

If the package seal is broken on the gauze pads, the burden of proof that the contents are safe is on the person providing the material. The surgeon needs a clear chain of possession and observation with trusted agents.

The default assumptions change when security is broken. If a cracker gets into your computer system, you assume that he has everyone’s password, and left nasty files behind. I can assure you that getting that cleaned up is a lot of work.

If ballots turn up outside of the regular procedures designed to prevent fraud, or are brought in from outside those procedures, the default assumption is that they have been tampered with. The burden of proof is on the election commissioner to prove that they are not. If she fails to provide clear chain of possession and observation by the required neutral observers, the votes are tainted. If the ballots are not collected and processed in the prescribed way by the prescribed deadline, the votes are tainted.

You cannot readily estimate the effect of tampering, and all votes are questionable. You can’t just scale the numbers and say "Instead of 150 votes for the Whigs and 50 for the Tories we’ll count 75 for the Whigs and 25 for the Tories," because tampering is intended to change the balance. On the other hand, this is not adequate to prove that the vote was tampered with, so absent incriminating evidence nobody is going to go to prison.

Holding new elections in Broward for the local elections seems like a no-brainer. The state-wide elections are another matter—the partisans know how many votes they need to arrange for, and will carefully make sure they have them. It may be that a new state-wide election is needed.

I have been dubious of early voting--when you hold ballots for that long guaranteeing neutral observation and possession is hard--and I consider e-voting an invitation to disaster. "There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired." Messes like this do not encourage me.

A season for returns

The NYT says the networks are worried: they're all ready for the big election night,

But as television news gears up for 2016’s big finale, an intense public distrust in the media is threatening the networks’ traditional role as election night scorekeeper.

I watched election returns one night years ago. I have not been tempted to try the exercise again. From one quarter hour to the next the changes were small, and misleading without the "Well, this district usually votes Republican, and this one includes the cemetery and votes the other way" explanations.

It's not like watching a ball game, with dramatic offense and defense and obvious skill. It's pretty abstract, and slow, and unless you believe that your intense stare will help your side win, nothing you do matters anymore.

Part of problem is commentary. They don't say it in so many words, but "Why do you think the people of Kansas are so stupid?" or excitedly "Look, the good guys are winning!"

The next day will be good enough--or, in the case of the Presidential election, bad enough. I'm not going to be happy no matter who wins that one. (*)

Donald Sensing proposes to leave the radio and TV off, and watch a move that night. Good advice. I've a little project I should attend to...

(*) Looking at the polls, I strongly suspect that the machine will successfully get out the vote for Hillary. Looking at the lawn signs, I see 3:1 Hillary:Trump in hard left Dane county (!), and O(10:1) in the countryside. But I think that just reflects lack of enthusiasm; they'll vote for the party when the time comes.

A courtesy

Don't ask people how they voted. It is rude--why is a secret ballot any of your business? I don't think it's a good precedent to assume that that kind of information is available on demand.

On the flip side, I don't need to know who you voted for--or who you retroactively voted for now that you know the result. It's generally virtue signaling or prompting (I showed you mine, now you show me yours), though for ancient history it could be just background. Maybe you think you know what my motives are in picking one Senator over another. AVI would say that I probably only have a fuzzy picture of that myself, and that a lot of our reasoning is ex post facto rationalization.

I have, in the past, explained why I deprecated one candidate or another. (That's shooting fish in a barrel this election--and everybody else has done it already.) I doubt that I persuaded anybody, but I tried, and persuasion is part of the game. But still, don't ask. The man with the 6' Trump sign probably didn't vote for Jill Stein. Don't ask. (Do you floss every day? Don't ask. Boxers or briefs? Please don't ask.)

This year's presidential election I think shows even more clearly the value of this little courtesy.

Preparing for elections

AVI has posted a series on the election and our role and influence. As of this writing he's presumably got a few more in the pipe.

Somebody pointed out that while contempt of congress is a crime, contempt for congress comes naturally. That's fine--if you insist on being in the public eye, you'll be judged. Not always wisely, perhaps, but that's life.

It is interesting to hear what people say about this election. Not pleasant, but interesting. This is Dane county--Trump comes in for matter-of-fact abuse. (Not many Hillary signs out, BTW--more for senator or representative.) The vicious invective is reserved not for the candidate, but for his supporters. I had a brief email exchange with one of the local reporters asking him who they were (I didn't know any personally), and his final letter casually dismissed them as stupid and unworthy of attention because they were Trump supporters.

"Everybody knows" that Trump supporters are racists, terrified of change and hating people different from them. Hmm. I could with equal (perhaps better) justice claim that Sanders supporters are envious ignoramuses, who just want free stuff at everybody else's expense; and profess myself duly horrified at how many fellow Americans have descended to this level. However, I think the Sanders phenomenon wasn't really an endorsement of socialist economics, but a kick in the pants for the Democratic party and an assertion that the status quo is broken--the big financial institutions are making the rest of us assume all their risks while they rake it in.

Likewise I think the Trump phenomenon is a kick in the pants for the Republicans, and an assertion that that the status quo is broken--the governing groups are disconnected from the public interest and the public will.

The critiques are similar, and the differences have more to do with the values the groups hold. BTW, I doubt that Sanders voters will sit out the election--they'll hold their noses and vote for Hillary even though they despise her, because she, even if distantly, claims to support their tribe's values.

So why the viciousness? Is this the default setting? A radio show suggested that WW-II produced a generation of politicians used to fighting on the same side to preserve the US, and suggested that though the politics might be wildly divergent, they had a sense of being in the same boat. Maybe so.

OK, assume this is the true normal. I don't think this kind of bitterness is something Jesus would approve of. So how do we combat the bitterness and do better than normal? I can hear some folks already: "Compromise--do it my way." Or words to that effect. Maybe instead "Dine with a Democrat" or "Share a Repast with a Republican" or "Lift a Libation with a Libertarian?" Find something in common--but that may be harder than it looks, given the way preferences seem to cluster. Better might be "Haul sandbags together while the river rises." Which I suppose is the WW-II unification hypothesis with a different enemy.

Voting

When my daughter and I arrived, there were 5 lines, for different chunks of the alphabet. Two were empty, one had one person waiting one had two, and A-F had 35. (It looked as though the registered voter binder was bigger for A-F than the rest, too.) Lots of signs said that they weren't there to debate the law but to administer it, and please have your ID handy. Everybody did. My jaw did not hit the floor.

We had plenty of time to strike up conversations about the weather, the tattered basketball on top of one of the gymnasium fans, and the groups of middle school kids brought in to see the zoo.

Wisconsin presidential primaries: pick a party on the ballot and mark whoever you like. Or dislike least. Seesaw: back-room deals to pick candidates based on favors rendered and promised isn't very pretty, so let the voters decide. But which voters, and on what basis ("if you do read the newspapers you are misinformed")? That doesn't look very pretty either, especially when the voters pick a candidate that doesn't have much to do with the party (and thus won't get much done). So add super-delegates that are party stalwarts. That kludge makes voters unhappy too and some may sit out the general election in protest. Nothing is going to work perfectly, and I have a suspicion that we'll be drifting back to greater party control soon, and then years afterwards, assuming we still keep up the formalities, back to voter selection.

Back in '03 I tried to figure out a plan for a binding "None of the Above" on the ballot. I still think it is worth a shot.

As we left, a woman with a slightly grumpy two-year-old on her hip came out of the gym. "No, they didn't have any suckers for you," she told him.