TrustTheVote on HuffPost

We’ll be live on HuffPost online today at 8pm eastern:

• @HuffPostLive http://huff.lv/Uhokgr or live.huffingtonpost.com

and I thought we should share our talking points for the question:

• How do you compare old-school paper ballots vs. e-voting?

I thought the answers would be particularly relevant to today’s NYT editorial on the election which concluded with this quote:

That the race came down to a relatively small number of voters in a relatively small number of states did not speak well for a national election apparatus that is so dependent on badly engineered and badly managed voting systems around the country. The delays and breakdowns in voting machines were inexcusable.

I don’t disagree, and indeed would extend from flaky voting machines to election technology in general, including clunky voter record systems that lead to many of the lines and delays in polling places.

So the HuffPost question is apposite to that point, but still not quite right. It’s not an either/or but rather a comparison of:

• old-school paper ballots and 19th century election fraud;
• old-school machine voting and 20th century lost ballots;
• old-school combo system of paper ballots machine counting and botched re-counting;
• new-fangled machine voting (e-voting) and 21st century lost ballots;
• newer combo system of paper ballots and machine counting (not voting).

Here are the talking points:

• Old-school paper ballots where cast by hand and counted by hand, where the counters could change the ballot, for example a candidate Smith partisan could invalidate a vote for Jones by adding a mark for Smith.
• These and other paper ballot frauds in the 19th century drove adoption in the early 20th century of machine voting, on the big clunky “level machines” with the satisfying ka-thunk-swish of the level recording the votes and opening the privacy curtain.
• However, big problem with machine voting — no ballots! Once that lever is pulled, all that’s left is a bunch of dials and counters on the backside being increased by one. In a close election that requires a re-count, there are no ballots to examine! Instead the best you could do is re-read each machine’s totals and re-run the process of adding them all up in case there was an arithmetic error.
• Also, the dials themselves, after election day but before a recount, were a tempting target for twiddling, for the types of bad actors who in the 19th century fiddled with ballot boxes.
• Later in the 20th century, we saw a move to a combo system of paper ballots and machine counting, with the intent that the machine counts were more accurate than human counts and more resistant to human meddling, yet the paper ballots remaining for recounts, and for audits of the accuracyof machinery of counting.
• Problem: these were the punch ballots of the infamous hanging chad.
• Early 21st century: run from hanging chad to electronic voting machines.
• Problem: no ballots! Same as before, only this time, the machins are smaller and much easier to fiddle with. That’s “e-voting” but wihout ballots.
• Since then, a flimsy paper record was bolted on to most of these systems to support recount and audit.
• But the trend has been to go back to the combo system, this time with durable paper ballots and optical-scanning machinery for counting.
• Is that e-voting? well, it is certainly computerized counting. And the next wave is computer-assisted marking of paper ballots — particularly for voters with disabilities — but with these machine-created ballots counted the same as hand-marked ballots.

Bottom line: whether or not you call it e-voting, so long as there are both computers and human-countable durable paper ballots involved, the combo provides the best assurance that niether humans nor computers are mis-counting or interfering with voters casting ballots.

— EJS

PS: If you catch us on HP online, please let us know what you thought!