Accurate Election Results in Michigan and Wisconsin is Not a Partisan Issue

In the last few days, we’ve been getting several questions that are variations on:

Should there be recounts in Michigan in order to make sure that the election results are accurate?

For the word “accurate” people also use any of:

• “not hacked”
• “not subject to voting machine malfunction”
• “not the result of tampered voting machine”
• “not poorly operated voting machines” or
• “not falling apart unreliable voting machines”

The short answer to the question is:

Maybe a recount, but absolutely there should be an audit because audits can do nearly anything a recount can do.

Before explaining that key point, a nod to University of Michigan computer scientists pointing out why we don’t yet have full confidence in the election results in their State’s close presidential election, and possibly other States as well. A good summary is here and and even better explanation is here.

A Basic Democracy Issue, not Partisan

The not-at-all partisan or even political issue is election assurance – giving the public every assurance that the election results are the correct results, despite the fact that bug-prone computers and human error are part of the process. Today, we don’t know what we don’t know, in part because the current voting technology not only fails to meet the three (3) most basic technical security requirements, but really doesn’t support election assurance very well. And we need to solve that! (More on the solution below.)

A recount, however, is a political process and a legal process that’s hard to see as anything other than partisan. A recount can happen when one candidate or party looks for election assurance and does not find it. So it is really up to the legal process to determine whether to do a recount.

While that process plays out let’s focus instead on what’s needed to get the election assurance that we don’t have yet, whether it comes via a recount or from audits — and indeed, what can be done, right now.

Three Basic Steps

Leaving aside a future in which the basic technical security requirements can be met, right now, today, there is a plain pathway to election assurance of the recent election. This path has three basic steps that election officials can take.

1. Standardized Uniform Election Audit Process
2. State-Level Review of All Counties’ Audit Records
3. State Public Release of All Counties Audit Records Once Finalized

The first step is the essential auditing process that should happen in every election in every county. Whether we are talking about the initial count, or a recount, it is essential that humans do the required cross-check of the computers’ work to detect and correct any malfunction, regardless of origin. That cross-check is a ballot-polling audit, where humans manually count a batch of paper ballots that the computers counted, to see if the human results and machine results match. It has to be a truly random sample, and it needs to be statistically significant, but even in the close election, it is far less work than a recount. And it works regardless of how a machine malfunction was caused, whether hacking, manipulation, software bugs, hardware glitches, or anything.

This first step should already have been taken by each county in Michigan, but at this point it is hard to be certain. Though less work than a recount, a routine ballot polling audit is still real work, and made harder by the current voting technology not aiding the process very well. (Did I mention we need to solve that?)

The second step should be a state-level review of all the records of the counties’ audits. The public needs assurance that every county did its audit correctly, and further, documented the process and its findings. If a county can’t produce detailed documentation and findings that pass muster at the State level, then alas the county will need to re-do the audit. The same would apply if the documentation turned up an error in the audit process, or a significant anomaly in a difference between the human count and the machine count.

That second step is not common everywhere, but the third step would be unusual but very beneficial and a model for the future: when a State is satisfied that all counties’ election results have been properly validated by ballot polling audit, the State elections body could publicly release all the records of all the counties’ audit process. Then anyone could independently come to the same conclusion as the State did, but especially election scientists, data scientists, and election tech experts. I know that Michigan has diligent and hardworking State election officials who are capable of doing all this, and indeed do much of it as part of the process toward the State election certification.

This Needs to Be Solved – and We Are

The fundamental objective for any election is public assurance in the result.  And where the election technology is getting in the way of that happening, it needs to be replaced with something better. That’s what we’re working toward at the OSET Institute and through the TrustTheVote Project.

No one wants the next few years to be dogged by uncertainly about whether the right person is in the Oval Office or the Senate. That will be hard for this election because of the failing voting machines that were not designed for high assurance. But America must say never again, so that in two short years and four years from now, we have election infrastructure in place that was designed from ground-up and purpose-built to make it far easier for election officials to deliver election results and election assurance.

There are several matters to address:

• Meeting the three basic security requirements;
• Publicly demonstrating the absence of the vulnerabilities in current voting technology;
• Supporting evidenced-based audits that maximize confidence and minimize election officials’ efforts; and
• Making it easy to publish detailed data in standard formats, that enable anyone to drill down as far as needed to independently assess whether audits really did the job right.

All that and more!

The good news (in a shameless plug for our digital public works project) is that’s what we’re building in ElectOS. It is the first openly public and freely available set of election technology; an “operating system” of sorts for the next generation of voting systems, in the same way and Android is the basis for much of today’s mobile communication and computing.

— John Sebes