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What the PB/OS advocates aren't getting
With Mole333 and the estimable Marjorie Gersten away on vacation, it's a perfect moment to commit some heresy. Here goes: I think the voting machine people really need to gain some perspective.
I say this having had to endure yet another 'the republicans stole the election by hacking, and if we don't get PB/OS, we'll never win an election in this state again' rant the other day.
That seems to be the central fear of some, not all, PB/OS advocates. The problem is this: the empirical evidence that would support that hypothesis is a bit sketchy, even if this statement will probably provoke long comments alerting me to same. That's not my point, however.
Rather, what I'm missing from the conspiracy crowd - note that I don't count either Mole or Marjorie in their number - is any understanding of how elections are influenced in the real world. For example, in the polling place I was at in Columbus, Ohio, in November 2004, there were three voting machines, as opposed to five for the primary; one of which broke down within minutes, resulting in a wait time, at 7 AM, of four hours. There was also a republican 'challenger', who seemed to specialize in questioning the credentials of little old black ladies who had already waited in line to vote for a few hours.
And let's not even go near the practices in certain Brooklyn Assembly districts.
A significant concern arising from the semi-paranoid activism of, again, certain elements within the voting machines advocacy movement, is this: by questioning the integrity of the process, they undermine trust in the system and de-incent people from being active in campaigns, voting, and so on. After all, if you're told loudly that the system is rigged, why bother? If you're looking for a guaranteed way to lose elections, congratulations, you've found it.
Conversely, claiming that every election we lose was stolen ignores that, well, sometimes we lose elections. For example, Francine Busby would probably be in Congress right now had she not had the unutterable stupidity of saying, on camera, that illegal immigrants should help her campaign. Blaming the machines inhibits the learning process from a loss, in short.
What the voting machine people should be calling for, in my mind, is comprehensive election reform, complete with paper trails, non-partisan redistricting, ballot access reform, same-day voter registration, campaign finance reform, with the entire process of holding elections overseen by a non-partisan state agency. The problem with our elections isn't just the possibility that machines could be hacked, though that is something to be guarded against; the wider problem is what can be done in a perfectly legal, above-board fashion. There may very well have been shenanigans with hacked machines in Ohio 2004; problem is, focusing on one (possible) factor in that debacle ignores all the others, which from my experience were significant enough to swing a close election. My little polling place lost, through waiting times of four hours or more, challenges, and malfunctioning mechanical machines, at least 200 votes; multiply that by a thousand precincts, and you don't need any hackers.
So by all means, advocate for PB/OS; it should be a simple maxim of good government that any public process needs to be transparent, verifiable and cost-effective. But keep the bigger picture in mind, and don't suck the oxygen out of real campaigns, please.
vote fraud
I was in Akron, Ohio on election day 2004 working several polling sites in majority black neighborhoods. What happened repeatedly there is that people would show up to vote, and be told that their voting precinct had changed. They hadn't been notified by mail that their precinct had changed, and worse, the poll workers could not tell them where their new precincts were. They were told instead to call the board of elections, a phone number that was busy all day long, to find out. We managed to get some tables set up out front with hard copies of voter lists which allowed us to look up names and precints, but in numerous cases even those official lists didn't have the right precincts on them.
Here's the thing. The voters whose precincts were abruptly changed at the last minute without their knowledge were almost all black. The precinct changes, as well as the entire election process, was run by the Ohio Secretary of State's office, run by a republican secretary of state.
This had nothing to do with voting machines. The voting machines caused the problems in florida in 2000. In Ohio in 2004 the fraud was much deeper than that, there was systematic disenfranchising going on. Worst of all, you wouldn't have noticed this going on unless you worked the polls, as I did, in majority black neighborhoods.
Having the right voting machines won't help this kind of thing, because we're talking about voters who didn't even get TO the voting machine. So I'd agree that its simplistic to say, "we'll take care of the voting machine issue and that solves everything" But I know that isn't what Marjorie and Mole have been saying though.
I should note
...that when I'm talking about crazies, I'm not referring to either Mole or Marjorie; but there are some elements in the voting machine crowd who are basically conspiracy theorists.
I mostly agree with you but
It is worth reading Robert Kennedy Jr.'s article on this in a recent Rolling Stone. I think there is a reasonable suspicion that even without the sort of intentional voter fraud that worries people, a close election is essentially arbitrarily decided by the accumulation of small mistakes or by more subtle forms of fraud. But elections are really all about power, anyhow.
VOTING MACHINES
I know people in Texas who when they checked their votes which were for Kerry the Diebold machine showed that they had voted for Bush. This happened to them several times until their votes showed up finally for Kerry.
I worked as a poll watcher here in NY and I verified that those machines were at zero before anyone voted. We did have a few people whose polling sights were changed and were a distance to where they always voted. We drove some to their new polling site and others got there on their own but a few were so upset (especially the elderly who voted at the same location for 50 years) that they refused to go to any other polling site. All said they had received notices from the Board of Elections but didn't bother reading them.
What happened in Ohio was totally different and further investigation should have halted certification of the election. Kerry knew that this election was different than what happened in 2000 and that there was no way it could have gone in his favor because the votes were tallied but thousands were unable to vote and without a vote you don't have a leg to stand on.
Election reform
Of course we need comprehensive election reform. But if the machines are not verifiable, then no amount of election reform will be effective. Transparency in how the vote is counted and verifiability of the vote are the most basic aspects of an election. Without those, we will never know if an election was fair.
Problem is
...that the best machines won't help you when the election bureaucracy is partisan and/or inept, the districts are gerrymandered, when you have challengers or physical intimidation at the polls, when the money flows so heavily to incumbents that challengers can't compete, when the hurdles for getting on the ballot are absurdly high. The PBOS crowd is focusing on one small part of what is a larger problem. The problem I see is that this drowns out, by its very nature, the real problem, hile simultaneously eating confidence in the system. Supppose we get those electronic machines - then what?
Agree and disagree
PB/OS leaves open fairness even if the election board is corrupt and partisan (Harris and Blackwell come to mind when I think corrupt and partisan election boards). DRE makes a fair and bi-partisan election board irrelavent because a stolen election could be completely opaque to the public and no recount is really possible. So even the best election board is negated by a machine that conducts the election process in secret with no chance of verification.
However, I agree with your underlying point and I always try to couple my call for PB/OS with a call for bipartisan, non-partisan or multi-partisan election boards.