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November 2, 2004

Election Day

So today is the big election day, the day everyone has been waiting for. The day every registered voter is supposed to try to fit into their schedule to go some random place and supposedly choose who they want to rule this country next, and other miscellaneous stuff. But of course, since it appears to be such a close race between the two major parties' candidates that no one is sure who will win.
And this makes it hard for the election system to work. And a major question that should come to our minds is why?
These election problems seem to be more emphasized in recent years, but have they always been there and we just weren't as aware of them? If they are new, what has caused them to appear? If not, what can be done to rid the system of them? These are all logical questions that should have an answer to those who are capable of cause and effect reasoning. But what solutions have we come up with in the recent years?
Apparently the only thing that was done in the past was send swarms of lawyers from each major political party to sue various entities responsible for counting votes in order to get the result they want. From a news article on CNN yesterday, it appears that this again is the favored solution to the problem. But is this really a logical solution? What does this prove?
In America the news, major corporations, and even households have shown that the way to get the results you want you have to sue someone else. So why not extend this reasoning to the election system? When my candidate doesn't get elected, I'll just sue whoever didn't get my candidate elected and then they'll buckle under pressure and I'll get the results I want. Is this really democratic? What happened to the majority vote wins? Can we count on the people in charge, especially lawyers, to count when they run out of fingers and toes?
So with the problem and its current solution well-defined, is it possible to reason some causes of the flaws in the system? Let's give it a shot....
First of all, the system is supposedly anonymous. I'm not sure how anonymous the system really is considering I've voted via absentee ballot for many years. The materials that arrive in the mail have my name and a specific bar-coded number on them. The ballot itself doesn't have any identifying information on it though, so I can assume the system is anonymous as far as keeping track of what I voted for, but not anonymous in keeping track of if I voted or not.
This system should work relatively well as long as it isn't abused. Unfortunately it is. Fake voter registration cards, people using deceased person's IDs, and the possibility of election officials doing the unthinkable could all come into play. When people get involved in the system, things are bound to get messed up at some point, and it takes time to verify all incoming information with other databases to filter out the filth.
The system attempts to make voting as real-time as possible, but this in itself is a major flaw. This need for instant results seems to be a constant drive behind the technology used in the voting system. Before the age of electronics votes had to be hand-counted, results were relayed across the country via methods considered painfully slow by today's standards, and the final announcement was not made for days or weeks after voting had occured. So if the people back then were satisfied in waiting for information to be properly tallied until a final announcement was made, why couldn't we do the same? Due to the rush to make a decision, America was forced to wait over a month in the pervious presidential election for a final answer anyways.
Then comes the issue of data integrity. Electronic voting machines have proved that this problem is a bit more difficult to solve in a world where it would be expected that a machine would have no political affiliations and produce unbiased results. Again people enter into the equation though. Machines don't operate as expected, data is left easily alterable by hand, poor choices are made on how to solve problems.
So with some issues defined, how about some possible solutions to the problems?
The first two issues go hand in hand. Make the election system not so real-time, but so much more accurate. Give the system time to verify all votes correspond to an actual living person, and that person hasn't managed to vote more than once. Verification has the problem of losing some anonymity though. If someone is found to be dead or defrauded the system in some other way, that person's votes need to still be attached to their name so they can be removed from the final tally. Is this a price Americans are willing to pay for a system that doesn't defraud themselves?
The solution may lie directly in the problem of electronics though. It would be easy for a machine to give an unbiased look at each person's identity, then remove errant votes from the tally when a person has attempted to cheat the system. Human interaction may be necessary here, but only as a check of proper functionality.
A system of this sort only works if it works right though. This goes back to the idea of "test, test, and then test some more." Software would have to be robust, with no corners cut to prove to voters that it works properly and flawlessly. The software should also be open source, or at least available to anyone who wishes to view the code to verify its operation. Finally the system should still produce hardcopy results of each person's vote. Electronic data is gone at the flip of a switch, whereas hardcopy data requires much more effort to make disappear, especially unnoticed.

Hopefully ideas such as these may one day be properly implemented, and the American ideals will change from suing for instant gratification to patience to allow for quality results. Is the government capable of this sort of transition?

Posted by Plocmstart at November 2, 2004 2:21 PM

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