Voting and Electoral Integrity
By: Manu Chatterjee
Tags: Voting, Elections, Justice, Democracy, Politics

Voting and Electoral Integrity

A Vote being cast. Photo courtesy Element5 Digital on Unsplash

The United States has just finished another Federal election cycle. Yet the tension around it shows we need a more uniform, transparent, and modern voting process.

It may be comforting to think that our election process is robust. The legal challenges played out and the system ‘prevailed’ - just with a little delay. I would submit the opposite is true. Our system worked only because the 2020 election wasn’t actually that close. If a single state decided the 2020 election, such as in 2000, chaos would have ensued.

Perhaps the most critical issue is this: How do we retain faith that the system of voting and representation is fair? No voting process can be perfect, but as a democracy, we strive for fairness and trust.

Let’s explore a couple critical areas:

Fair Voting Process (voting mechanics) — All eligible voters can have confidence that they can easily get their ballots cast and that they will counted correctly.

— All eligible voters can have confidence that they can easily get their ballots cast and that they will counted correctly. Accurate Information (influence)— Ensure people are accurately informed so that their votes and candidates best reflect their desired direction. This includes pamphlets, campaign disclosures, and lobbying, among other issues. Assessing what accurate and factual information is challenging, as touched on in this essay.

For both of these to work well, the most critical idea is that all processes we use must pass a simple glance audit. What’s a simple glance audit? It means that anyone in the electorate can easily scan our voting process (with very little training) and see that it is transparent and just by their own quick inspection.

The ability of any person to understand — at a glance — how the whole system works is critical. Unlike other areas where we go to an expert (such as a doctor or mechanic), voting is something where each voter should be an expert (enough). Simple processes may not be the most efficient in a technological sense, but they allow for long term consistency and generational trust.

Here just a few of the issues for which we can apply our Simple Glance Audit:

Procedures that vary from state to state.

Voter eligibility varies from state to state.

The timing of when mail-in ballots are accepted varies across states.

It is nearly impossible for a member of the public to audit votes or counts, especially for electronic voting.

Not everyone can vote on election day (work, illness, travel, pandemic, etc.)

Counting machines use software that, even if reliable, is not accessible or understandable by the average person. This can lead to endless challenges about their accuracy.

Results take too long -in many cases, several weeks to be official. Our counting procedures come from a horse-and-buggy time-period. For reasons of stability both at home and to our overseas adversaries, we must not let such a long period of ambiguity fester.

The election process and machinery should be understandable by the average person.

The following sections use metaphor of simple glance audit to look at aspects that ensure the best possible voting process.

Uniform Voting Process

A voting process should be simple and straightforward. Show up to vote at the right place and pick your choices and vote.

In theory, voting by mail should use a similar, vetted process (all though there are challenges we’ll explore). Now let’s look at areas where we can help ensure our process is fair for all and hopefully robust to corruption or failure.

The themes here are meant to be a discussion about the goals of a fair and transparent process. As new tech or challenges come up, we can test what should (and should not) be adopted.

States Rights and Equal Protection

A key idea of fairness is that all persons voting in the same election must follow the same rules, procedures, and deadlines. Long-held beliefs about states’ rights (that each state can set up its own way of voting) are probably not appropriate in a national (federal) election. The 14th Amendment, as written, only applies to rights within states. However, just as “Separate but Equal” was struck down as a civil rights issue, it is time to create uniform voting rules when conducting a national election.

Having a set of uniform rules passes our simple glance audit that everyone is treated the same. This is not an argument that the Federal government runs the election for each state — just that the rules the states follow are uniform (such as who is eligible to vote, what days, how access is administered, and more are the same for voters in each jurisdiction). To treat voters in different areas differently would be unfair by the “separate but equal” logic already applied to civil rights by the courts.

Who Has the Right to Vote

Voting should be open to all adult citizens of the country. Generally, aliens or permanent residents are not allowed to vote. This is because citizens (birth or naturalized) are fully bound to the country’s laws and vice versa.

Aliens — Aliens who are residents can’t vote, but if they become citizens, then voting rights are granted to them. Many argue the aliens live by the same rules as citizens and pay taxes — this is true, but aliens can’t be drafted. The country won’t perform other kinds of consular type services to non-citizen resident aliens who happen to be abroad.

Felons — Felons who have completed their prison sentences (repaid their debt as defined by law)- should restore their voting rights. Note some view this as controversial, but I put this here as those who have completed repaying their debt. If there is a concern that the felon’s debt has not been repaid, I suggest we address sentencing laws, not the permanent revocation of citizen rights.

Using simple rules about voter eligibility passes a simple glance audit protecting minorities and other groups who have been illegally denied the right to vote.

Proper ID

The country needs a simple way to prove the eligibility of a voter. This will require a national ID system with some unique capabilities, including people’s ability to prove citizenship yet still vote anonymously and safely. This is no simple task. But if we really want to make sure that only those with the right to vote are the ones voting, we will need a straightforward way to make sure this is so.

The US has a long history of suppressing the vote of minorities even after slavery was lifted that has not been fully resolved. This has led to an ad hoc system of loose verification of registered voters, which varies by state. However, in modern times, we must deal with stolen identities and digital information warfare. Because of this, we must institute a proper ID system to safeguard our voting process. This system must also protect citizen’s rights to have their votes be kept confidential.

Unrelated to voting, but as important, ID systems must be instituted to protect citizens’ other rights such as finance, tax, and healthcare information that are beyond the scope here. Identity management is a requirement of modern times, and voting is just one place where modern identity management is needed.

Persons working in many/most polling places nowadays do not personally know or can vouch for the identity of voters who present themselves at a particular polling place. In an earlier time, our existing processes had the benefit of neighbors knowing their neighbors, but this is no longer true in 2020. Valid identification of a person as an eligible voter is a reasonable expectation of a country’s citizens as a piece of the infrastructure for safeguarding our election processes.

Having a uniform ID system (it can be driver’s licenses, temporary voting IDs, or other means) passes a simple glance audit that only eligible voters can vote. This includes proper residency checking.

Safe Environment & Long Enough Voting Period

Whether voting in person or by mail, we must protect our polling places and ballots so that voters never feel threatened while voting. Additionally, hours and areas should be open long enough to allow eligible voters access. We may have to spend a little more money to ensure polls are open longer and in enough places. If we are serious about our democracy, we must be serious about spending enough to secure it.

Citizens should be able to vote over a long enough voting period. For example, ballots could be finalized on September 1, and voting could occur any time after finalization until election day.

Voters could go to the DMV or other specified government offices and vote once they have finalized their ballot without waiting for election day.

By ensuring a large enough time window to vote, we reduce situations where voters are deprived of their right to vote because of work, illness, or timing. This can also eliminate the need to grant voters time off on election day since that would just be the last eligible day to vote.

Having a large enough time window passes a Simple Glance Audit for fairness of opportunity.

Vote by Mail

If necessary, citizens should be able to vote by mail.

Vote by mail cutoff should be enough ahead of time such that mail ballots are counted simultaneously with the last possible in-person ballots. This likely means that the vote by mail cutoff could be two weeks ahead of the final election date. All citizens should have the right to vote by mail if needed.

However, voting by mail has some issues, as listed below.

Intent — Even though a person may be a holder of a valid mail vote, there is no way to know that they are the actual person who voted and not someone else (such as another household member). Statistically, this number may be low in the general population, but it is an area of concern. Denial of Vote — Let us say that a state mails out several copies of a given voter’s vote-by-mail ballot. An unscrupulous person may be able to mail one of these other copies. When the election officials examine the various copies, they may be forced to invalidate all of them, thereby denying the legitimate voter’s ballot. It is the paper version of a denial-of-service attack common in cybersecurity arenas. While it may be difficult to mount such a fraud at scale, we must plan for it.

While vote-by-mail may be a necessity at many times, we should strive to develop Simple Glance Audit techniques to ensure vote-by-mail integrity.

Human Countable Audits and Ballots

All ballots must be human countable so that hand audits can be performed if required. Electronic voting, such as digital touch screen voting, should not be permitted unless there is a way to make them pass a simple glance audit.

While it is possible to create a secure voting machine, no human off the street can inspect such a machine and know that it counts correctly. Purely digital voting machines fail our standard of simple glance audit. A few more details emerge as well:

Ballot Inspection — Any person should be able to inspect a ballot (e.g., hand scoring) Counting — Any group of persons with minimal training should be able to tally ballots Special Needs — Persons with special needs should be provided with systems that render their ballots countable by the same human-friendly audit systems. Recounts — Since ballots are human-readable, any group of humans can do a recount and do this as often as necessary. Audits — Ballots can be kept for years to perform audits.

Quick notes on special needs: Ballots should be printed in such a way that when braille is used, the assistive devices make the human auditable counts possible. Much of this is already true.

For those who cannot render a regular ballot, an assistive device can print out a human auditable ballot, and that ballot’s results can be read back to the voter by either machine or human assistant.

The above criteria pass a simple glance audit because there are many ways that anyone can supervise and audit the counting process. We could even have video feeds watching every counter of ballots if a disputed election occurred as has been occasionally done.

Simple counting systems

There are many ways to count and determine the winner of an election. Some of these are:

Simple majority — candidate with the majority of votes win

Plurality — candidate with the most votes wins, even if they don’t have the majority of votes (such as in a 3-way race)

Rank-choice-voting — Voters select multiple candidates by order of preference

Weighted ballots (such as the electoral college system in the US) — some votes have more influence for various ideas of representation

STAR Voting — Voters give each candidate they like a certain number of points, with most points winning (many variations)

(and many more.)

Yet only a few of these methods pass simple glance audit if the candidate with the largest vote count doesn’t win an outright majority of votes. These include plurality win, plurality win with run-off, and approval voting. Lets look at these in more depth with our Simple Glance Audit tool.

Plurality win

In a plurality win system, the candidate (or position) with the most votes wins even if they don’t have a majority of the overall vote. For example, if there are three candidates and one has 45% and the second 30% and the third 25%, then the candidate with 45% of the vote is declared the winner even though most voters didn’t choose that candidate. Plurality passes a simple glance audit since we simply declare whichever candidate has the most votes the winner. A concern is that this may not reflect a true “will of the people” since the majority of voters didn’t cast a vote for the candidate with the highest total. If this is a concern that we can move to the next option — majority win with run-offs.

Plurality Win with Run-Off

To solve the problem of a winner not having an actual majority, we can take the top two candidates of the original vote and run a second election called a run-off. In this case, whichever candidate wins the run-off will have won a majority of the votes cast since there are only two choices (or there is a tie, but this is nearly impossible in a large election).

Majority win with a run-off also passes a simple glance audit because we are declaring the candidate with the most votes in the run-off election the winner.

Approval Voting

Approval voting is a system where a voter can vote for as many choices as they wish for an office. Tacitly this means that the voter has “approved” of any of the choices they’ve made. When the results are tallied, the candidate with the most votes still wins. For example, this allows a voter to vote for both a mainstream candidate and a third-party candidate they might like without “choosing the lesser of two evils” as common in two-party systems. Approval voting also passes a simple glance audit because the counting system is the same as plurality voting.

However, like plurality voting, there is no guarantee that a single candidate will receive a majority of votes. In this case, we can still perform a run-off election.

A more subtle challenge with approval voting is preventing fraud from submitted paper ballots. An issue here is that a nefarious poll worker (“man in the middle in computer security speak”) can take valid ballots and simply mark extra candidate(s). If not caught, these (still valid) ballots would boost those candidate(s). If this happened at enough scale, it could swing a close election. This issue doesn’t occur in systems where only one candidate can be chosen. In those systems, an attacker checking extra candidates would invalidate votes and likely raise suspicions.

Also, it is tempting to add “disapproval” voting or voting against a candidate. But this allows a majority party to simply squash minority parties by disapproving their candidates with such a count from which they would never get elected so it doesn’t pass simple glance audit.

Challenges of Other Tallying Systems

There are several approaches to optimize the counting process in some other way (save time, better represent geographic interests, etc.). Some of these include using delegates, ranked-choice voting, and more.

Yet, several of these fail a Simple Glance Audit, so we should use caution in deploying them.

Delegates — In a system with delegates, a small number of persons act as the voter for many people on a given issue or candidate. This can include political party primaries, the electoral college in the US, and even representative governments. A problem with using delegates is that there is no way to know that each voting delegate has accurately captured the true will of the people they supposedly represent or to harmonize conflicting views of persons they represent.

Rank Choice Voting (RCV) — is a system where each voter casts votes for every candidate in order of their preference. The idea of RCV is that an election need only happen once, and a series of virtual run-offs can happen where each candidate with the least votes is eliminated in a series of passes until the winner is determined. RCV may be true mathematically if all voters cast votes for every candidate on the ballot. However, RCV suffers on several tests for fairness:

Omission (also called “Voter Fatigue”) - If the voter doesn’t select candidates for each position, their vote may be left out of the final “winning” virtual run-off.

(also called “Voter Fatigue”) If the voter doesn’t select candidates for each position, their vote may be left out of the final “winning” virtual run-off. 2nd Campaign Info — In a run-off election, the remaining candidates can present new information and updates on their positions, which were impossible in the first election. RCV prevents candidates from updating and qualifying their positions on critical issues once the electorate is forced to choose between the final two candidates because they don’t go through the rigor of having to win the run-off. Voters who may not have considered the remaining candidates in a run off can now reevaluate their choices.

— In a run-off election, the remaining candidates can present new information and updates on their positions, which were impossible in the first election. RCV prevents candidates from updating and qualifying their positions on critical issues once the electorate is forced to choose between the final two candidates because they don’t go through the rigor of having to win the run-off. Voters who may not have considered the remaining candidates in a run off can now reevaluate their choices. Fails SGA- Finally, RCV fails a simple glance audit — with all of its rules, it’s difficult for just any person to quickly and accurately tally ballots or understand how the voting process works. This makes an RCV result ripe for misinformation and conspiracy theories in an age of social media. This failing isn’t a problem of the mathematics of rank choice voting, but a challenge of building trust with an alternative counting mechanism that is impractical for humans to audit by hand.

Quick Results

The presidential election of 2020 is a precursor to what happens when unofficial results (the AP results or network television results) are seen as authoritative while the official results may take weeks. A festering period of weeks where the winner may not be officially known is dangerous — even if all the counts are theoretically known.

While the 2020 election resulted in a relatively peaceful ambiguity period, this might not be the case if a truly zealous politician was contesting the results. Foreign adversaries may find ways to exploit the seemingly long period where the official results not complete. In earlier times, this lag from election day to the final result was less critical. However, modern communications and the internet suggest having a quick official result is better for stability and trust.

Mail-in ballots (and absentee ballots) along with in-person ballots should be counted as they come in. Deadlines for mail-in ballots should be enough in advance so that the results of mail-in ballots can be made simultaneously as in-person voting.

In modern times there is no reason that we can not have official results from all states within a couple days after election day. This does not interfere with legal appeals or recounts, the procedures for which should follow any normal audit process.

Counting Machines

With nearly every election much discussion ensues about whether ballot counting machines are accurate and trustworthy. Even with the best of computer science skills it is difficult to prove that a vote counting machine is accurate and hasn’t been tampered with. However there are many approaches in which we can audit the vote counting machine while getting the advantage of the speed and accuracy they offer.

The key is to make the output of the vote counting machine pass simple glance audit. For example, we can have the machine output a continuous ledger (such as a roll of paper) in which the machine outputs the last counted ballot’s candidates and the current running totals. In addition the counts extra info such as the ballot serial number (or one-way hash) can be printed along with checksums for each total count. This ledger can also be streamed as the machine is counting so that outsiders can watch the tallying process. The paper ledger again allows a human auditable process (even if the ledger is very long). There should be no large jumps in the accumulation of votes. The point it while the inside of the machine can only be understood by experts, the ledger and video can be understood by anyone. This is just one way to make machines pass simple glance audit, other ways can be created as well.

Advanced technologies such as blockchain may also help automate the process of detecting anomalies but are harder for average persons to easily understand. This shouldn’t preclude their use but is outside the idea of simple glance audit.

No Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is a process by which geographic boundaries are manipulated to help specific political interests. Political committees determine the geographical boundaries, but fairness is highly partisan in nature. The committee process fails the simple glance audit since there is no way for anyone “off the street” to look and figure out which district they are in by inspection. Also, such boundaries are redrawn nearly every election cycle in the name of “fairness.”

Though by no means easy, a solution to the gerrymandering process is to have a mathematical formula that draws the district lines. Several proposals exist, but this author prefers the population centroid based Voronoi diagrams. While the mathematics is beyond the reach of a simple glance audit, the map it produces is easily understandable and inspectable by all. Odd snake shape districts are eliminated, and the map can be redrawn after each census. An example is here.

Summing Up

Spiritually we live by a system of majority rule and minority rights. The majority can pick the direction of major issues in the country but never at the expense of anyone’s rights. In our current hyperpartisan world, we must learn to live with the majority’s choices, even if not our own. We must all be vigilant to protecting everyone’s rights, including a right to be respected, lest we find ourselves down a dark and narrow path that many a failed country has traveled before.

Suppose we value our democracy’s ideals of fairness and rights. In that case, we must secure our voting process with fair voting systems that can pass simple glance audits. We must maintain utmost vigilance over those who peddle influence against our own interests.

Perhaps we can sum this up in a question:

“Are we an amateur democracy or a professional one?”

If we are to be a professional democracy, the one that is the gold standard for others to follow, then we must invest in it. This means creating systems where anyone can understand and trust every phase of the voting process. With this idea in mind its harder to sow doubt in the integrity of an election since every citizen has the tools to inspect the result.

Lets find ways where we can improve simplicity and fairness for our voting future.

Some Further Reading