The banking industry processes millions of transactions daily, yet ultimately only “loses” $500 per $1 million transacted. In comparison, according to Jim Adler, the quality of the “voting industry” is shockingly poor.
Recent experience in our state and across the country has shown how elections fall short. According to the American Bankers Association, electronic banking loses just $500 for every million. As a result, bank customers conduct millions of banking transactions every day with nearly universal trust.
Contrast this with elections where we lose one ballot for every 50 cast, according to the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. Electronic banking is 40 times better than our elections. It’s clear that there’s room for improvement.
Looking beyond the numbers, there are too many stories about lost ballots. King County Council Chairman Larry Phillips famously stumbled upon his name on a list of mistakenly rejected ballots. North Carolina is holding a re-vote for state agriculture commissioner because of lost ballots. Overseas military ballots are routinely discarded. If banks were run this way, we’d still be stuffing our money in mattresses.
Adler identifies three places where the banking industry has established that trust: accurate electronic transactions, customer verification and independent audit. Electronic transactions are much more accurate than hand-counting and couriering cash. Customers get ATM slips and statements to prove that what they tried to do actually happened. And audits by both the government and private firms do a reasonable job of keeping things on the up-and-up.
Adler is not a disinterested party here, but a founder of “VoteHere,” a election audit technology company. As he puts it,
Specifically, at the time you vote you are given a private, take-home receipt that preserves your secret ballot. After the election, you can check your receipt against the election results to make sure your vote was counted properly — just like you reconcile your ATM receipts against your monthly bank statement. At the same time, any independent organization can audit all the votes to make sure the final count is right.
There are a number of other factors which hamper the voting biz vs the banking biz that aren’t so easily dealt with.
Most importantly, while banking is now a national and international effort, voting remains a local, county-based (or lower) equivalent of a traveling carnival. If banks were all local, open only once every couple of years, set up in gymnasiums and garages for that one day, and staffed by volunteers who needed to be trained each outing, I suspect that the accuracy, and trustability, of the banking industry would go way down.
The solution there seems to be much greater centralization, standardization, and funding of election infrastructure. The advantage that banks have of having a fixed infrastructure and staffing here can’t be underestimated, but it’s difficult to think of you could do that with election locations.
The other big problem that elections have that banks don’t is privacy. Financial transactions are “private” — but records of them are kept by the bank, reported back to the individual, available for regulators and auditors, etc. On the other hand, the (essential) tradition of a secret ballot makes auditability that much more difficult for elections. We don’t want the government, or anyone else, keeping track of our votes in such a way that we could be identified with them. Presumably VoteHere uses some sort of transaction code to go the other direction — to let voters verify their votes in secret, rather than the other way around — but proving that a voting receipt actually belongs to an individual might be a bit tricky, unless we treat possession of the slip as proof.
Providing voters with the means of validating their votes is a good idea (though there’s infrastructure concerns — do we assume that everyone has easy access to the Internet? Or do we print out large books of votes and codes and put them in local government buildings for review?). But so long as our voting infrastructure remains so ad hoc and locally-oriented (which has benefits as well as drawbacks), it can only identify some of the problems that occur, not actually do much to fix them. And that problems exist we already know.
(via GeekPress)