The Science of Tallying Votes: Where is it???

Science and technology may have many applications, but it seems insuring a reliable and accurate tallying of votes in an election is not one of them.

Historians might have predicted that vote counting in a democracy would be a failed application based on the lack of interest in the very first invention of young Thomas Edison: an electronic vote counting machine to tally the votes of legislators in the US congress. The legislators simply did not want to have their votes recorded so efficiently!

In last decade in the U.S. there have been numerous election irregularities, for example, in Florida, Ohio, and other states. Problems have been related to ambiguous ballots, poor chad removal in ballots, faulty voter lists, voting machine overload, and electronic malfunctions. Elections irregularities have been seen in elections in other countries.

Peculiar results have appeared in some US elections. For example, districts have been noted in which many votes have been recorded for a particular candidate, that are adjacent to districts in which zero votes were recorded for the same candidate. Pre-election polls, and exit polls have been in striking disagreement with the recorded votes, for example, in New Hampshire.

Consider an outrageous possibility: give scientists the task of developing methods and technology to record votes accurately and efficiently!! For a scientist, a definitive test of any system would be to insure that the votes tallied actually agreed with how the voters voted. (We defer the actual methods to perform this verification to the more technically inclined and a subsequent blog.) People usually just assume the election results have been tallied correctly.

This is an obvious test, yet it has, to my knowledge, never been done in any election. Insuring that each elector's vote is counted correctly is part of the very foundation of a democracy. Since the accurate tally of votes has never been verified, we must conclude that all democracies, like the U.S., have a precarious foundation. U.S. democracy, with the increasing use of electronic vote recorders, is built on an unverified and vulnerable "black box foundation." It would be easy for an experienced engineer to modify electronic voting machines to rig elections in ways that would be very difficult to detect. Even machines that give a paper receipt and not immune from tampering since the paper receipts are never tallied.

In the recent presidential primary, I served as a election supervisor in our rural township. Voters could use either paper ballots (which most people, including me, used) or an electronic vote recording machine. To use the electronic machine, a module for each election, about the size of a deck of cards, of unknown contents, is plugged into the machine. The module is from a Minneapolis company with the ominous name "Command Central."

Before the election, the voting machine is put into a test mode, and tests are done to "insure the votes are being recorded correctly." This test procedure does not, in fact, insure the votes in an actual election are being recorded correctly. It only insures that the votes in the test procedure are being recorded correctly.

Why is so outrageous to imagine scientists working on the technology to record votes accurately? An anti-science bias in politics? Or perhaps for the same reason campaign reform is very difficult to achieve. Each side anticipates it will benefit from the lack of reform.

Who are the losers for the absence of campaign reform, or from the absence of a reliable and accurate vote tally method? We, the people, are the losers.

PEAR Deserves a New Obituary

After about 28 years, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR) is closing. It was founded by Emeritus Prof. Robert Jahn after he retired as Dean of Engineering at Princeton. The PEAR laboratory did scientific research in telekinesis, the paranormal, and other aspects of consciousness using ordinary people, predominantly students, as subjects. In a typical experiment, a subject would try to influence a randomly generated event by his consciousness alone, by just thinking about it. For example, in a sequence of ones and zeroes randomly generated by radioactive decay, the operator would try to have more zeros appear. To provide controls on the experiments, in a second experiment, the operator would try to have fewer zeroes appear, and in a third experiment, do nothing to influence the outcome. Jahn and his laboratory manager, Brenda Dunne, conducted numerous carefully controlled experiments for decades, with statistically significant results. They have found that out of 10,000 random events, consciousness can change about 2 or 3 events from the random result.

More about PEAR and their research can be found on their web site http://www.princeton.edu:80/~pear/publications.html.

How does the mainstream scientific community feel about PEAR closing? Relief !! Articles on its closing appeared in the New York Times National (Page A1, Sat. Feb. 10, 2007), “After 28 Years, Princeton Loses ESP Lab, to the Relief of Some,” and in Nature Magazine (March 1, 2007), “The Lab that Asked the Wrong Questions.”

I wrote a letter of dissenting opinion to Nature, one of the most "prestigeous" magazines representing mainstream science. Predictably, the staff at Nature decided not to publish the letter, so I am doing it for them:

The obituary of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory “The lab that asked the wrong questions,” highlights some unsettling issues about the culture of science. The article states that Jahn has shown that “on average, people can shift 2-3 events out of 10,000 from chance expectation,” but that such “tiny deviations from chance have not convinced mainstream scientists.” It is notable that no scientists have criticized the experimental methods of Jahn, yet the work is called “unscientific” by Robert Park because “no effort is made to offer a physical explanation.”

There is enormous resistance to both the perception of and acceptance of anomalies outside the dominant, accepted paradigm. Great scientists have denied the possibility of atoms, x-rays, nuclear fission, incandescent light bulbs, air planes, rockets to the moon, and many other achievements. Studies in consciousness, like Jahn’s, are not rejected by the scientific community for poor experimental procedure or poor data analysis, but because they are outside the paradigm. For scientific work within the accepted paradigm, small statistical effects are readily accepted. For example, in large drug trials, the occurrence of serious side effects in 1 of 1000 or 1 of 10000 patients is not dismissed as “unscientific.” In elementary particle experiments, the desired reaction may occur only once in a million events, yet the conclusions from one or two selected events are accepted.

The argument that the effect of the human interaction is so small as to not be of significance is without merit, and used to selectively reject the implications of the work of Jahn and others in consciousness research. Compare the small effect of psychokinesis (2-3 in 10,000) with the small effect measured in the experiments of Lamb and Retherford in 1954. They measured a difference in energy of 1 part in a million between two states of the hydrogen atom which were thought to be degenerate. Bethe provided a theoretical explanation almost immediately of this small deviation, ten times smaller than that found in hundreds of consciousness studies, but nevertheless it led to a fundamental revision in quantum electrodynamics. In 1920, Eddington and others measured a very slight deflection of star light as it passed by the sun, just 2 arc seconds out of 180 degrees, or about 1 part in 5400, comparable in size to the effect Jahn has measured. If scientists had rejected the small corrections measured by Lamb and Eddington, we would not have General Relativity or Quantum Electrodynamics today.

The critical issue was framed in the article: “How permissive should science be of research that does not fit a standard theoretical framework, if the methods used are scientific?” We are at a peculiar time in science. Most scientists readily accept that many physicists have been working for three decades on a theory that has yet to make an experimental prediction, and they categorically dismiss the results of scientists who have been making measurements on the effect of consciousness on physical systems because they don’t have a good theory. It appears that, today, many scientists are more interested in models than measurements. The history of science teaches that it is important to pay attention to good data, even if you cannot explain it. Theories come and go, but good data lasts forever.

GJM

About the book "Decoding Science"

The new book Decoding Science by quantum physicist G. Jordan Maclay, PhD, will hit cyberspace or the shelves soon, we hope. This book tells it all, the story from the birth of modern science during the Reformation, to string theory and other scientific myths. It talks about the perverseness of quantum mechanics, and the mythic model of the photon. It talks about the politics of science, why scientists hate religion, parapsychology and ESP; why they believe in the top quark but deny whatever doesn't fit the current paradigm. It reveals the essential nature of science, what makes it so powerful, beautiful, useful, and threatening. This book even broaches the ultimate taboo in science, spirituality, and argues that if you have a spiritual experience, it is as real as anything else you experience, from eating an apple to measuring an atom. The most revealing and helpful viewpoints to take in life must embrace the scientific, the poetic, and the spiritual perspectives.

Stay tuned...