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.