Thomas Edison’s very first patent, granted in 1869, was for an electronic vote recorder. Why are we still voting on paper ballots in the 21st century?

In an earlier post entitled “Online Voting vs. Paper: Papier est Passe” , I stated what is obvious to most of us: We live in a virtually paperless society. Almost every basic transactional function in our lives is done online. One glaring exception is the way in which we vote in the United States.
Not only do most of us vote on antiquated paper ballot systems while we do everything else online, the election administration and “election integrity” culture in the United States has no problem with this disparity. In fact, they almost universally insist that the only “trustworthy” way for us to vote is and ALWAYS WILL BE on paper. But here’s the thing: this “paper worship” on the part of those who run and observe our elections is both counterfactual and extremely self-serving on their part.
Opponents of online voting apply completely different standards of necessary “trustworthiness” between digital voting systems and paper ones. They fundamentally oppose online voting on the grounds that it theoretically could be compromised in a way that threatens the credibility of any election result. The key word here is “theoretically”.
Since online voting is working so well in the private sector and in other countries for actual political elections, opponents tend to rely on the world of “what ifs?” to justify their stance against remote voting.
As Dr. Bill Kelleher points out in “How NIST Has Misled Congress and the American People about Internet Voting Insecurity; or, Internet Voting in the USA: History and Prospects” , his just-released brilliant treatment of this subject from a political science perspective, opponents of online voting use “unfalsifiable” arguments to define the standards which digital voting systems must live up to in order to be trustworthy. Of course, such standards are impossible to meet so they claim online voting can never be safe. Period.
Meanwhile, these critics of digital voting apply no such standards regarding the outcome of elections using paper ballots in order to define those tallies as “credible”. On the contrary, they insist that paper ballot voting be used in all circumstances despite the well known horrible track record paper has. Mention Bush V. Gore, butterfly ballots, hanging chads or long lines to these folks and their response is “Oh well, no systems are perfect”. Highly flawed voting systems are fine with them as long as they use paper.
The Verified Voting Foundation, a leading moneymaking propaganda mill for paper voting, recently conducted a “study” of the 50 states with regard to their voting systems and graded each state. The VVF was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (Perhaps more. One grant alone from the MacArthur Foundation was for $300,000) to look up each state and find out what kind of voting systems they use. They organized their results into “grades”, published and publicized the report. Nice gig if you can get it, I suppose.
Not surprisingly, the grading system the VVF employed was based on how much paper worship a state practices. If a state uses paper ballots, it got a “Good” grade. If it hand recounts those ballots as a matter of course it got a better grade. If it uses electronic voting in any form the state got a worse grade.
Given the long detailed history of ballot confusion along with our most recent example of a 102 year-old voter waiting in line for five hours to vote, you might wonder why there is such emphasis on paper as the “only way to go”. Wonder indeed.
The entire paper-only rationale depends on the concept of the “paper trail” as a necessary component of voting. Believe it or not, when they say paper trail they mean it quite literally. In every industry today the term paper-trail has come to simply mean “data trail”. If an IT service company needs to find backup versions of information they will search through a data trail of redundant sources. That data trail will be referred to as a paper trail. Rarely if ever are they talking about real paper.
The election administration culture is a unique exception in how it defines the term paper-trail. They strongly mean it literally. Somehow, when it comes to voting, if a transactional record isn’t kept track of on pieces of paper, it isn’t “safe”. It may seem silly, but so far this rationale has been successfully used to keep most Americans voting using antiquated paper ballots.

The VVPT

In a world of acronyms by far the favorite of election admin folks is VVPT, or “Voter Verified Paper Trail”. While their main goal is to perpetuate paper ballot voting in this country indefinitely, publicly their focus is on the states that use digital voting machines at their polling places. They insist there must be a paper record, and imply that the voter will get some kind of “receipt” to verify his or her vote. Hence the “voter verified” part of the term.
The VVPT is a buzzword that has worked very well for opponents of digital voting. Even today legislators working on creating new standards for voting have incorporated the VVPT into the language . But if you take the concept of the VVPT to its logical conclusion, you can easily see how flawed it is.
If a DRE voting machine also produces a paper record for later audit, the votes are still not “voter verified”. And if such a voting machine actually produces a receipt for the voter to take home, what does that accomplish? If a voter returns to the polling place and claims the receipt doesn’t match how he or she voted, what is done then? Is the voter allowed to vote again, or is the vote changed? – OF COURSE NOT.
The most important thing to remember is that in reality the MAJORITY of Americans (The total population of the 22 States that the Verified Voting Foundation gives such a good grade to because they use paper ballots is 165 Million People) live in states that use ACTUAL PAPER BALLOTS for voting. These votes are in no way voter verified. I vote in New York, where optical scan ballots are used. I fill out little ovals on sheets of plain paper and feed them into scanning machines. I do not receive any kind of receipt. I do not know when I feed the paper into the machine if my vote is being properly counted and tallied or if it will be thrown out during a hand recount as “irregular” because of a stray pencil mark.
The entire “voter verified” half of the VVPT argument is a fallacy. Paper ballots do produce actual paper trails, but are they in fact good forms of data trails compared to digital ones? No. Paper is probably the worst possible way to keep track of, verify, recount or secure any kind of data.
In practice the VVPT really means paper ballot voting: an archaic, expensive, and fundamentally flawed system that most Americans are stuck using today. Why do the election admin and “integrity” folks insist that we must always vote this way? As I mentioned, their arguments are self-serving. The “Luddite angle” to our election admin culture will be discussed in my next post. Resistance to change can be a very powerful force.
Lastly, let us not forget that a paper ballot has never increased voter turnout by one single voter. It never has and it never will.
Cyber the Vote!

Desilene Victor, 102 Year Old Voter who waited for five hours in line to vote, at the State of the Union.

President Obama clearly cares about voting rights and voter access. He also seems determined to do something about it. I am quite heartened by this.
In the short span of three months, the President has put the issue of long lines at voting places front and center in all three of the most significant speeches for any President: Election night, Inauguration, and The State of the Union.
On election night in November President Obama told us that we “have to fix” our dysfunctional voting system. On Inauguration Day he told us that “Our journey is not complete” until we fix it.
Most significantly and powerfully, during last night’s State of the Union Address, the President not only told us “we CAN fix this”, he introduced us to one of the reasons why we must.
In the gallery sat Desilene Victor, a 102 year old Miami voter who waited in line for over FIVE HOURS to vote in the last election. After the President told her story and introduced her, she received standing ovations from those below and instant national attention. This attention is vitally important to the issue of voter access. Judith Browne Dianis (@jbrownedianis) and the Advancement Project deserve great credit for shining the light on Desilene and what she represents.
Opponents of online voting often point to senior voters as a group that would somehow be disenfranchised if the use of online voting were to become widespread. They argue that older voters are less likely to have and understand computers. Like most of their arguments, if you actually unpack and disect this one you see how silly it is.
Leaving aside the fact that advocates like myself never suggest that we should abruptly replace the polling place with online voting, the very notion that the convenience of online voting would inconvenience seniors is flawed. First of all, many seniors now use computers for things like banking and travel arrangement right along with the rest of us. My own father is 89 years old and is very fluent with email and the computer. These conveniences haven’t “left seniors behind”.
More importantly, even if someone as old as Desilene Victor does not have a computer or IPAD or smartphone, do any of us honestly believe for a second that it would take five hours to get her in front of one?
Senior centers, nursing homes, libraries and even coffee shops have free internet access to the public. There is no doubt that trekking to a polling place is more difficult for ANYONE than getting to the nearest computer or smartphone, or getting one to you.
It shouldn’t have to take Desilene Victor or anybody else more than five minutes to vote, much less five hours in line waiting for the chance.
Yes, Mr. President. We can fix this. Our journey is not complete.
We must fix this. We MUST Cyber the Vote.

Voting access. In his second Inaugural Address, President Obama said “Our Journey is not complete” until long lines to vote are history.

On election night in November President Obama referenced the disgusting status quo of long lines on election day.
“We have to fix that”, the President said.
Today, in his second inaugural address, the President again told the country that he finds our current state of voter access in the United States to be unacceptable. He included exercising our voting rights as part of a list of important issues that still face our country.
“Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.”
Many of the problems the President spoke of are not easily solved. When it comes to improving voter access, the things that block progress are in some ways easy to defeat. In other ways it will be more difficult.
Technologically, the answer to ending 12 hour lines to vote is easy: Provide citizens with the option to cast their vote online. Online voting can provide our elections with better security, auditability, transparency, and verifiability than our current antiquated paper based election administration does. It can do all this at lower cost. Online elections in the private sector and for political elections in other countries prove this every day.
Without an entrenched resistance to automating much of our election process, solving the problems of waiting in line for hours and low voter turnout is easily done.
Unfortunately, with such resistance firmly in place, with an elections administration industry and culture that firmly rejects the modernization of our voting as threatening to their status quo, completing the journey toward easy voting access in the United States will not be easy. It will require a rejection of fear-based rationale and a rejection of the position that our nation, in the second decade of the 21st century, should accept 12 hour lines- accept dysfunction – as the norm.
When it comes to voter access we must complete the journey, we must Cyber the Vote.

Florida early voters waiting for hours in line. Why are we waiting IN LINE when we could be voting ONLINE?

Happy Election Day. Did you vote?

If you are a voter in Florida, perhaps you already voted early. In that case perhaps you waited four hours in line to vote. No doubt anybody in that situation would ask the question, “How long do we have to wait?”

I ask the same question regarding online voting every day: How long do we have to wait? How long do we have to wait till our election officials provide us with modern technology with which to vote?

How long do we have to wait till polling place voter suppression is a thing of the past, along with the need for the polling place itself?

How long do American voters have to wait before we can vote online?

How long before enough is enough when it comes to jumping through hoops in order to exercise our most important right?

Other countries aren’t waiting. Canada isn’t waiting. Last month the city of Edmonton, Alberta conducted a trial online election as part of their plan to implement online voting next year. (By the way, the red jelly bean won). Other cities and municipalities throughout Canada are doing the same.

When will our election administration system move out of the 19th century and into the 21st?

How long do we have to wait?

The irony.

At the very end of the 20th century, the United States was poised to revolutionize voting forever. After centuries of voting only at the polling place and often on insecure and inadequate paper ballot systems, the Internet was about to change all that.
The notion of voting online, and all the benefits that it would bring, was occurring to more than a few election officials and developers of online technology. After all, everything else in our lives was rapidly going digital and paperless. Voting would be no different.

Several states began to trial online voting pilots, particularly for absentee voting. Arizona offered online voting in 1999. That’s right, thirteen years ago online voting already existed.

DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) terminals at the polling place were phasing out antiquated punch card and optical scan systems throughout the country. While electronic voting at the polling place was better than voting on paper, online voting held the most promise.

One online voting system was developed by the Defense Department (DOD) to be used by overseas military voters. Everyone understood that the first place online voting could have an impact was with these voters. Paper absentee ballots are inadequate enough for domestic voters. For military personnel stationed around the world, going through the process of mailing paper ballots is often daunting enough to drive them to not vote.

The first DOD pilot project was called VOI (Vote Over the Internet) and it was launched in 2000. It was so successful that the DOD later launched SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment) in 2004. In all technical trials, SERVE performed flawlessly as well.

Yes, at the dawn of the new millenium the future of voting in America was clearly going to be online. It looked like a bright future.

Then came Bush v. Gore and the election of 2000.

We know what happened. Archaic is too kind of a word to describe the punch card ballots with the famous “hanging chads”. The same is true for the butterfly paper ballots used in Palm Beach County, Florida. These ballots caused holocaust survivers to vote for Pat Buchanan for President instead of Al Gore. These confusing pieces of paper handed the election to George Bush.

Suddenly the subject of voting technology, always a very wonkish one which drew no public interest for generations, was all the rage. Congress acted and passed HAVA (Help America Vote Act). Election infrastructure had to be modernized and everyone knew what that meant. Digital voting was in. Paper was out.

HAVA began to accelerate the modernization of our voting after Bush v. Gore. It was clear that online voting would be coming soon. Everyone seemed to feel that was a good thing.

Well, not everyone.

Unfortunately, what HAVA also brought was the opportunity for some folks to soon claim that we were rushing toward disaster by modernizing our voting systems “too fast”. What HAVA also brought was an opportunity for money to be made, as happens with any legislation that injects money into a process of change.

The Hijacking.

Within a very short time after the 2000 election some players emerged in the “discussion” over voting technology who remain key players against digital voting today. There appeared a well-organized and well-funded campaign against digital voting of every kind. This included DRE’s but most epecially was aimed at online voting.

A moral panic was successfully created over the security of digital voting. In 2006 the movie “Hacking Democracy” appeared, in which a computer scientist with limited cybersecurity skills was paid to supposedly hack a Diebold DRE machine.

In the swing state of Ohio in the 2004 election, turnout on the Democratic side was very high, and many polling places were unable to accomodate the crowds of voters. Some precincts had NINE-HOUR-LONG lines. Many eligible voters never voted at all.

Yet the Black Box folks told us that the real problem in Ohio was not the limits of the polling places, which disenfranchised thousands of voters. Instead they told us that the digital machines used in the election were “rigged”. “Hacking Democracy” offered a very scary portrait of digital voting.

The fact that there was no real evidence whatsoever that the tally of votes in Ohio was flawed got ignored. Exit polling showed no discrepencies. The fact that the real problem was the age-old one of inadequate access, not “hacked” tallies, was also ignored.

Also in 2004, opponents of digital voting successfully killed the DOD SERVE online voting system in its tracks when they were asked to participate in a panel to objectively review the system. They were included in the panel because of their known opposition to digital voting. Still, they agreed to be part of a single “joint” report regardless of whether “pro” or “con” was in the majority. These opponents broke that agreement, and ran to the NY Times with a MINORITY report of their own, trashing the SERVE system and declaring it insecure with no facts to back up the claim. After a lot of public panic, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz killed the project.

Dr. Kelleher covers the demise of SERVE in depth in his book, “Internet Voting Now”.

ALSO at the same time in 2004, one of the opponents on that SERVE committee, Barbara Simons, also tried to take over the leadership of the country’s premier voter advocacy group – The League of Women Voters. She did so by attacking (with the help of the black box folks) the league’s position supporting the modernization of voting technology. She specifically targeted the President of the League, Kay Maxwell, and attacked her personally, charging her with “turning over our democracy to hackers”. She ran a campaign for President on a “paper trail platform”, complete with a lot of ginned up anger over electronic voting. While unsuccessful in her Presidential coup of the LWV, Ms. Simons successfully scared the League into condemning digital voting and only supporting paper ballot voting. This change in position, for an organization born of suffrage, is a blight on its reputation and history. This was all thanks to Barbara Simons and her technophobic colleagues.

In fact LWV President Maxwell had visionary clarity regarding what digital voting could offer to the American electorate. Her 2005 address to the Commission on Federal Election Reform is a moving window into the kind of world we COULD have entered in the last decade. A world that provides maximum access to all voters is the world Kay Maxwell envisioned in 2005. She knew it was in our grasp. I highly encourage all my readers to read President Maxwell’s address in its entirety.

All of the digital voting bashers from back then, from Barbara Simons to David Jefferson, Avi Rubin and others, were successful beyond their wildest dreams at derailing America’s move toward modernized voting. The term “paper trail” became synonymous with “data trail”. States have moved from lever machines BACKWARD to overly expensive optical scan paper ballots, which are an absolute horror show. All of this has happened due to the success of the moral panic.

The same crowd dominates all discussion about voting technology today. The media even calls them “experts” on election technology, even though they are anything but. The real election administration experts were driven out by the moral panic crowd a decade ago.

Meanwhile across the rest of the world and in the private sector, where there has been no moral panic to poison progress, online elections are taking place with no technical problems and great success at boosting turnout.

Here we have had a lost decade.

We can not change the past. Will we change the future?

(Editorial Note: This post from November 2011 has been this blog’s most popular. Given this year’s attention on the broken election administration system in the U.S., I am reprinting it below without edit)
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I have been meaning to post a comment regarding some of the words I hope will become obsolete in coming years: “Polling place”, “turnout”, “voter suppression” and “enthusiasm gap” to name a few.

I want to see all of these words become obsolete because I envision a time when online voting brings us not simply convenience, but unprecedented voter participation.

But the word that most needs to become obsolete with regard to our elections happens to be the thing that has rapidly become literally obsolete in the rest of our lives.

That thing is paper.

We were told that we would become a paperless society and I’m not sure many of us believed it would really happen.

But the Internet, and more importantly Broadband high speed internet access, has made it happen more rapidly than we ever could have imagined.

Thanks to the lighting-fast proliferation of the Internet, broadband, and web-enabled smartphones in the last 10 years, we are now the paperless society we imagined. This is true in every way, with a few minor exceptions and a single GLARING one.

You guessed it, the exception is how we vote and, perhaps more importantly, what “election integrity advocates” see as the only possible way for our otherwise paperless world to approach election technology.

“And the people bowed and prayed, to the “paper” god they made.”

It is ASTONISHING to see, in my recent conversations with many such againsters, how utterly wedded they are to the almighty pulp and ink. Is there anything more out of touch in a paperless world than insisting that only paper is acceptable, or WILL EVER BE acceptable, as a way of voting?

Traditional newspapers are dying. Many, if not most, news sources today don’t even have a paper version (The Huffington Post, for example).

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I no longer receive my cancelled checks back from my bank. I only receive “images” on the statement, which I receive digitally. Of course, I don’t write many checks any longer because most of my bills are paid online.

When I first started working for a major IT firm 12 years ago, reams of paper were constantly kept in stock to fill the many printers in the office. Those working from home had a monthly allowance for paper. Today, most of those office printers are gone, along with the offices themselves. There are no more monthly allowances for paper, since paper is not considered necessary in any way for anybody’s jobs. ALL data is kept on “soft copies”.

Do you recognize what the ladies are holding in the photo above? That’s right, Tickertape.

Tickertape goes back to the days of telegraph and stock ticker machines. It was state of the art 100 years ago. Investers all over the country were able to keep track of stock information in “real time”.

Tickertape was thrown out of windows for parades because there was so much of it.
Today, when they have “tickertape” parades, regular confetti is thrown out of the windows. Why? Because tickertape doesn’t exist anymore. Stock “tickers” are now digital.

No stock information is kept track of on paper anymore. Banking information is not kept track of on paper. Email is replacing “snail mail”.

Photos are no longer printed. Architects no longer draw traditional “blue prints”. Designers and artists now use tablets instead of pencil or charcoal on paper.

One of the most important aspects of modernizing our health care system is digitizing our medical records. Bye-bye paper “charts”.

Over a TRILLION dollars a day in currency is traded, and NOT A PENNY of it is accounted for on paper.

Paper is obsolete. Obsolete everywhere except in the world of American voting and, more importantly, the world that exists in the minds of some of our largest “election integrity” organizations.

We keep track of everything we do digitally. Every tiny bit of information we produce remains in existence, residing on redundent server systems. In the information age all information is available for instant recall, instant verification, or instant recount.

What is this obsession with paper all about? It defies logic, yet is accepted as a reasonable approach to voting.

When it comes to the againsters and their attacks on online voting, their dogmatic reliance on paper always seems to ignore the most obvious flaw in their conclusions.

It is the big “AS IF” factor.

They vilify online voting and protect the archaic paper systems AS IF paper ballots are so reliably recountable or verifiable. History has shown us time and again that they are not. Any voting systems that rely on paper in any way are notoriously unreliable.

They worship paper AS IF information on paper is somehow so “safe”. AS IF history isn’t full of examples of paper ballots coming up missing or stolen, or showing up in somebody’s trunk or garage a month after an election.The againsters vilify online voting AS IF we haven’t seen as a nation how completely unreliable, unverifiable, and unrecountable paper ballots can be.

They say all this AS IF we don’t all remember this:

The digital revolution has the ability to revolutionize our entire political system by revolutionizing our voting system. Online voting will make the entire “polling place” concept as extinct as tickertape.

Yet none of this will happen if we don’t let our antiquated voting system evolve along with the rest of our completely paperless world.

Polls, Polls, and "Pols"

Poll: Place where people go to vote.
Poll: Survey of a sample of people, the results of which are usually extrapolated to indicate the opinions or preferences of a larger population.
“Pol”: Politician, elected official.

What do these homonyms have in common?

The polling place is and always has been the center of our election process. It is supposed to represent the very essense of democracy. When voters turn out, democracy is better served.

However, our history has proven time and again that not all of our citizens turn out for every election. In particular, young voters are almost never proportionately represented in voting results. Seniors “rule” when it comes to voting. One can speculate on the cause of this disparity. One can theorize that younger voters just aren’t as “engaged” as much as senior voters. Perhaps young voters just don’t appreciate the importance of voting as much as senior voters.

I don’t accept any of the above theories as explanation of why senior voters turn out in higher numbers. The reason for this disparity is obvious: retirees have more TIME to devote to going down to a polling place to vote than younger working voters. As a result our “polling place” system of voting has, and always will, result in disproportionate representation among voters.

The senior voter also dominates the world of political polls. Political poll results are skewed toward the responses of older voters. Most recently, and increasingly, this has a lot to do with the way polls are usually conducted. Polling today is still almost exclusively conducted via telephone. Specifically, by “LANDLINE” telephone, the “old fashioned” hardwired phone in your home. Cellphones don’t count. “Voice-over-IP” phones, like Vonage or the phone service many people receive from their cable providers, don’t count. The number of U.S. households with no landline service whatsoever continues to rise significantly. Such household are not represented AT ALL in most political polling data.

Young voters suffer the most from conventional polling methods. Their views, their beliefs, and their values are basically not represented in the polls we hear about daily.
Recently Mathew Segal, of the youth advocacy group OurTime.org, wrote an Op-Ed about how polling methods disenfranchise younger voters. I hope that Matt also understands that, if our polling system under-represents the younger voter, our “polling place” system of voting does so in an even more significant way. Our voting system over-represents the senior vote, and so does the political polling system that everyone relies upon to “gauge” where the electorate stands on any given subject.

And what about the “Pols”- the politicians who we elect to supposedly represent all of our interests in government? What role do they play in our seemingly disfunctional political system?

Politicians rely on the results of political polling to define their positions on every possible issue. Politicians do not start with a position, and then conduct polls to find out who agrees or disagrees with that position. The process works the other way around. The first thing that any politician seeking election or re-election does regarding a position on an issue is conduct polling research on public opinion. The “results” of that research determine a politician’s position.

Perhaps most unfortunately, the polling of the electorate on most issues is rarely done as a sampling of the voters’ “best hopes and dreams”. Polling is geared toward finding out what the electorate most fears. Hope vs. Fear, when it comes to politics, is not usually a fair fight. Fear usually wins.

Politicians look to find out what senior voters are most afraid of, or at least most worried about, with regard to a specific issue. Fear has proven to be a much bigger motivator with senior voters than younger ones with regard to turnout in elections. So what we have is a political system that is completely geared toward manipulating the fears of senior voters. It is a race to the bottom on almost any issue.

One would think that at least senior voters themselves benefit from the system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality the manipulation of the senior vote rarely results in better representation of senior concerns any more. Never more true than in the 2010 US Midterm elections, politicians inundate senior voters with barrages of short television attack ads that are ALWAYS designed to scare them. As soon as they were elected many officials, who won in 2010 by scaring senior voters about things like losing Medicaire benefits, attempted to slash those same benefits. Seniors in this country would be much better off if their grandchildren voted in much larger numbers. The TV attack ad is significantly more effective with senior voters than younger ones. These ads often run not in primetime, but during time slots when retirees tend to watch, such as morning and mid-day.

If you believe our political system is dyfunctional, then you must look at our voting system if you want to truly understand the causes of and possible solutions to that dysfunction.

Solutions? What solutions? Enter Online Voting.

Oh yes, I’m the great suppressor. Who am I? I am the polling place.

There is certainly a lot of talk these days about attempts to suppress the vote. Draconian photo ID laws, measures akin to poll taxes, restrictions to early voting and registration mechanisms. All these things have one thing in common: to deter certain voter demographic groups from voting in large representative numbers.

Most of these examples of vote suppression occur at the time of voting: It is when people show up to vote at the polling place that they are told their ID is unacceptable or that they can’t vote early or can’t register. The suppression happens at the polling place.

Those who enact these measures-state governors and legislatures-might rightly be referred to as “Suppressors”, who facilitate the disenfranchisement of voter rights at the polling place.

But by far the largest suppressor of the vote-The “Great Suppressor”- is the polling place itself.

When you think about it, shouldn’t the voter registration process be the mechanism that “weeds out” those who are eligible to vote from those who are not? Think about all of the information you must provide when registering to vote. Most registration forms include the need for the registrant’s name, address, phone number, personal information, etc. When a voter registers to vote he or she supplies all of this information and, if they are eligible, they are mailed a voter card which offers all the proof one should need to prove they are eligible to vote. The “are you eligible?” process should end there.

One of the most important things to remember about the registration process is that it is usually done well in advance of election day. Therefor if there are any issues that arise between the voter and election officials regarding eligibility, they can be corrected in time to allow the person to vote on election day. The registration process does not suppress the vote, it facilitates it.

When a person arrives at the polling place to vote, and is told for some reason that he or she is “ineligable” to vote, despite having registered, there is little the voter can do at that moment to correct the situation, whether the poll worker is correct or not in stating that the voter is ineligible. The voter is then at the mercy of the poll worker. If the poll worker decides, for any reason, that the voter is ineligible to vote normally, the next thing the worker usually does is hand the voter a “provisional” ballot and tells the voter to vote using that method. What the poll worker, who has just chosen to deny the voter the ability to vote, usually does not tell the voter at that point is that the provisional ballot rarely counts toward an election result. Voting on a provisional ballot is usually akin to not voting at all. The voter is unaware of this, and casts the provisional ballot believing it will be counted.

This kind of thing, denying a registered voter his or her right to vote and throwing a worthless provisional ballot at him, happens all the time in our elections. It is absolutely a form of voter suppression.

The polling place has also historically suppressed the vote simply due to the fact that the voter has no anonymity or privacy when he or she shows up to vote. The vote itself might be considered private, but the fact that an individual has showed up to vote is not. If for any reason partisan poll workers or watchers want to punish an individual for daring to vote at all, they know who the person is to target.

This type of activity, intimidation of registered voters at the polling place, has taken place throughout our history. In the Jim Crow South an African American voter would literally risk their life when showing up at the polling place to vote. If you dared to vote your identity was noted. Intimidation and even violence would follow.

As with most of my posts, you know where I’m going with this.

Online voting is continously vilified by its detractors as, among other things, threatening to the voters’ privacy. Just as with the other buzz-word charges of “unsecure”, “unauditable”, and “unrecountable”, I find the notion that online voting is less private than polling-place voting to be laughable.

Imagine receiving your registration card and being able to immediately go online and confirm your eligibility to vote. Nothing can then suppress you from excercising your right. You then cast your vote in as private a setting as you desire. There is nobody to watch you show up at the polling place. You do not wait hours on line. Nobody tells you that you can’t vote or hands you a worthless provisional ballot.

Most importantly, the polling place is the great suppressor simply by being the only option people have to excercise their right to vote at a time when EVERYTHING else people do is done online. Denying voters contemporary technology with which to vote is the greatest form of suppression of all.

How do we end the suppression?

Cyber the Vote!

Defining “how we vote”:

1) Which candidate we vote for in an election.
2) The type of technology we use to cast our vote.

In an election year, all the attention in the world gets paid to “how we vote”. That is, whether we vote for a Republican candidate or a Democratic one. Or perhaps whether we vote “yes” or “no” on a referendum. What choices we might likely make with our votes this fall are predicted and discussed by every pundit who can make a dime off of the process.

What about HOW we vote, as in the technology we use to cast our vote?
How much does election technology get discussed during an election year or otherwise? Not much. Not much despite the fact that our voting technology is directly related to our election outcomes.

Sadly, the answer too many citizens will give when asked how they voted in a recent election is “I didn’t”.

Today’s media thrives on its own conventional wisdom. Even those in the media who may talk about conventional wisdom still follow it. This is never more true than with regard to our voting patterns.

Here’s one of the most widely accepted false premises repeated ad nauseum daily:

“A small slice of undecided independent voters will decide the election. Most voters have already made up their mind so the outcome will be decided by this small group”.

The above statement is completely wrong. Undecideds don’t decide elections. Independents don’t decide elections.

In the United States, NO-SHOWS decide elections.

Terms like enthusiasm gap and turnout are more relevant to the outcome of all of our elections than undecideds and independents.

With turnouts in elections that represent less than half of the eligible voters in the country, perhaps we should be focusing A LOT more on the means provided to us to vote (How we vote) than the specific choices made by the few who do vote.

As I discussed in a previous post “Polls, Polls, and Pols”, certain segments of our electorate vote in much greater numbers than the rest of the electorate. Unless that changes, many other things will not change.

Just imagine what changes we could see if younger working voters were represented in our elections the way they should be.

Enter Online Voting.

There are many promising ways that internet voting can help get money out of politics. They are worth discussing.

In an earlier post, “Follow The Money”, I discuss the hold the television attack ad has on our political system, and why I feel online voting can help change that through greater participation in the process by younger, working voters.

There are also other direct ways that voting on the internet can “get money out”.

Dr. William Kelleher, in his book “Internet Voting Now: Here’s How, Here’s Why – To Kiss Citizens United Goodbye” goes beyond proposing change through participation and offers fresh ideas for how to transform our Presidential Election process in a way that gets money out, with internet voting being integral to that goal.

In May of this year, Mr. Al Dahler wrote a great article focusing on Dr. Kelleher’s book and his proposals. I am delighted to repost that article here for my readers.

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Can Internet help counter ‘Big Money?’

Written by Al Dahler – Progressive Perspective

(Editorial Note: Mr. Dahler’s article was first published in The Newsleader of Staunton, Virginia. Direct links to that article are no longer available. I am happy to repost the article in its entirety for the public to read – Rob Weber)

May 30, 2012

—During the Republican primary campaign, what has been missing are serious rational, in-depth analyses about issues which affect people’s lives and our national well-being. How does one become a player in this absurd theater production?

Several players intimated having a “call,” attributing their egocentric ambitions to God. Others assiduously courted the “Big Money” people to boost their candidacy.

One cold January night, a few eccentric Iowa party faithful cheer the opening night. Then, the play hits the road, allowing a few privileged early audiences to pick the star. The majority of the population then has to accept the fait accompli.

It is not surprising that he who placed his faith in “Big Money” trounced those claiming to have a “call.” In real life, Mammon always triumphs. But, does it even matter who receives the Republican star billing?

According to Grover Norquist, all the party needs is a cipher, a stooge, an empty suit who has enough digits to sign off on legislation passed by a Republican Congress beholden to Grover.

The general election, too, is a misnamed drama. Voters do not elect. They simply sustain the choices of the Democratic “Big Money” people or the Republican “Big Money” people. Yet, the political parties and the media continue to spin the fantasy that this hokum is a democratic process.

Does technology, specifically the Internet, offer remedies to transform our nation’s misbegotten election hubbub into a rational and meaningful civic exercise, allowing people, not money, to make the vital choice of who will occupy our country’s most important political office? William J. Kelleher, professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, believes that the Internet has a real potential to revolutionize America’s presidential election process.

In his book, “Internet Voting Now! Here’s How, Here’s Why — So You Can Kiss Citizens United Goodbye!” he makes a rational and compelling argument of how Internet voting is highly feasible, offering the possibility of informed and thoughtful citizen participation.

The Founding Fathers abhorred political parties. John Adams wrote: “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties …. This … is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” Party loyalty creates a bandwagon effect and discourages independent thinking. Yet, political parties have captured the election process. Kelleher demonstrates how, by using the Internet, the election process can be made free from party tyranny and the influence of the “Big Money” people.

Internet voting has been tested by several countries and by our Department of Defense to facilitate voting of our overseas personnel. According to the author, Internet voting can be made safe, and the integrity of the system can be assured. He points out that much of modern commercial life and banking is conducted on the Internet.

Dr. Kelleher envisions an open system, allowing all qualified citizens to compete. The first step would be for candidates to pass a written test to ascertain that they are intellectually qualified, having a reasonable understanding of the governing process. Those qualified would then participate in a series of one-on-one publicly funded state selection debates. All of the debates would be broadcast (online, as well as by television and radio) to all eligible voters within the state. These would be real debates, not sham polemics hosted by media celebrities.

Each debate would be followed by a fact-checking analysis. Using their home Internet connection, voters would then indicate who they considered the winner, registering the intensity of their choice by awarding points ranging from one through nine.

The eventual winners of the state competitions would advance to regional one-on-one competitions in the Northeast, Midwest, South and West. Again, all debates would be broadcast and fact checked before allowing each voter to register his/her choice through the Internet.

The regional winners would move on to the national one-on-one debate competition with the candidate awarded the most points to be president and the runner-up to be vice president as originally envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

The system would not demand much time and effort from all eligible voters, only a few hours during the election period. Yet, the seriousness of choosing the president deserves from each of us wholehearted participation.

The brevity of this article allows only a cursory discussion of Dr. Kelleher’s proposal. His idea could be adapted to congressional and gubernatorial elections. The book is well worth reading to contemplate what might be and how we, the citizens, could build a true democracy using the Internet.

The monumental obstacle to allow true citizen participation is the “Big Money” dominated political parties which now have an ironclad grip on the election process.

Could a dedicated and rational citizens’ movement successfully challenge the current presidential election hokum?

The Internet has changed our lives in many ways. It may prove to be the means to make true democracy a reality.

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Write Al Dahler, a retired Air Force officer and a former college prep school administrator, at aadahler@ntelos.net