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Elections & Electronic Voting

Date: 10 Nov 2004 21:51:16
From: jim(a)planetwork.net
Subject: election info page on planetwork.net

Hi All,

Rather than send out a stream of email I have decided to repost info on the election to an area on planetwork.net under ELECTIONS from the home nav.

http://www.planetwork.net/elections/index.html

I can't keep up with it all myself, but I am attempting to provide some filtering and elevate links to the most reasoned and careful critiques to the top while leaving off links to the most strident and partisan diatribes.

For what its worth, here are some of my general observations.

1. The US election system is not accurate enough to measure the results of close races. Virtually all US elections have an error rate in the range of 1-6% (or worse!) due to spoiled ballots, under-vote, over-vote, glitches, etc. This means that with an increasingly polarized and closely divided electorate we might as well be flipping a coin. (except that if we did that one would expect each side to be winning about half the time--unless one side were more successfully gaming the system...)

2. The biggest fundamental problem with our election system is social more than technical, i.e. we have partisan political officials managing the election process. No amount of technology can fix this, but bad technology choices can make it worse.

3. Virtually all election tabulation results are run through a computer at some point in the process, so while touch screen voting machines without a paper trail have gotten the most press (and should never have been allowed in the first place) my thoroughly unscientific survey of the reports I have seen suggest that the most disturbing patterns of divergence form exit polling may have occurred more in precincts than with optical scan than with DRE‚s (this time).

4. Exit polling is so accurate that where there is a large and consistent pattern of discrepancy with official results an investigation is warranted.

5. Exit polling data should be publicly archived, by hour, so that we can observe trends. Instead, *actual* results are gradually dribbled in to make the polling data match the official results by the end of the official count. This makes it very difficult to independently verify claims about exit polling data now.

Best wishes,
-j