The Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee, of which I am one of the most senior members, today voted unanimously to support Rush Holt's bill to require paper trails and, in some cases paper ballots, in order to increase the chances of honest elections. Nearly 30 Democratic state committees have now passed similar resolutions.
The issues of computerized voting machines have been kicking around for decades now. In the late 1970's I was one of the members of a House State Government Committee majority that killed consideration of computerized voting on the grounds that it was too complicated for many citizens and the technology was too new to ensure the integrity of the ballots counted.
Three decades later, fewer and fewer people are baffled as to how to operate computerized voting machines. But, as we all know, the issues of voter security have intensified even as the technology has developed. Indeed the development of the technology has been so great that there are very few people who could detect a program that gave the Democrats 99% of the votes for them and the Republicans 101% of the votes cast for them, or a program that diverted votes for Democrats in close races to Democrats who were certain to win or certain to lose.
A lot of voting occurs in patterns, as people in similar ethnic, economic and residential circumstances exposed to similar media influences tend to vote in similar ways. From 1979 through 2003, when my late father, Philadelphia City Councilman David Cohen, was a candidate for Councilman at Large, I would go through the voting returns of every precinct in the City of Philadelphia--about 1700--and itemize precincts where his showing was suspiciously low compared to how he did in similar precincts. For the vast majority of the precincts I identified, a check of the voting machines showed that the early returns were in error.
My work on my father's behalf was similar to what goes on in close elections around the country. A precinct in which a candidate gets only a small fraction of the votes he or she got in similar precincts stands out like a red flag and can be quickly identified by persons familiar with voting trends. These kind of human errors can be caused by either fatigue or deliberate intent to short candidates of the votes they have won.
But this kind of detective work cannot defeat deliberate and consisent small errors in many places. There is no practical way of knowing whether a candidate who is recorded with 34% of the vote in a precinct really got 36% in that precinct. If a candidate gets a small upward bump everywhere, or a small downward push everywhere, it is virtually undetectible.
The only measure now widely available to serve as a check are exit polls. The U.S. government uses exit polls to monitor foreign elections. Exit polls in the 2004 election were almost precisely accurate in the vast majority of the states where the election for President was not close, but, in closely-contested states, generally gave Kerry a higher percentage than he received on election day. This odd fact added fuel to the flames of those concerned about the integrity of the electoral process.
Election officials of both parties are less than thrilled about either paper trails or paper ballots. Elections that are quickly decided are far less work for them. And they worry about the possibilities of losing the paper, and the possibilities of unscrupulous candidates bribing financially strapped election office employees to tamper with the ballots.
Chester County, Pennsylvania, a traditional affluent Republican stronghold, was pressured by active Democrats into setting up a voter verified paper trail system. On election night, the Democratic candidates trailed by narrow margins in three districts at least partly in Chester County, and the voter verified paper trail ballots were the key in determining who controlled the state house of representatives. The Democrats gained a 102 to 101 margin in the state house as one of the districts (West Chester, home of West Chester State University) flipped from a 19 vote Republican lead to a 28 vote Democratic victory.
No proof was found that there had been any deliberate manipulation of the voter returns. But the high stakes involved--education spending, mass transit spending, spending for the autistic, mentally retarded and mentally ill all went up as a result of that minor vote switch, and other worthwhile progressive initiatives are still in play in Pennsylvania's year around legislative process--show the folly of allowing quirks in the degree of pressure placed on the machines by frail or careless voters or impurities in any of the equipment to determine major public policy.
Human error or human bad intentions is always possible in a paper process. I recently watched a Law and Order episode--Republican Presidential candidate Fred Thompson stars in this series as the District Attorney--in which a state senate candidate wins a contested Democratic primary by having an organized crime ally steal a good number of paper ballots from precincts going against her. The murder of an innocent woman who is mistaken for a hard charging investigative reporter leads to the uncovering of this scheme. Whether there was Republican bias in the writing of the script is unknown to me, but the events it describes could certainly happen and things like this have certainly happened in the past.
But the threats of mass manipulation of election returns by programming is a real and constant threat. Jesse Jackson has expressed amazement at how a weak black candidate for a statwide judgeship in Ohio not popular in her home base of Cleveland did so well in conservative rural counties where Kerry was running far behind the normal Democratic vote strength; it certainly looked likes votes were being diverted even though that was not proven. And then there are those amazing exit polls, "overestimating" Kerry's strength in a close states but accurately stating it in states he decisively won or lost.
The House of Representatives should quickly pass Rep. Holt's bill for paper trails when it takes the bill up soon--possibly on September 13 or September 17. Enactment of this legislation does not solve all problems of election integrity, but it does limit violations of election integrity to the traditional suspects. There are alternate technical solutions to the current dangers that provide for an alternate monitoring procedure in each voting machine--Punchem and Prime III are now being advocated--but it is far too early to conclude that they solve the problem.
When the next President is sworn in, it would be nice to have everyone active in politics agreeing that he or she actually won the election by honest means.