How Elections Should Be Conducted: Public Hand-Count

by Eric Jaffa

March 21, 2004

How Elections Should be Conducted

People enter the room they're voting in, and there is a large, transparent ballot box on a table in plain view.

People who show up early can see that the transparent box is empty.

Poll workers hand voters a sheet of paper for the major races, and the voters put X's next to the candidates of their choice.

Poll workers also hand voters a supplemental ballot book for the minor races with an optical-scan (SAT-style) ballot.

Voters fill out the ballot for the major races, fold it in half, and drop it in the transparent ballot box. They fill out the optical scan ballot for minor races, give it to a poll worker who puts it through a machine which checks that all the ovals are filled out completely, and if so counts that ballot and deposits it in a separate ballot box.

Any voter who wants to wait around after voting and watch the transparent ballot box is welcome. Any voter who wants to return in the evening and watch the counting of the votes can do so.

After the end of voting, the ballot box for the major races is opened, at the same place it has been all day. A bipartisan team of two Republicans and two Democrats count each ballot in front of a roomful of citizens. The totals are phoned in before everyone, and posted on the wall.

How Elections Will Be Conducted in 2004 in Some Precincts, Unless We Persuade Congress to Act

Voters are handed cards with electronic information on them. They stick the card in an electronic machine, and cast their votes. There is no paper record of each vote produced. If a machine doesn't display each appropriate race, and the voter presses "Send Ballot" expecting to then be able to view more races, there is nothing a poll worker can do about it. That voter was disenfranchised (Note 1).

People are asked to trust whatever totals the machines display at the end of voting. If people suspect an error in the results, because a Democrat did surprisingly well in a traditionally Republican precinct or vice versa, there is no way to conduct a meaningful recount (Note 2). Even if a candidate who dropped out of the race is shown to be leading in the electronic tally, there is no way to conduct a meaningful recount (Note 3).

What Can We Do?

Creating a transparent, verifiable election process won't be accomplished all at once. It will be an ongoing struggle, with certain voting machine companies wanting as much secrecy as possible, and some officials eager to oblige such companies.

As a first step, we should try to get Congress to pass "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act", which requires voter-verified paper ballots. That bill is HR.2239 in the House, and S.1980 in the Senate. You can call Congress for free by dialing 1-800-839-5276, and asking to speak with the office of a particular Congressperson or Senator, and leave a message that it's important to you that The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act passes. If you don't know the names of your Congressperson or Senators, you can look this up at www.vote-smart.org.

As a long-term action, we can keep visiting www.verifiedvoting.org to monitor progress, and keep talking to the offices of federal and local officials, including Secretaries of State, about the importance of transparency in the voting process.

Note 1: The situation of voters being disenfranchised by electronic voting machines which don't show all the races isn't speculative. It happened to some voters on March 2, 2004 in the Democratic Primary in Georgia, a state which has exclusively used Diebold machines since 2002. These citizens wanted to vote for the Democratic Presidential nominee, but were only allowed to vote on a state flag. (Had the election had been done on paper, a voter handed a paper ballot without a list of Presidential nominees could have asked for the right ballot, instead of being disenfranchised.)

Note 2: In the 2002 Georgia Senate Election, conducted entirely on Diebold electronic machines, there were suspicious results. Republican Saxby Chambliss did surprisingly well in traditionally Democratic counties, and Democratic incumbent Max Cleland did surprisingly well in traditionally Republican counties.

Six days before the election, Cleland was leading in an Atlanta Journal Constitution poll by 49%-44%, but the electronic results were 46% to 53% in Chambliss' favor. There was no way to a meaningful recount, and Senator Max Cleland was replaced with Saxby Chambliss. In fairness to the argument that the election was accurate, Chambliss had a one-point lead in a Zobgy poll a week before the election. This article of Common Cause Georgia cites the Zogby poll and argues against voter-verified paper ballots, contrary to the national position of Common Cause. The author of the Common Cause Georgia article describes all the steps taken to prevent a rigged election in 2002, including testing to try to make sure that computer code wasn't changed, and testing to try to make sure that there weren't any trojan horses set to go into effect at a certain time and date. By listing so many complicated steps to try to defend against a computer programmer who wants to rig an election, the author unintentionally makes the case that it would be much easier and cheaper to have the voters draw X's on plain paper and do a hand-count.

Note 3: In Florida's Bay County on March 9, 2004, Dick Gephardt, had a two-to-one lead over John Kerry, according to software counting optical-scan ballots. This raised suspicion since Gephardt had dropped out of the Primaries in January. Because optical-scan ballots are paper-based, officials were able to examine and fix the problem and count the votes accurately. The final count in Bay County had Kerry with 58 percent and Gephardt with less than 1 percent.

A similar glitch in a paperless system couldn't have been corrected with recounts. Also, it was a wildly inaccurate result which prompted an examination. In a closer race, if the counts were reversed, election officials wouldn't know something was wrong. This demonstrates the need for widespread audits, in addition to requiring voter-verifiable paper ballots.

Lastly, this incident shows why hand-counting the major races would be the best system.