The Quest for Legitimacy in Elections

Second of 13 parts 

In part one of this series, we noted some of the challenges posed to honest elections.  

So what to do?  How to stop this cheating?  How to maintain, or regain, legitimacy?  The only surefire way to beat vote fraud—including the digital-age trick just adding numbers to vote totals via tech manipulation —is to count the votes on the way in.   That is, know how many votes formed the input, and then compare that to the officially reported output.   To put that another way, the idea here would make for a second count—which is actually a first count, prior to/at the time of the voting, the second count being the official tallying of the voting.  

The point is simple enough: If the number of votes that go into the system (the aforementioned input) is a mystery, then the votes that emerge from the system (the output, the reported results, from the official vote-counters) will be, by definition, equally mysterious.  Has the throughput changed on its way from input to output?   There’s simply no way to know if the input is unknown. 

So the only answer is to know the input and follow it, as it were, the “pig” as it goes through the “python.”  So who would do this first counting, this pre-counting?  Most likely, for the sake of Republicans, it would have to be the Republican Party, or Republican campaigns, or some other group working closely with the GOP.  The first-counters, of course, would also presumably be the Get Out The Voters (GOTV).  Campaigns and parties are getting good at figuring out who their voters are—all this granular digital tech is paying off.  So the essence of GOTV nowadays is fine-grained relationship management and motivation: Knowing that John Smith is a likely Republican voter, the campaign does its best to get John Smith to vote and knows whether he did or not, and will stay on Smith until the last possible moment to get him to vote. (The issue of the secret ballot leaves a little bit of mystery, and we’ll get to that.) 

We might think of this counting idea as a dual-key system.  The official vote-counters have one key, and that’s the legal key of the state machinery. But the unofficial voter-counters have the other key—and that’s in the possession of the campaigns.  And while the campaigner’s key has no legal force, it does serve as a metric. The goal is to use the unofficial key to check, and keep honest, the official key.   And yet to have effect, the unofficial key needs to be as transparent, or bulletproof, as possible.  That is, if Republicans assert that X-number of GOP votes went into the system, they have to be able to document that that number did, in fact, go into the system.  Otherwise, they have no credibility.  Claims without proof can be dismissed as just more campaign hype.  So the answer, of course, is that Republicans need to know who their voters are, and identify them, and count them.  

So by definition, it can’t be a secret ballot, it has to be a public ballot.  Or at least a transparent ballot, viewable by the campaign and other parties, as the need might arise, e.g. an audit.  

Of course, under current law, the GOP can’t mandate a public ballot.   So the public ballot has to be voluntary.   That is, the voter would have to say, Yes, here am I, and here is my ballot, marked, Republican.  For anyone to inspect and verify.  

So why would a voter wish to do this?  Not all would, but most would.  Why?  Because most voters, on both sides of the aisle, are perfectly happy to tell anyone how they voted.  Such externalization is function  nature of polarization, as well as social media.  And so Republican campaigns can seize on that and say: 

Mr. Smith, here’s your chance not only vote Republican, but to let everyone know you’re a Republican, and to get credit for being a Republican, and to secure ballot integrity for Republicans.  In fact, by your public act, you have just been enrolled in our GOP Gallery of Heroes.  Here’s the website where you are listed, along with all of our other GOP Heroes. 

To be sure, some voters, perhaps 10 percent, but probably less, will wish to keep their ballot secret, for any number of reasons, from personal reticence to fear of retribution.  These reticent folks should be free to stay shy.  

Moreover, there’s nothing coercive envisioned here, as to why anyone should vote, or not vote, or reveal, or not reveal, his or her ballot choice. Nor is there any sort of financial incentive: The suggestions made in this piece, and in this series, are not, in any way, about buying votes, or about offering any sort of remuneration for voting or not voting.  Instead, this idea is about giving people credit—psychic income, if they wish to take it—for how they voted.  (We will deal more with the mechanics of this in later installments.) 

Such public voting is, in fact, in keeping with the trend of our times.  As noted, social media takes away much of the mystery as to how someone voted, and all the other forms of data-mining take away even more.  It’s a safe bet that Facebook or Twitter can know, within a fine degree, how any of its active members voted (and one can apply for absentee ballots on social media).  Furthermore, voting by mail takes away the mystery even more: the mere fact that an envelope comes into a post office or voting station tells someone, at least, how the voter voted.

So again, there’s less and less mystery as to how many people vote.  So for the sake of more effective and transparent campaigns, why not just own it?  Especially if the owning of it helps assure that one’s vote is counted?  If all the Republicans in a precinct got together and announced their vote, and showed their ballot to any curious onlooker, then the world would know that, say, 1,000 Republicans voted in that precinct.  And they would expect that the vote results showed 1,000 Republicans voted. 

But if Republicans announced their votes and their vote total, would Democrats do the same?  Quite possibly not.  But that sets up the contrast: The GOP “shows its work,” while Democrats do not.  So if the GOP is transparent, and the Democrats are not transparent, what does that tell us?  

The idea is that if Republicans are completely transparent about their vote, Democrats might be forced to do the same.  And even if they don’t, it’s still useful for Republicans to have a better handle on their own vote—that’s an evolution in campaigning which, again, we will deal with later in this series.   

If the Republican vote is transparent and the Democratic vote is not, the contrast will be obvious, especially if it can otherwise be demonstrated, or at least suggested, that Democrats are somehow fiddling with, or padding, their total.  But again, if the GOP vote total is murky, then the Democratic total can be murky, and maybe nobody or nothing will be able to penetrate the murk.  That’s been the story of the last few elections, made all the more murky by the new voting modalities. 

So we keep colliding with the basic condundrum of anonymity.  Anonymity guarantees some modicum of unverifiability: If I’m holding something in my hand and I don’t know who it belongs to, how can I know for sure if it’s real?  How can I check its provenance?   If someone manages to slip in (or slip out) a crate of paper ballots, nobody can be sure what’s what, or how the voters (if there were any) intended to vote. 

We can add that, given the focus on convenience and the reliance on apps, it’s quite likely that electronic voting is the wave of the future.  Republicans will likely oppose electronic voting, but Democrats will likely embrace it.  And in many places—most obviously, California—they’ll likely be able to make their preference stick.  As we chew on that statement, we might consider the situation today: If you vote, your vote becomes a bit of electronic data; of course it can be hacked or otherwise mulcted.  That happens all the time to electronic data: Wikipedia keeps an ever-growing list of data breaches, affecting billions of files and people. 

So here’s a closing thesis-statement to consider: The ultimate solution to vote fraud is to make sure that each vote is linked to an identifiable voter.  That way, if there’s a dispute on the count, vote-auditors can check back with the voter to make sure his or her intention has been properly tallied.  

If we do this, we will regain and maintain ballot and electoral legitimacy. 

Next: The Inefficiency of Campaigns