Fourth in a series
Show Me the Voting!
Okay, so we’ve critiqued the current way of campaigning. We’ve emphasized that the real issue is getting people to vote. But then there’s still the question: Even if we know they voted, do we know how they voted? Can we be absolutely, positively sure that they voted the way that they said they did? The citizen is under no obligation to reveal, of course, but if they don’t, then we can’t know. And if we can’t know, then a more efficient political machine is not possible.
There’s one way to make sure, of course: take a picture of the ballot. And, further, record the process in which the ballot goes into the slot. Now of course, that doesn’t guarantee that the ballot has been faithfully counted, and yet at least it demonstrates the input. And as we saw in Part One, verifying the input is at least a first step in verifying the throughput and then, most importantly, the output. That is, the actual counted ballot. But again, if the ballot can’t be verified in the first place, then there’s not much hope of verifying it has moves through the process. Nailing down accurate and honest elections might be a long process, but we have to start somewhere.
And so we could start by verifying the ballot as the voter meant to mark it. To that end, it certainly does seem reasonable to produce a photo of one’s own ballot. Perhaps with one’s own face in the same frame: The voter holding his or her ballot. That is, a “ballot selfie.” As The New York Times put it in 2016, “To many, there’s no better celebration of democracy than a voting booth photograph. It’s the moment political talk turns to political action, one younger voters are especially eager to record and share with friends.”
But there’s a question: Is this act legal? Intuitively, it would seem that free speech, and free expression, should prevail, especially concerning political speech and expression. And in fact, there’s no federal law against photographing a ballot. However, the states are a curious patchwork. and the states are a patchwork. According to Vox, in 14 states it’s not legal, and in another 10 states, the law is unclear. The thinking behind the ban on photographing ballots is it discourages vote-buying, and that might be true, although the laws seem more aimed at voting machine companies, as opposed to individual voters. In any case, few, if any, individual voters have been prosecuted for photographing (an antique term in the age of cell phone cameras) their own ballot, and yet the overhang of illegality is enough to discourage larger organizations from doing it.
Still, it seems likely that the general tendency in American society today—people taking selfies of themselves doing just about everything—is going to prevail. That is, oneself photographing oneself and one’s ballot will be okay.
The Great Separation: The Public Act and the Secret Ballot
But if we’re on the subject of voter certainty, here’s a question: Why are ballots secret, anyway? Any way you slice it, the secret ballot makes it harder to verify the balloting, so why are we making it hard on ourselves? And come to think of it, even the notion of a ballot is potentially troublesome, as the ballot is a different thing than the person. So even to add the concept of “ballot” is to create complexity beyond the person—the complexity of two, as opposed to one. If John Smith wishes to vote Republican, or Democrat, that’s simple enough. So why not simply count John Smith, as opposed to his ballot? Why not keep it unitary, as opposed to making it binary? Why secret, as opposed to open?
We should keep in mind that the whole essence of our Constitution and our government is the republic, an English word derived from the Latin res publica, the public thing. The acts of politicians are mostly public—people would be horrified if legislatures voted in secret and are always demanding more “sunshine”—so why is the citizen’s act of voting private? Especially when that makes the voting process vulnerable to fraud?
In fact, through most of the history of democracy, citizen voting was public. In ancient Greece, or in the Italian republics of the Renaissance era, voting was public: a show of hands, or a voice vote. Simple and clear. In early America, voting was similar public: a show of hands, or dropping pebbles, or tokens, in a bowl. In his classic work, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville praised the New England town meeting for its openness, which we would now call transparency. In the town meeting, citizens could speak openly, and vote openly, witnessed, of course, by their fellow citizens: “Township institutions . . . give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free.” Does that sound so bad? Tocqueville continued: local control, expressed publicly, was the key to a strong civic spirit:
Patriotism is a kind of devotion which is strengthened by ritual observance. In this manner the activity of the township is continually perceptible; it is daily manifested in the fulfillment of a duty or the exercise of a right; and a constant though gentle motion is thus kept up in society.
Yet with the coming of mass suffrage in the late 19th century, including from new immigrants from non-English-speaking countries, concerns arose about the ability of political bosses in cities to coerce voters. This was undoubtedly a legitimate concern, and yet perhaps, over the long run, the solution was worse than the original problem. And back then, the shift from public to private voting was laden with controversy.
For instance, the British reformer John Stuart Mill, a liberal in his day, opposed the shift to secret balloting. In 1869 he declared, “It appears to me that secret suffrage . . . would at present, and still more in time to come, produce far greater evil than good.” To Mill’s reckoning, voting was a trust more than a right; after all, it were a right, then it could be bought or sold. But a trust must be held to a higher standard. And yet, in Mills view, the secret ballot was a selfish act. Reacting to the argument that secret balloting was needed to counteract duress, Mill declared, “A base and mischievous vote is now, I am convinced, much oftener given from the voter's personal interest, or class interest, or some mean feeling in his own mind, than from any fear of consequences at the hands of others.” And so Mill continued, the voters own baseness and mischievousness, combined with the secret ballot, “would enable him to yield himself up free from all sense of shame or responsibility.” The right thing to do was the public vote, “under the eye and criticism of the public.” If democracy is going to work, there must be accountability, and that applies to everyone: We all, in our way, must stand up and be counted. Yet Mill’s view, of course, was defeated.
In the 1880s and 1890s, the U.S. began to switch from open balloting to the so-called "Australian," or secret, ballot. The argument that prevailed was that the secret ballot would be more orderly, would prevent coercion, leaving voters “alone with their conscience.”
Once again, maybe the secret ballot was right solution for that era. But now we live in a different era, and so maybe a different approach is needed. Today, as a function of red-blue polarization, just about everyone is only too happy to tell you who they voted for—and who they voted against. As noted, open balloting, with a visible chain of custody—me, the citizen, and my vote, to be counted, and, if need be, recounted—would all but eliminate vote fraud.
So while there’s no need to rehash the electoral history of the last 150 years, we can say that,, a century-and-a-half later, the issue is being revisited. Being revisited already, in fact.
The GameStop Lesson
In this era of secret ballots, the only way to verify a voter’s intention is to see what he or she says. And so external tests help, even if they aren’t conclusive. Still, the external tests, made all the more visible These can be quite visible. In fact, we’ve already seen something of a dry run for this. In 2021, an army of activist investors, informed by free-for-all platforms such as Reddit, and powered by low-cost or no-cost trading platforms such as Robin Hood, chose to drive up the stock price of video game retailer GameStop. The stock was worth less than a dollar in 2019, and yet the activists thought it was undervalued, so they bid it up to as high as $347 in January 2021. Some will ask: Was this truly an investment play—including a squeeze on short sellers—or was this some aspect of herd mentality and general rowdiness? the madness of crowds? Nearly three years later, GameStop stock had settled into the $15 range, which, while down enormously from its peak, is still a multiple higher than its earlier price before the run-up. That suggests that, yes, group psychology had driven speculative excess on GameStop, a 21st-century tulip mania. And yet still, the proverbial “army of Davids” had proven a point; they had self-organized online, and made an impact, and discovered at least some latent value in the stock. Wall Street had had the edge over small traders, using high frequency trading and algorithms, and reaching into “dark pools,” private exchangers were big traders can trade without moving the market. (In other words, it’s a kind of institutionalized insider trading.) It’s a safe bet that this sort of self-organization will occur again. In fact, along the way, GameStoppers blitzed help on a charity for gorillas, so who knows where all this will end, if it ever ends.
We can see that the same elements of the GameStop—individuals acting as a peaceful flash mob, operating outside of traditional structures—could be applied to politics. That is, an army of voters wash over the balloting. Quick action, profound results; now that’s leverage. Unlike investments, the voter flash mob can come and go--so long as it alights on Election Day, or, nowadays, Election Season. The goal is to make sure that the votes are cast and counted, and group enthusiasm can drive that.
If a citizen is vocally, demonstrably, in favor of something, that’s a pretty good clue that he or she will vote for it. And for a political campaign, that sense, while not ironclad, is worth a lot. However, to make it worth more, the optimizing campaign must drive up turnout for its vote as close to 100 percent as possible. So that suggests further steps to verify the commitment. And that takes us back to photographing ballots. Or, if they can’t be photographed, then we go to some sort of verifying procedure, such as another person eyeballing the vote. So now we come to ideas such as parties, in which everybody brings their ballot to show it off, allowing for some campaign official(s) to verity it. And yes, it might be hard to get people to resist taking pictures of such festivities, but then, as we have noted, nobody gets prosecuted for exuberant selfie-ing.
Furthermore, without a doubt, new technology will enter in. For instance, the non-fungible tokens (NFT). These were a tulip-like craze in about 2021, and yet it seems that since then, their value has fallen to pretty much zero. Zero might be the appropriate monetary valuation, but as a token of political solidarity—as in, you get one of you’re on the voting team—they could be worth a lot to campaigns. If voters can be convinced to publicly stand by their candidate, and let their vote be measured in the meantime, well, the whole nature of campaigns changes, as the focus shifts from advertising to vote-counting.
Indeed, whether it’s selfies, parties, or NFTs, we can see that a public expression of a ballot is worth a lot.
And there’s more coming. We can see that bots and AI could play a role in tending to the candidates, making sure they feel connected. And some have gone further. For instance, Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, sees potential in a tech-oriented Proof of Personhood, which, he explains, could have political potential. Indeed it could. But it could also be a case of overengineering. That is, we don’t need to know everything about everyone, down to a retina scan. We just need to know that they are an eligible citizen, that they intend to vote for our candidate, and that they are willing to verify their vote. That’s all we need to win elections.
Next: The Superfluity of the Media
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