Voter Uncertainty, and How to Fix It

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  

  

The Inefficiency of Campaigns

Third of a series

If We Weren’t Doing This Now, Would We Start? 

In part one of this series, we considered some of the key issues of vote fraud, and vote counting, in the U.S.  In part two, we looked at the resulting problem of the legitimacy of American elections.  Now, in part three, let’s look at some of the challenges facing candidates and campaigns, starting with the inefficiency of the current campaign system.    

To be sure, at the end of every election, somebody wins, so the system might seem to be at least somewhat efficient.  Yet still, some spectacular examples of inefficiency leap to mind.  For instance, in his 2020 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Michael Bloomberg spent some $1.25 billion, all in, and got of course, bupkis.  And in 2022, Citadel’s Ken Griffin donated $50 million to an Illinois Republican gubernatorial hopeful, Richard Irvin, who did all the usual candidate-y things, such as making speeches and running TV ads, and yet he lost badly, coming in third in the GOP primary, garnering a meager 119,000 votes.  Which means that Griffin’s $50 million “investment” worked out to $420 a vote.  

And of course, the real test of the current campaign system will come when something better comes along—as, for example, described here.  Only with competition and the resulting gains in perspective do we really see what works best—and what works worst.  

We can pause to wonder as to what’s going on.  After all, these and other fatcats in and around politics have typically proven that they know how to run operations.  And yet even so, they make spectacularly bad political investments.  Could it be that they are being outfoxed by the campaign consultants?  Or is it that the system just doesn’t work well?   Either way, the industry seems ripe for reinvention and/or disruption. 

When confronted with an issue of the status quo, we can ask the piercing question which Peter Drucker, writing seven decades ago in The Effective Executive, suggested every firm ask of itself: “If we did not already do this, would we go into it now?” And if the answer is “no,” Drucker continued, then the company should start thinking if maybe it, whatever it is, might not be such a good idea.  Indeed, perhaps exit the activity altogether and seek something better.  

According to Open Secrets, total campaign spending, nationwide in the U.S. in 2020, totaled $14.4 billion. Although surely, the amount spent to influence voting is vastly greater than that.  How would, for example, one count all the money spent, directly and indirectly, on political persuasion, be it via organizations or by the media—including social media?  It’s easy to conclude that the true number, if it could ever quantified, is a vast multiple of $14.4 billion.   So there’s a lot of money in politics.  Yet whatever the total, the only thing we know for sure is that the leverage of politics—political influence on the economy—extends to every penny of the $26 trillion or so of U.S. GDP.   So it’s worth figuring out how to do this right.

Craft Businesses

Yet despite all the money and tech—well-funded digital strategists and data-crunchers abound now in political campaigns as budgets for a mere House race swell into the tens of millions—the business itself is still a “craft” business.  That is, there are probably hundreds of thousands Americans who call themselves “campaign consultants,” or professional political operatives of one stripe or another.  They aim to serve the estimated 519,000 elected officials in the U.S.  And yet even the largest campaign campaign operations have but a small market share.  

We can note the enormous churn of creative destruction in the process; campaigns and consultancies come and go with rapidity.   As a result, theres’s a lot of friction in the basic meat of campaigns which is, increasingly, data: the names and addresses of voters and donors.  The national Republican and Democratic parties have their treasured lists, as do the campaign arms of U.S. Senate and House members in both parties: The NRSC, DSCC, NRCC, and DCCC.   And there are similar operations for governors, state attorneys general, state legislatures, and so on. 

In addition, thousands of firms and political action committees have their own proprietary lists.  So we’re already up to thousands of data siloes.  To which we can add the uncounted number of campaigns that pull together at least some data, and do at least something with it, win or lose.  These entities come and go, and their data are often lost, like tears in rain.  We can quickly see that data quality, data security—even basic data retention—is an important issue.  

Truly effective data operations—from Google to the credit card companies to the Social Security Administration—don’t operate this way.  They, and their industries, long ago realized that consolidation into the data equivalent of fortresses was the only way to go, data-sanctity-wise.  In a world of hackers and other kinds of fraudsters, there’s simply no way to avoid a heavy investment in cyber-security. And so those operations that aren’t investing heavily are likely porous.  The wide-open pores are, in fact, legion. 

We can’t say that the status quo is catastrophic; we can merely say that it is suboptimal.  And the lack of privacy and security for personal data is probably destined to collide with some pretty heavy and costly lawsuits and other legal interventions.  This likely future litigation will probably force a roll up—the concentration of the industry in fewer, more defensible forms.  Such concentration is also in keeping with the general tendency of firms to scale up their data operations into larger realms that better capture economies of scale.  

The Roll Up  

To cite a past industry analogy, we might claim that the state of the politics biz today to that of the car industry 100 or more years ago.  Amidst the Cambrian Explosion of auto innovation at the beginning of the 20th century, it’s been estimated that some 2,000 U.S. car companies came into existence in the first two decades of the last century.  And yet by mid-century those U.S. companies were rolled up (willingly or unwillingly) into the Big Three, as well as just a handful of tiny-niche survivors.  Today, there are more big companies than just three, including foreign makers, and yet the top ten brands control more than 90 percent of the market.  

We can see this phenomenon elsewhere. Just a few decades ago, there were thousands of internet service providers, each striving to serve some local market.  Today, there are still thousands, and yet just a handful of “phone” and/or “cable” companies dominate the ISP market.  

It would seem that there’s an inevitability to this process of consolidation, and so it’s likely to come to politics.  In a way, of course, it already has. The two parties, Republican and Democratic, control, between them, 99 percent or more of all partisan political offices. 

Boutique Politics   

The duopoly of politics itself makes the cacophony of political operations all the more interesting—and all the more looking like a lagging indicator.  For the most part, campaign firms style themselves on the persona of the person, or persons, who originate the firm.  Back in 1934, California politicos Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter started Campaign, Inc.; they are remembered as the first campaign consultants.  

The history of campaign consultancy since abounds with famous people, from Tony Schwartz to Stu Spencer to David Garth to Roger Ailes to Lee Atwater to Bob Squier to Bob Shrum to James Carville to Mandy Grunwald to Jeff Roe.  The commonality of all these trailblazers is that while they and their firms can be hugely profitable in their moment, the companies tend to dissolve quickly.  It’s not that they go bankrupt or cease to exist, it’s that their partners have a way of cashing out or otherwise leaving the scene, while the entities are bought up and and reshuffled. To be sure, sometimes these campaign firms are bought up and rolled up into giant firms.  For instance, in 2010, WPP bought Blue State Digital, bringing the Democratic consultancy into a global multination boasting revenues of $17 billion. There have been hundreds of huge deals, because a hot shop is, indeed, profitable. 

Yet still, there’s the challenge of what the German sociologist Max Weber’s called “the rationalization of charisma.”  That is, the process by which an institution outlasts its founder, if it does.  The charismatic hero will not last forever, and so the company must rationalize his or her charisma, turning it into a system or, if you will, a bureaucracy. It’s the only way something can survive; although, of course, with AI, who knows what new longevity tool will emerge.

Yet we can further add that if a company if depersonalized, it becomes all the more clear that underlying product—the ultimate real currency of campaigning— is data.  That is, data, as expressed in big data, structured in algorithms and interface with CRM, and so on, wins.  

To be sure, there will always be great TV ads—moving, funny, memorable, effective—and there will be internet cognate of this creativity, in the form of videos, animation, AI-ification, gamification, who knows.  But in the end, politics is a numbers game.

Thus the issue of data optimization, even survival, once again rears its head.  With every campaign or corporate move, there’s friction. And that’s trouble, including potential legal liability for data gone wrong. 

The point here is not to argue that a few giant search engines, or phone companies, should be running campaigns. Quite possibly, it’s important, even vital, that campaign creativity and political freedom necessitates continued decentralization.  And yet even if the industry remains decentralized, it will still likely benefit from some sort of consortium element on data, some common repository, the cloud equivalent of a stock exchange, or farmers’ coops, or deposit-insured banks, or reinsurance.   If not a roll up, then a rationalization is coming.

The Fundament Unit is the Vote

And as we think about what might come next, we can learn from the data-driven transformation of another field, which is also a numbers game: baseball.  Perhaps more than any other sport, baseball has always been nerds; if one sits in the stands, one might see someone barely watching the game, but rather, poring over stats, for purposes of betting or perhaps just geekery. 

Seventy years ago, the statistician for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Allan Roth, had a simple-but-profound insight: The fundamental unit in baseball is the run.  That is, stats such as batting average, earned run average, etc. all sounded good—and fans loved them--and yet they weren’t necessarily translating into runs, and thus wins.  And winning is the point of the game, at least to managers and their teams.  What matters is on-base percentage, more than homers and stolen bases and then, of course, a million more stats, such as hits and homers when men are on base.  

There was nothing complicated about Roth’s basic insight, and yet it was profound; even as the complexity  Indeed, the application of his insight mostly consisted of chopping away extraneous statistics—what a scientist would call epiphenomena—focusing on those stats that were actually causally linked to whether or not the team won.  Isn’t that so often the case: One must reduce clutter to actually see what needs to be seen.  In more recent decades, Bill James turned Roth’s simplicity into a new kind of complexity, as he started developing statistics that more closely correlated with runs, such as whether or not a batter hits with men on base.  And then, Billy Beane synthesized Roth and James and created a new style of baseball managing/general managing.  The rules didn’t change, at least not much (the designated hitter being one big change).  But what did change was the evaluation of the data.  (Beane was made famous, of course, in Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball, and then further immortalized by Brad Pitt in the 2011 Hollywood movie.) 

Ockham’s Election

What Roth did was wield Ockham’s Razor.  Back in the 13th century, William of Ockham said famously, “eliminate unnecessary complexity.”   As with Roth and the run, Ockham’s statement was profound its simplicity.  Ever since, Ockham’s Razor—everything else being equal, choose the simplest possibility—has been the standard for science and logic.  (And as such, it was loathed by others of a different turn of mind; the conservative Richard Waver, author of the 1947 book, Ideas Have Consequences, argued that Ockham was when the world took a decisive  turn for the worse because the Razor began chipping way at faith.) 

In subsequent centuries, figures such as Sir Francis Bacon further clarified the scientific method, so that discoveries resulted from an organized systematic process, as well as individual brilliance.  One needs both, of course, and yet anything worth knowing in science and technology needs to be written down and quantified, so that it can be further understood and improved. In thew words of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, “When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”  That’s the point: If you want anything to last, it has to expressed in a way that others can understand; and math is the most universal of languages. 

Shifting disciplines again, we can look to the Yale historian Edmund S. Morgan, who said that good scholar needed the “courage to simplify.”  Echoing Ockham, Morgan continued,“To simplify where you know little is easy.  To simplify where you know a great deal requires gifts of a different order: unusual penetration of mind and, above all, sheer nerve.”

We might begin a deeper analysis by making an Allan Rothian point: In politics, the fundamental unit is the vote.  Indeed, as we shall see, if the focus is kept on votes, then we need to question everything that is not voting.  By putting the focus on the fundamental unit in baseball, Beane & Co. changed the baseball; by putting the focus on the fundamental unit in politics, maybe  we can change politics.

And in politics, if one thinks about how campaigns judge themselves, one might think about the numbers being tossed around to show that the campaign is doing well—money raised, social media impressions delivered, contacts made, money raised, etc.  And, of course, polls, even if hey are only are, as is said, snapshot of the moment.  Of course, what really matters to a campaign, in the end, is votes.  That is, Did your candidate get more votes than the other candidate?  Did the campaign win?  

Let’s drill down, imagining it’s our campaign.  Let’s start with the realization that most voters, in both parties, have already resolved how they’re going to vote.  This is the base we hear so much about: those voters who vote in every election, or almost every election, always, or almost always, for the same party.  Probably 80 percent of voters count as base voters, roughly split between the two parties.  So if a base voter is one of “ours,” here’s our opportunity to insert some Moneyball-type thinking, by working to push the probability that he or she actually votes for our candidate to the highest possible level—ideally, of course, to the certainty of 100 percent.  Just as winning baseball teams strive to clear the bases by getting all their on-base players to home plate for the runs, so, too, we wish to “clear the bases” by getting all our voters to the voting booth (including, of course, mailboxes and any other place that receives ballots) for the election.  By this reckoning, politics, like baseball, is a numbers game: Get more runs to win; get more votes to win. 

So how, exactly, to get all our peeps to the polls?  This effort might entail any degree of of “white glove” treatment for the voter: nudges, reminders, peer pressure, made all the easier by big data and AI—imagine every vote-intending voter with a chatbot nearby.  Some might say that this is just good ol’ GOTV—Get Out The Vote—updated with new technology.  And in a way, that’s true: It is GOTV, made all the more granular with digital tools.  And for sure, there’s nothing devious or corrupt about it; our campaign is just applying the time-tested wisdom: Get there firstest with the mostest.  Yet of course, if this were easy, everyone would be doing it. 

Two Inefficiencies to be Ironed Out 

One inefficiency is on the vote side, the other on the elected official/party side.  As we think about this, we can keep this thought in the back of our minds: We can see that the costly superstructure of political campaigning is extrinsic.  What’s intrinsic, and needs to homed in on, is the actual process of getting voters to the voting booth—or, of course, these days, with absentee and mail-in voting, getting the voting booth to the voter.  Just as Roth wanted more runs, we want more votes.  Let’s keep it that simple.  Let’s talk about the voter first.

The Two-Screen Dilemma for Voters

Right now, the voter has to deal with two screens. 

The first screen is the one by which he or she sees the world of political news: typically either a TV screen or a computer screen, including the screen on a smart phone.  This is typically a news portal of some kind, be it cable news or a a news or commentary site.   This site, or sites, might be entertaining, but in general it is not politically interactive.  That  is, one can absorb information—video/audio, print—and yet one can’t typically take action on that site.  They are, in this sense, passively nontransactinal. 

The second screen is the one in which he or she takes action.  This would be more like a party website, or a donor platform such as Act Blue or WinRed. These are plenty interactive, but they aren’t, as a rule, entertaining,  That’s not their purpose: The purpose is to facilitate an action.  They are actively transactional.  Come here, give money, and perhaps do other things, such as apply for an absentee ballot.  And likely some day soon, vote.  

But here’s the question: Why are there two screens?   Everything in our world of consumer convenience says, unify, simplify.  That’s why we can put just about everything on our smart phone or tablet, from communication to premises security to tax payments.  The two-screen status quo flunks the Drucker Test: If we weren’t doing this now, would we start?  

So the voter is ill-served by this inefficiency.  But the politician, too, is ill-served.

The Opaque Screen for Politicians 

As a general rule, politicians like to talk.  But as a matter of campaign efficiency, their political advisers  should wish to talk first about their own election or re-election.  And here’s where we say where the media aren’t aligned.  After all, reporters and other kinds of journos want to talk about all the issues of the day, whatever they might be.  And so they will inevitably drag the pol into discussions of anything and everything.  The talented pol might well seek to steer the discussion to some stronger ground or safer harbor, but that’s not always possible.   It’s the rare pol who has the clout to demand that the topics raised on the segment or show stick to an approved menu.  

Moreover, to no small extent, cable news encourages a kind of circus-like atmosphere, since TV news is designed to entertain, as well as inform.  The pol might not be mind being an entertainer, but at some point, entertainment values get in the way of message-delivering.  There’s a reason why brands are careful about where their brand finds itself; pols, too, are a brand, and so they must be careful—even if they aren’t always so careful.  

Moreover, because the pol is talking on someone else’s platform, the audience is probably not legible to the pol.  Suppose a pol goes on Fox News, thereby speaking to a few million folks.  That’s all great, but the pol doesn’t know exactly who he (or she) is talking to.  All the pol knows is that he was on for three minutes.  Even Fox doesn’t know exactly who was watching, because TV ratings measure households and their general demographics, not the exact name and details.  Moreover, the pol-on-Fox will quickly realize that a repeat performance—and the repeat after that, and after that—most likely means that he is talking to pretty much the same people.  So not only does he not know the identities, but it’s likely that the unknowns are themselves, reruns.  So a rerun pol talking to a rerun audience.  That’s inefficient.  To put that another way, the signal-to-noise ratio isn’t so favorable.  This issue becomes all the more acute if the pol is focused on a critical election in his home state or district, as by definition, the vast majority of the audience will be outside of the needed jurisdiction.   (There’s a reason why the most common figures on cable news either have national ambitions or safe districts; if so, then they’re happy to play the cable game.) 

However, if the inefficiency of campaigns is a problem, the uncertainty of the voters is another problem.  And we’ll turn to that next. 

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