The Times reports on yesterday's County Council hearing: "County gets mixed advice on mail-vote technology"
First the council heard from Ellen Hansen, Citizens' Elections Oversight Committee chairwoman and former elections manager, who said it would be too risky to install new vote-counting equipment after moving into a new office and before conducting a presidential election.The advice can be summarized as "No and Hell No".Elections Director Sherril Huff then contradicted Hansen, saying it would be too risky to keep using an aging computer database that is strained almost to the breaking point and can't handle 300,000 additional mail votes next November.
Reasonable observers will conclude that the Democrats' push for mail-only voting is driven by something other than the desire for an accurate election.
Councilmember Kathy Lambert, R-Redmond, was critical of Democrats' desire to implement mail voting next year in the face of technical difficulties. "There are two sides," she said: "one that wants vote-by-mail and one that wants accuracy."Indeed. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 17, 2007 10:00 AM | Email This
How many of these 28,000 voters would have been able and willing to vote in an all-mail election?
Presumably, they would not have received their ballots in the mail, since they did not show up on the poll books in the precincts that they voted in.
On the other hand, those provisional voters with a correct address on file, but who went to a different polling place for whatever reason, would have been able to vote by mail -- since they would have received their ballot.
At the same time, some poll voters are registered at the wrong address, but know where the polling place is for that address, and go there to vote anyway, casting regular poll ballots. They will not be receiving ballots in the mail, due to the wrong address.
Many counties with all-mail voting have only one provisional ballot voting site -- namely the county auditor's office. Even Snohomish County, the largest presently all-mail voting county, only allowed provisional ballots to be cast at the county auditor's office last year.
I would imagine the number of provisional ballots cast in November 2006 in Snohomish County was WAY DOWN from any of the off-year elections in November 2002, November 2003, or November 2005.
King County is presently proposing up to 10 regional voting centers, where provisional ballots can be cast -- and also where people can "vote" in person. This number may end up being cut -- assuming there is all-mail voting at all -- based on "budget" concerns.
In November 2004, there were nearly 600 polling places where provisional ballots could be cast. If there are only 10 regional centers (or worse yet, just the elections office and one or two other locations), the number of provisional ballots cast in King County for November 2008 will be greatly reduced from the 28,000 cast in November 2004.
The demographics of provisional balloting tend to make these votes more heavily Democratic than the overall voting pool. I don't see how provisional voters are going to cast their ballots in anywhere near previous numbers, if the all-mail voting system ends up being used.
Posted by: Richard Pope on July 17, 2007 10:17 AMIt goes on and on. You can be sure the left will always stand in the way of progress, and create schemes that advance class warfare and a generally Marxist bent.
Accuracy in elections is basic and should be non-partisan, but the left just can't let go.
Posted by: Jeff B. on July 17, 2007 11:09 AMYour fundamental thesis on provisionals is off.
The vast majority of provisional ballots are not cast by confused poll voters, as many people think, but by:
1) absentee voters who did not receive their ballot in the mail.
The second largest group is:
2) absentee voters who lost or damaged their ballot and need a replacement.
The number of actual poll voters who vote a provisional ballot is really quite low. All one needs to do is look at any provisional ballot report from any election to see this.
All Mail balloting is actually going to make the number of expected provisionals go up, not down, like the learning impaired Mr. Laird Hail has suggested.
We can expect to see the 10 - 20 regional voting centers (whatever number they setle upon) taxed to the limit by about 45,000 provisional voters in 2008. All on election day.
Do you really think they can handle this volume?
No, and hell, no.
Posted by: Common Sense on July 17, 2007 11:21 AMHow many of these 28,000 voters would have been able and willing to vote in an all-mail election?
ALL of them who would be able to vote in all-mail voting ARE ABLE TO VOTE BY MAIL NOW. MOST voters -- especially the lazier ones, let's be frank -- already are registered to vote by mail. I do not trust your unsourced analysis that there is any significant number of voters who only vote because it is switched to all-mail.
Posted by: pudge on July 17, 2007 11:42 AMSupposedly, it was too much of a hassle for voters to vote at their neighborhood polling place. How does having a more distant location better?
Provisionals cover two primary issues: a problem with an absentee ballot or a voter not being found in a poll book.
Absentee ballots are either not received, lost, damaged, or mismarked requiring a new ballot.
I do not like forced vote by mail. Any errors with my ballot, I want to be mine and not someone else. Voting at a polling location where my ballot is recorded as I intend is far more acceptable than potentially having someone copy it or decide "voter intent" for me.
All the mail ballot tracking on the web tells me is that the envelope with my ballot was received. From that point on, I have to trust that it was properly handled.
A far cry from the poll booth.
Obviously there a lot of people working in KCE who do care about the integrity of our elections. Kudos and please keep fighting to improve that.
Whatever became of the lawsuit of the "fall guy" gal that was fired over the 04 election?
On the flipside it appears the characters in the upper echelons of the power structure in King County are villains right out of any Batman movie. Well I guess that accusation rings true right up to Gregoire.
Posted by: Andy on July 17, 2007 12:46 PMSecond, I am ambivalent to whether or not elections are held entirely by mail. I see advantages as well as disadvantages, so it is a matter of choice. There is no reason that King County Elections cannot handle an all mail ballot election, if properly prepared.
In that respect, Sherril is right. The existing voter registration and elections management system cannot handle a county-wide all mail election. It has enough difficulty handling the mail ballots it receives in a regular election.
But, Ellen is right also. It is too risky to activiate a new system as is presently planned for a national election such as is scheduled in 2008.
Conclusion: Hold off on county-wide all mail elections until the new system has been tested in smalled elections.
While some parties are interested in speedier results. what the voters really want is an accuately tabulated election, and you have to trust your mangement and tabulations sytems to get that.
Regarding provisional ballots, it is true that the majority of the provisional ballots come from those who were sent, or supposedly sent, an absentee ballot, but for whatever reason, vote at a polling place instead of (or in some rare cases, in addition to) voting by mail. However, the next largest number are those who are registered voters who, for whatever reason, even because it is too inconvenient to go to their assigned polling place, vote at an other than assigned polling place where of course their name does not appear in the poll books. Theses would mostly be eliminated in an all mail election.
Any process that can help reduce the number of provisional ballots, which are an election administrator's nightmare, and which are often at the basis of contentions in close races, should be given careful consideration.
In any event, it looks like it will be a interesting year in elections.
ACORN will have a ball with all mail in voting, and handed in provisional ballots. How would they possibly reconcile the mail in votes with the provisionals. As I recall they still have not reconcile the provionals from the last election.
Do paw prints count?
All kidding aside, I can only imagine the outcry when the R's are in power. That is to say when the stamp is on the other side. Hope the R's are taking voting management classes from the D's. There are certain skills one must used for counting.
1,2,3,5,9,10,14,16,17 and so on.
Good licks all come November.
Posted by: Snuffy on July 17, 2007 08:41 PMMail ballots were a lot more difficult to process when the county used punch cards because they did not lend themselves to an ease of voting without the device commonly found in the polling place. Mark sense ballot have made a marked improvement on that issue.
The heart of the tabulation process in mail voting is the automated system that contains the voter registration files and signatures. If that system is faulty, you have big trouble, The next vital element is simply keeping an accurate audit trail of the ballots from the time they are received until they are stored away in secure storage. If you look at the significant problems with mail voting in the recent past, it has been because either the first was not operating properly and/or the second was not carried out correctly.
Posted by: Desert Rat on July 18, 2007 10:57 AM
I am sorry, but yes, it is. A LOT less secure, without any contest.
You are conflating security and reliability. They are two very different things, and while we could argue anecdotally about reliability, security is a no-contest.
When operated as designed, it is more secure than voting at the polls.
No, in fact, it is not. There are many vectors of attack against the security of mail ballots that simply do not exist for poll ballots, or are significantly mitigated by the circumstances.
ID is the obvious one. At polls, you check ID. Granted, there are ways to get around that, but it is still far more secure than a ballot sent by mail whose signature is checked by a poll worker who was trained on verifying signatures for half an hour by the state police.
This can be exploited through a typical man-in-the-middle attack. Granted (in Snohomish County anyway) this is much harder to use to exploit to *vote* on behalf of someone else on the way out, though it is simple to do it to vote on the way IN. I intercept your ballot, sign your name (downloading your signature from the county web site, where it is available on a public record from when you bought your house), vote for you, send it in. The only way this will be caught is you notice it and get that ballot intercepted before it is tabulated.
Or I could use the same attack vector the other way, after you send it. It would be very hard to vote for you or change your vote, but I could just shred it, and if you don't follow up and call the auditor's office, they will never know, and if you send it on election day, you will have no recourse, because you won't find out it was lost until it is too late.
And then there's having an actual record of your having voted, and in the case of DRE voting you can actually SEE who you voted for before recording that vote, so you know the machine got it right. With mail voting, you can only know IF you follow up days later that it was received, and you have no clue whether it's been counted, and how accurately. (This is mostly a security issue, but knowing it was tabulated accurately is, of course, a reliability issue.)
On the other hand, there is no security problem unique to poll voting that does not also affect mail voting. You can talk about poll workers making mistakes all you like (which is a reliability, not security, issue), but we still have them: they are the ones processing the ballots, too, and there's a lot of them. Further, many individual voters at home make many mistakes too, and I've seen no evidence backing up the notion that there is a higher error rate at polls than at home.
Further, mail voting is much more complicated for the voter, because you have to send EVERY voter EVERY type of ballot, and this is only going to get worse as federal law requires us to add languages. So for primaries you will be sent ballots for 2 or more parties, and each of those for each available language. And the problem is not going to become easier to solve.
And don't even get me started on how superior DREs are. They have some of their own problems, but all of them are solvable, unlike paper ballots, especially mail ballots: DREs have no overvotes, signicantly reduced undervotes, immediate feedback of how your vote is recorded, a paper trail for use if necessary ... unfortunately the DREs we use in SnoCo had too much of a cost associated with them which justified, to some, ditching them in favor of a much worse system.
Posted by: pudge on July 18, 2007 02:28 PM