The Problem with Paper Ballots
After the 2000 election, I was pretty strongly in favor of electronic voting. Of course, what I was in favor of was an idealized form of electronic voting, one that I would describe as “functional.” Instead we wound up with many instances of buggy, non-secure machines that sometimes failed to operate and often could not be verified. And I began to wonder what had ever possessed me to support the idea in the first place. The Minnesota Senate race has reminded me. For starters you have the problems with paper ballots and scanning machines where the machines don’t properly count some votes. Then you get the ambiguous ballots where you have to figure out voter intent from a bunch of markings that don’t quite follow the instructions. (And let me just say how much confidence these exercises give me in all the standardized tests I’ve had to take in my life.) And now on top of that we’re seeing the inevitable result of a process that depends on taking hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper and moving them around: stuff gets lost. If I’m following the story correctly, one Minnesota precinct has lost an envelope containing over a hundred ballots, so those ballots can not be recounted and Norm Coleman’s campaign wants to prevent Minnesota from using the original count.
Now, given all the problems we’ve discovered with the actual implemented version of electronic as opposed to my idealized version, maybe we need to accept these drawbacks. Or maybe we should be looking for a way to combine electronic voting with paper documentation and backups to ensure that when we have an election, we can actually figure out who wins.
(Then again, if I’m truly honest, this Minnesota election looks like it’s so close that any human error might change the result. This seems to me like the kind of situation that calls for a run-off election. It might be failsafe you only have to use once in a lifetime, but boy wouldn’t it come in handy once you do need it?)
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.