The Smug Baldy Speaks

Last week on the season premier of Real Time with Bill Maher, former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow raised the issue of a national Voter ID in response to a conversation about how it’s possible to steal votes using Diebold’s automated voting machines. By simply mentioning voter fraud , Tony successfully switched the topic of the conversation away from the very real threat of high-tech voter fraud and election tampering.

While someone on the left might see his comments as a smoke screen, Mr. Snow actually has a point, but not the one that I think he was trying to make. In any free and fair election, we need to be able to guarantee three different things: 1) that the people who vote are the ones who are supposed to be voting, 2) that the votes that are cast are accurately counted, and 3) that any count of the votes gives the exact same result as any other count.

Issues 1 and 2 above get at the notion of the validity of an election, and I believe that, as a nation, we should demand valid elections. This certainly implies that we should guarantee that only citizens who are allowed to vote are the ones at the polls casting their ballots. Whether this requires a National Voter ID or not is debatable, although I generally think that the push to create a National ID is probably really about money rather than about good citizenship. Indeed, during the 2004 presidential election, there were only about 2900 voter ID related fraud incidents reported throughout the country, which would indicate that the vast majority of voters already adequately identify themselves at the polls. The second item, the security of voting machines also speaks to the validity of an election. That we would trust the future of our nation and our democracy to a private, for-profit corporation is worrisome enough. That this same corporation created machines that can be altered by malicious persons to generate results that are impossible to independently verify is quite simply unacceptable.

The third issue, that of generating consistent results over successive recounts gets at the reliability of an election. While it’s possible to have reliable results that are invalid (as in the case of hacked voting machines), it’s impossible to have valid results that are unreliable. In the 2000 presidential election, there was much ado concerning vote recounts (imagine that!), and while there were certainly issues of law at play, the bigger issue was one of logistics: it was expensive to conduct vote recounts. With today’s technology, recount costs should be both dramatically lower than in previous elections, and recounts should be more reliable as well. In my ideal world, every vote recount generates the exact same result, and if anyone challenges the tally, there would be an audit trail that would independently support the final results.

So what are we missing now? I’ll tell you: We need a voting system that cannot be hacked, in which each voter gets just one vote, one that creates a paper audit trail, and that generated the same results each and every time a recount is conducted. Here’s one idea for a cheap voter ID system: