I have heard many horror stories about voting in the past few months. Many of them center on states either partially or fully controlled by very conservative Republicans.
Massachusetts is overwhelmingly Democratic in its legislature, with a liberal Republican governor. Why don’t we try and codify some reforms while we have the chance?
The foremost problem is ensuring faith in our election results, and with all the articles I have read about voting machine hacking, this seems like the obvious place to start. I would suggest that we guarantee a few things: first, all cities and towns must use a voting system that leaves a paper trail – this may already be a requirement. However, given that votes are tabulated electronically, we have no guarantees that the paper ballots match the totals, do we? How about a law that requires a randomly sampled hand-count in each community to ensure that the totals match, and if not, trigger a full hand-recount?
I have been reading stories about people who have been arrested for casting a ballot while ineligible, mostly people who have prison records. In Massachusetts, your may vote if you are not currently incarcerated, which is relatively reasonable – however I would still ask the question, do we really want to couple the right to vote with being imprisoned? Maybe prisoners should be able to vote too? At the very least, I think the state should affirmatively make people aware that a criminal conviction neither makes you ineligible to vote, nor is there any risk whatsoever of “improperly voting” if you have a criminal record.
I don’t know our current procedure for updating voter rolls when someone moves, but I hope that this process is as easy as it can be. Many renters move around, some do this a lot, so it should be super-easy to just update your address and vote if the address change does not trigger a precinct-level change, and update your address and go to the new precinct if it does.
I have asked people why they aren’t registered to vote, and many tell me that they don’t register to avoid jury duty. Massachusetts goes beyond this, and uses municipal census results to compile its jury list, but I bet that 75% of the populace believes that the list is compiled from voter registrations, so again, I think the state should affirmatively make people aware that voting has nothing at all to do with jury duty.
Although I think that the incidence of voter fraud is nonexistent, maybe we need to throw a bone to our Republican governor and put in a plan that makes voter ID unnecessary – by requiring the city or town to keep the identification of the voter as part of the registration. That means when you register, they take your photo, and when you check in to vote, they bring up your photo. I would hope that this would put to bed, once and for all, the idea that people are being “bused in to vote” or that there is rampant fraud.
Gerrymandering is another big national issue. Perhaps it is time that we take our state’s redistricting out of the hands of partisan legislators and put it into the hands of nonpartisan bureaucrats, both for our US House districts and our state districts.
What about student voting? I honestly don’t remember voting for my very first election because I was away at college. I am fairly sure I did not go through the process to get an absentee ballot because, face it, it is a process – though it is a lot easier now, since you can get the form online. But are there any other ways to do this, to make student voting easier?
I know that Oregon has mail-in voting. I’m not yet comfortable going down that path (or internet voting) because I do see this as being more corruptible. I’m reminded of local Republican Jack Villamaino’s scheme to submit absentee ballots from registered Democrat voters in his Republican primary (made possible by his girlfriend changing their status to unenrolled, and his town position of handling the mailing of such ballots). I also know that we now have expanded pre-election voting hours.
Still, I think we need to analyze why so many of our residents simply do not vote. My guess is that they have been convinced that they should only vote if they are 100% informed of both the issues and the candidate, and while that sounds reasonable on its face, it is not reasonable that they would be represented by legislators that only 20% of the populace selected. Such a disconnect between representative and their constituents does not make a healthy political system.
The de-emphasis of political parties is likely part of the issue – so maybe we should adopt a Michigan-like approach of straight-party ballot voting? This would reduce the information a person felt they needed to cast a ballot, and would put more emphasis on the parties to screen their candidates. If a person is generally liberal, and generally likes the platform issues of the Democratic Party, then isn’t it better for him to cast his vote to that effect rather than sitting out the election because he has no personal knowledge of the candidate?
Now that our elections have been called into question, it is clear to me that tyranny is really only possible when the vote is corrupted or when the population is not adequately represented. Anything else is simple democracy, with the rights of the minority backed up with a constitution that ensures equality.
We already have a lot of this. At Galvin’s insistence we vote by paper for the reasons you cite and the machines that count are on site and don’t need to be hooked to a network to do their job so they really can’t be hacked. Personally I’m OK with the incarcerated not voting. Seems to me if they broke the social contract they can sit out having a hand in making it for their term behind bars. It’s also extremely easy to change your address which I did myself just recently having moved. My experience makes me leery of straight-ticket voting; it kept NH Republican for a long time. People are still free to vote straight-ticket of course and party designations are next to the names, but it takes just a few extra seconds to fill in the bubbles for each race individually. I’m all for more education about how these things work, I just wish it included emphasizing that you should vote simply because it is your job as a citizen of a democratic republic.
The lack of internet connectivity is not a guarantee against hacking by a long shot. Here’s a good article on that subject. Here is another specific to Massachusetts.. People may be a bit too comfortable here.
We do have a procedure for post-election audits, but only during presidential elections; 3% of precincts are audited.
I don’t know if our state law requires paper ballots, or if this is at the judgement of the Secretary of State, but it would be troubling if the latter was true because that means just one person could make the decision in the state to change things. I’d rather have it passed via legislation. It’s good that we have paper records, but if we’re not doing some kind of sampled verification except in really close races, those paper records might as well not exist.
I was happy to find this report, from 2006, about Massachusetts voting machines. It shows that people are at least reviewing and auditing what we do.
To be clear, I do not think that we have problems now, but since we have Democrats in power, I think that this is a good time to make sure that things are as tight as they can be, given that there do seem to be some shenanigans occurring in states where Republicans are in control.
I would add that I do not think changing voter registration or addresses is as easy as Christopher thinks it is. Particularly for the elderly, people with disabilities, people with learning disabilities, and people who are not fluent English speakers. It is another default written around the cultural constructs of the abled, the middle class, and the English speaker. Automatic voter registration, same day voter registration, and vote by mail are reforms this Secretary of State has consistently opposed until he faced a credible primary challenger. He still opposes voting by mail, which has lead to exponentially higher turnout rates in Oregon and would save the state millions.
Maine and Vermont have not had the sky fall with the incarcerated voting. I think it is a potentially good way to help rehabilitate criminals by allowing them to maintain civic responsibility and community ties. It also ensures that they stay voters when they come out of prison instead of dropping off the rolls. Perhaps extending the franchise can be limited to non-violent offenders and/or people not serving life sentences. I think VT and ME have similar restrictions. What we definitely do not want to do, is to strip former felons off the rolls or prevent their voting eligibility when they get out of prison, as many Republican Secretaries of States have to depress minority turnout. Most infamously Katherine Harris in Florida.
Between voters and their casting votes, there should be as little interference as possible. Voting should be sacrosanct, not revoked as punishment, not impeded by ridiculous Voter ID requirements.
Granby has optical scan ballots. Voters check in when they receive their ballot and check out when they send it through the optical scan, which keeps a running tally. Aside from the checks referred to linked article, we have occasional recounts, which occasionally show that ONE vote might have not been counted correctly (voter error).
I agree with James. We should be looking at vote by mail. By all accounts, it boosts turnout significantly by reducing the interference between voter and voting.
If I was going to hack a voting machine, the best approach would be to make the preferred candidate win by a little bit more than the margin of error for a recount. Maybe 3%. If there are 2,673 voters, and 1,069 were originally for a Republican, and 1,604 for a Democrat, then make the machine spit out 1,417 Republican votes and 1,256 Democrat votes, 53-47. Well outside the recount margin.
There’s no “vote flipping” involved. It’s just a manipulation of the totals printed.
At the 2017 DefCon hacking conference, 100% of the voting machines were able to be hacked – easily. Some could even be hacked wirelessly. Others were hacked by plugging a USB into them for a couple of seconds.
I don’t know what Granby uses. I can tell you that Springfield uses optical scan machines that are at least 20 years old, and likely older. I don’t know how they work other than it is likely that there is update-able firmware on the machine which runs the scanner and tabulates the buckets, and configurable software which needs to change each election to match the candidate names.
These machines are not connected to the internet, but could someone have loaded firmware which alters the vote? It at least seems possible – so why not require spot-checks?
I believe ours have been replaced. We only have TWO machines. (It’s not like replacing dozens or more for Springfield). Ours are also optical scan.
The Town Clerk sent me a letter inviting me to attend a test of our Image-Cast voting equipment; we have a vote on banning marijuana on August 20. Out of curiosity, I’m thinking of attending, though I’m not worried. We also added digital check in, using our licenses.
I’m not opposed to spot checks. I trust our town clerk and Granby would not be the most effective target for vote changing. Not all polling stations, however, are run well, and others would be a better target for influencing the vote by flipping it.
The hard part about changing the vote is hackers would have to do it in multiple polling stations.