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REVISITING THE U.S. VOTING SYSTEM: A RESEARCH INVENTORY

November 27-28, 2006

Convened by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

George Gilbert

SOME SHORT TERM RESEARCH NEEDS FOR ELECTIONS

In September, 2004, our predecessor workshop posed a long list of questions and research topics important to the future of elections. There was a particular emphasis on the lack of adequate “baseline” information on the election process as it existed at that time.

Since that time, the “baseline” has shifted radically. New voting systems have been introduced across much of the nation, centralized, statewide voter registration databases have been implemented in most states and new voting procedures have been developed in response to new requirements of law and new technologies.

I seem to recall noting (I think out loud) that the legislative bodies around the country were not likely to wait for our research results before forging ahead with new legislative “remedies” to perceived problems. This has certainly proven to be the case, and in the process whole new sets of problems have been generated.

Election administrators and policy makers share a common objective. Both are primarily interested in (and in need of) methods that will improve the process of casting and counting ballots in the next election. We cannot, or will not, wait for the research results to come in. (By “casting” I mean more than the voting device. I include the whole vote enabling process.)

If researchers want to make a significant contribution to improving the election process, they must target their research toward providing sound practical responses to the most recently perceived problems in the election process. (And, by the way, if you have any engineering skills your value will increase exponentially.) I do not want to imply that the proposed “baseline” research is not important or that academic understanding of the election environment is of little value. I consider both highly valuable and have spent most of the past twenty years as an election administrator building my own knowledge of that “baseline” especially for my jurisdiction. Recently, however, that baseline has been a rapidly moving target.

Among the most pressing problems created by the latest round of legislative initiatives around the country relate to the “paper trail” requirement for DRE voting systems. Examples of research needs suggested by our recent experience with these “voter verifiable paper trails” include:

1. Voting system reliability--By far the most frequent source of voting machine “breakdown” with the iVotronic touchscreen voting machine with its “Real Time Audit Log” (paper trail) was the printer itself. A preliminary review of 92 reported voting machine problems leading to voting stoppages on November 7, 2006, in Guilford County, revealed that 59 were directly related to the paper trail printer. This incidence of voting machine malfunction, whether due to mechanical or human causes, is unacceptable high. (In reality the incidence was higher. We are finding that not all printer failures were documented.)

How frequent and how widespread are such printer related disfunctionalities on DRE systems with “paper trail” add ons?

What alternatives exist to paper audit or backup systems for DRE voting machines? How do the usability and reliability of such systems compare to paper trail systems?

2. Auditability--Related to the printer malfunction problem is a tabulation issue. Of the more than 20 states that have required some form of “paper trail” associated with DRE voting systems, presumably all have some form of audit requirement and many have deemed the paper ballot the “controlling” ballot in the event of a recount. Missing paper records, as described in item 1, appear to substantially undermine the usefulness of such “paper trail” dependent systems for audit or recount purposes. Auditability requires a much higher degree of reliability than appears to be likely with paper audit systems.

3. Audit and Recount Procedures--Manual recounts of paper “ballots” raise a number of issues. Existing research on manual recounts is sparse and, to date, has addressed only manual vs. machine recounts of paper based voting systems (1) or hand recounts of previously hand counted ballots.(2) (As of early 2005, these were the only two research efforts I could locate actually attempting to measure the accuracy of vote tabulations.) The widespread manual audit requirements recently implemented in many states should provide a tremendous breadth and depth of readily accessible data for analysis of manual vs. machine tabulation of a variety of voting systems. Significant questions arising from North Carolina’s brief experience with the manual audit include:

Where paper trails are required on DRE voting machines, how should an audit sample be designed given that some paper records are likely to be lost or destroyed?

Can any audit discrepancies between DRE and manual paper trail tabulations be attributed to factors other than missing paper records or errors in manual tabulation?

What factors account for discrepancies between machine and manual tabulation of optical scan ballots?

State and local election jurisdictions need prompt answers to these questions. If such issues are too pedestrian to merit academic research efforts, then the administrators and politicians will continue to devise “solutions” based on best guess or popular appeal criterion.

The 2008 presidential election is less than 2 years away and solutions that are not ready to implement within the next six to ten months will not be implemented by November, 2008. After that, the landscape may well change again.

One final research topic: How do you get policy makers to pay attention to substantive research results?

1. Alvarez, R. Michael; Katz, Jonathan N & Hill, Sarah A.; MACHINES VERSUS HUMANS: THE COUNTING AND RECOUNTING OF PRE-SCORED PUNCHCARD BALLOTS; VTP WORKING PAPER #32, September 2005

2. Ansolabehere, Stephen & Reeves, Andrew, “USING RECOUNTS TO MEASURE THE ACCURACY OF VOTE TABULATIONS: Evidence from New Hampshire Elections 1946-2002,; VTP Working paper #11, January 2004.