VOTING MACHINES
In the August 16 New York Times, in an article entitled “Officials Saw Flaws at Polls will Remain in November,” reporter Ian Urbina notes that several of the new voting machine systems, particularly those with the touch screens, will not be ready for deployment before November because of a delay in federal testing and certification processes.
As I read this article, I continue to be mystified as to why elections officials believe that machines will solve voting problems. Our experience with technology is that it is subject to a wide range of potential errors in deployment and use, and that a single testing and certification process never anticipates every possible problem. Pitney Bowes equipment is highly reliable, particularly with respect to equipment used for postal revenue collection, but part of the reason is that we continually assess how it is being used, and are able to anticipate and react to all of the challenges we see. We are also fortunate that, although our equipment is critical to our customers’ success, we have the luxury of being able to repair it, and, if necessary, replace it without negatively impacting our customers’ operations.
In an elections environment, a malfunction on election day in one polling place can change the outcome of an election. There is no margin for error, and being able to fix a system the day after an election is inadequate.
Therefore, it puzzles me that elections officials do not think more seriously about secure mail solutions like our Relia-VoteTM Mail Balloting Solutions. Relia-Vote has three major advantages, aside from being a proven system. First, if something goes wrong, it is highly likely that there will be time to correct the problem, since the voting-by-mail system anticipates a several-week, rather than a single-day, voting process.
Second, by its nature, the Relia-Vote technology sending out and processing the incoming ballots is operated by a relatively small population of trained elections employees, whereas every machine-based voting system is operated by the totality of voters in an election, and, if the technology is new, these voters will not have been trained before they cast their vote. In a voting-by-mail system, the voter is using an intuitively simple paper-based system like other paper-based systems with which the voter is familiar.
Third, the elections officials available to help voters reacting to mail ballots can be on the other end of a telephone in a single location and can be trained employees of the elections department in a locality. They can help one another and learn from one another as they address questions raised by voters. A machine-based voting system, by its nature, will be decentralized, and will have less-well-trained poll workers in multiple locations who will have far more difficulty explaining problems and getting answers over the telephone in a highly time-compressed election day environment.
We appear to have a bias that newer systems like touch-screen voting machines are better, rather than looking at improved versions of older systems, like voting by mail. The reality is that our country would be far better off and would have far fewer election disputes if everyone voted by mail, or, at a minimum, everyone had the option of voting by mail.
August 20th, 2008 at 8:25 am
Does your system guarantee it will be subject to public scrutiny? My understanding is that proprietary voting systems do not.
August 21st, 2008 at 2:55 pm
I think your question about “voting systems” might be more appropriately directed to the companies that produce election management software and machinery like direct recording electronic (aka touch screen) voting machines and optical scan ballot readers. Those are the main technologies used to record and tabulate votes in the U.S. and are what most people commonly refer to as “proprietary voting systems.”
Pitney Bowes’ Relia-Vote technology is not a system used to record or tally votes, it is a suite of standard mail processing equipment (inserting, printing, scanning and sorting) that is used to help ensure that ballots are mailed efficiently and accurately.
Once the completed mail ballots are returned to election officials, our equipment is often used to help scan signatures on ballot envelopes so officials can visually compare the signatures on mail ballots to the original signatures stored on voter registration records before a ballot is accepted and sent to the counting room.
We are pleased that our Relia-Vote technology helps make mail balloting more cost effective for election administrators, but perhaps most importantly for us, we are proud that it provides additional audit tools to help ensure prompt delivery of mail ballots, detect fraudulent or duplicate ballots, and reduce the physical labor and errors associated with hand-processing large volumes of mail ballot envelopes.
August 21st, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Great post, Mike. The stakes are so high in elections that unscrupulous people will exploit opportunities to cheat. The efficiency of voting machines creates opportunities to cheat efficiently. Give me paper ballots and legions of gray-haired people manning the polling places.
Poor people are often disenfranchised by long lines at under-equipped polling places. Voting by mail is a way to address that problem.