Recently, I attended a conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State. My main interest was in voting processes because Pitney Bowes has a secure, reliable voting-by-mail solution called Relia-Vote™, and because we are conducting a pilot test with the U.S. Postal Service® and the states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana to insert voter registration kits into the Move Update and Welcome Kits we prepare for the U.S. Postal Service®.

Several things struck me as I reflected on the conference:

• After the Florida debacle in 2000, and the issues associated with the exceptionally tight Washington state gubernatorial race in 2004 that resulted in the election of Governor Christine Gregoire by about 100 votes out of 3 million cast, election officials and the federal government are more focused than ever on getting the election process right. They want accuracy, security, reliability, and, above all, they want every vote to count in the manner intended by the voter.

• Given the substantial increase in participation in voting as a result of the hotly-contested Democratic and Republican presidential primaries, they have a high degree of interest in securing long-term increases in voter participation. We will have a much healthier democracy if everyone participates not only in voting, but in other ways that result in greater civic engagement. (more…)

The Sunday, January 6, New York Times Magazine cover story was about the disappointing results of the electronic voting technologies implemented by many states after the passage of the Help America Vote Act, which resulted from the problems identified in the 2000 Presidential and Congressional elections.

I have always believed that government officials and businesses get too enamored of the latest and greatest technology, without recognizing and trying to retain the benefits of older technologies. Pitney Bowes has strongly believed that the most secure system of all is voting by mail, which supplements traditional paper-based ballots with state-of-the-art address management software and ballot tracking and tracing systems.

The biggest problem identified in the article was the quirkiness and unpredictability of computer-based systems, which fail in unexpected ways on election days, because of the large number of people using them. The kinds of misuse possible when tens or hundreds of millions of people use a system are not all predictable, and, therefore, not preventable. This Freedom to Tinker blog post clarifies some points made in the article in reference to this topic. (more…)