The Truth about Voter Fraud

I read a boring yet informative work of the same title authored by Justin Levitt at the Brennan Center for Justice. Levitt highlights the point that most allegations of voter fraud are false and distracts attention away from real election issues which need to be resolved.

It draws attention away from problems best addressed, for example, by resource allocation or poll worker education or implementation of longstanding statutory mandates, and instead improperly focuses on the voter as the source of the problem. — Justin Levitt

While Levitt’s prescription for real election issues may help to fight against many historical election errors — he does not provide any innovative solutions to deeply rooted problems in our election system. The truth is that we have a system of “fraud by default”. All you need to do is inspect the write-in results of any election in history. Take a peak at Alabama’s 2014 election results. I thought that a unique write-in vote would allow me to verify the authenticity of our election process. What I found is a list of write-in candidates that is not 100% legible and obviously required a large amount of effort to produce error-prone results.

Analog versus Digital

The world of analog signals is old and outdated. Why does hand-written votes continue to be a part of our election process? In a properly designed election system the results would be available immediately after the polling window was closed. Authentication and verification redundancies would be available for anyone interested in those checks and balances. The time, energy, and financial costs for the entire process would drop to a minimum.

Technical Inertia

Our modern election system is outdated because of past inertia. Leaders from the past had to design a system with the tools that were available. But now we have amazing new tools which are being ignored because of technical inertia combined with older people’s unwillingness to change. I also suspect that members of the current power structure fear the inevitable implications of embracing new technological paradigms. This resistance to change is the source of fraud and corruption in my eyes.

Future of Voting

I can’t paint an exact picture of the future election system. But unlike Justin Levitt — I can give you very real future possibilities because I am a software engineer and architect. It is possible that we can vote using the internet from the comfort of our own homes or the closest public access point available.

Authentication

Multi-factor authentication is already used in polling places like the one I use in Alabama. I show up at a polling place and hand over a picture identification card. The authorities compare the information on my card with my person and an entry on their list of registered voters. The same process happens on the internet every day with various forms of multi-factor authentication. I could receive an email, text message, and a request for a one-time code generated by an application synced with the authorities. Each additional layer of security helps to verify the authenticity of my vote. A properly designed system could verify the authenticity of my identity far beyond the current checks that are in place.

Verification

There really are not any systems in place at the moment which allows me to verify that my vote was accurately counted. The system would need to give me a receipt with a unique token which could be used to verify that my votes were counted. This could be done easily with a digital system on the internet. Non-affiliated 3rd parties could use the anonymous tokens and election results to facilitate a verification process much like the process being done to verify bitcoin exchanges.

The Implications

The implications of such a voting system are detrimental to the modern power structure where a handful of people have shaped an election system in their favor. The analog systems of the past required us to arrive at 2–3 candidates for a large election that occurs infrequently. The digital system of the future allows for many elections to occur very frequently. The existence of two monolithic political parties will become obsolete. We may even be able to bring in the 4th branch of government — The People. Experiments with direct democracy on websites like stackexchange and stackoverflow are preparing us for a better future where people have more representation in government than they have ever experienced throughout human history. I just hope we don’t have to wait for Elon Musk to bring direct democracy to our species after colonizing Mars.

If you care — please share. #directdemocracy #4thbranch