It’s time to rethink paper ballots
Coronavirus gives us reason to reimagine our entire electoral process, starting with the ballot box
There has been plenty of ink spilled recently in support of absentee ballots,
given that one Wisconsin poll worker is already known to have died and 50 voters infected with COVID-19 as a result of the April 7th primary election. Much anger has been focused on the U.S. Supreme Court, whose 5-4 ruling stated that the Governor of Wisconsin could not delay the election or implement absentee voting so close to the date. Equal fury has been pointed at the lawmakers who closed an extraordinary number of polling places, so that only 5 locations remained in Milwaukee of the usual 180. However, rather than blaming conservative judges or arbitrary voter suppression laws, we should focus on the true culprit: paper.
The ballot box may be the last, and most vigorously defended vestige of 18th century democracy. Imagine yourself taking your paper payslip to the bank every 2 weeks, standing in line for 30 minutes to cash your check, then walking out with a wad of bills. Millennials likely have no idea what I’m talking about, but this is how I was paid at my first job, and I was ecstatic about the switch to direct deposit. An equivalent thought experiment has us lost on a road trip, pulling over at a gas station to get a road atlas and compass out of the glovebox to decipher where we missed our turn. This is how I made my first cross-country trip, and I would never go back to life without GPS. Yet somehow the last month since the Wisconsin primary has seen a number of authors wax poetic about the virtues of stuffing paper into envelopes. The more things change…
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
99 percent of all government services in Estonia are available online
We all recognize that our creaking, anti-bellum electoral process is failing us as a society. Voter apathy is higher in the United States and voter turnout lower than other modern nations. We consistently wind up with politicians who don’t represent their electorates, and it’s generally true that a Congressman has to die or retire in order to be replaced. A variety of trickery is used to keep groups of people from voting, such as closing polling places to create long lines or drawing electoral boundaries to benefit one party over the other. But the biggest barrier of all is the fact that our system is bound together by paper. Whether placing your ballot in the box by hand, mailing it in, or punching your choice on a screen to get a paper receipt, everything still relies on this 2000 year-old invention.
Luckily for the future of democracy, the 21st century is beginning to offer alternatives that will allow us to vote from home, as we can see in the attached video, but it’s crucial to consider the implications this digital transformation will have on our electoral process. After all, paper ballots provide a variety of perceived benefits which have allowed them to remain the technology of choice for 300 years, namely: authenticity, transparency, and privacy. Let’s look at each of these aspects in turn, and show how this works in a digital alternative.
Authenticity
The most commonly accepted premise of paper ballots is the belief in “One Man, One Vote,” or the fact that each person casts a single ballot in a given election. For those fearful of electronic voting, the thought of Russian intelligence officers stuffing ballot boxes conjures digital nightmares. It’s worth considering that paper is not fool-proof, and there are still cases of ballots cast by dead people, but it’s not a significant enough problem in the United States to stop us from using paper altogether. The question, then, is can we mitigate the risk of identity fraud in an electronic voting system enough to keep it below the threshold of risk that we already accept?
As we’ve written previously, many of the big tech providers have invested enormously in biometrics, authentication, and encryption in order to protect the financial system, private messages, health records, and other critical data. As noted in the attached video, Estonia introduced a smart chip encoded national ID card to use as a digital encryption token for handling any type of personal data. Given the Balkanised ID system in the United States, alternative approaches could be used to verify identity documents in the same way that a poll worker would, only virtually. This authentication system is currently being piloted within a mobile app in West Virginia for overseas military members to cast absentee ballots.
In short, the technological advances of the last decade, especially due to widespread smartphone use, have made authenticity a solvable problem for digital voting.
Transparency
This may be the greatest area of weakness in our current electoral process, at least in how it is perceived by the public, and equally challenging to guarantee in a digital process. When I cast my ballot, is it actually counted?
Unfortunately, the Iowa Caucus debacle had most pundits blaming technology. The voting app certainly had flaws, but the Byzantine voting process and anti-democratic nature of caucuses have made clear that a technology veneer doesn’t solve a broken system. What we need is a speedy, reliable, and un-hackable digital ledger for carrying each vote from smartphone to statehouse to be tallied. Enter… Blockchain.
There is much boom and bust discussion about the future of Blockchain. But this is still the most promising technology to deliver a digital voting platform that can be trusted by citizens. Because of the decentralized nature of the distributed ledger, which underpins Bitcoin transactions, the system cannot be hacked by either external malevolent actors or by the ruling government (which is far more common). Every vote on the ledger can be seen by everyone, at all times, and for all prior history. Copies of the ledger exist in thousands of locations simultaneously, making these vote records impossible to fudge.
Privacy
This leads to our final question: Is my vote still a secret?
After Estonia faced a government-wide cyberattack in 2007, its government implemented NATOs most advanced distributed system for data privacy protection, called hash-linked time-stamping. The idea is that the digital ledger points to all of the private data, but doesn’t actually contain this data. In our digital voting use case, a series of hash keys would be used to uniquely represent voters for a given election. Although the vote cast would be visible to all, in order to verify the total vote count, the voter herself would not be known to the public. This is the same process by which banks obfuscate user passwords on their servers, so that no bank employee can login on your behalf.
“The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention”
A Roadmap to Digital Voting
The Coronavirus pandemic is a crisis that may not subside any time soon, given an (optimistic) 18 month timeline for a vaccine and the risk that the virus is already mutating. The greater likelihood is that we will deal with COVID-19 in the same way that prior generations dealt with polio, measles and other contagions: managed risk. In our case, that includes social distancing, better hygiene, ventilator capacity, and testing. Assuming emergency legislation could be enacted to allow 100% absentee ballots, can we even rely on the Postal Service?
How reasonable is it to roll out digital voting by the November 2020 election? Given the initial success of the West Virginia pilot, and recent announcements by New Jersey and Delaware to establish an online portal, it’s clear that momentum is building. A significant push by voters is needed to make this a funding priority for legislators. Each State must establish evaluation criteria around authenticity, transparency, and privacy in order to determine the baseline of risk that we are willing to manage during this transition. Recent criticism of security flaws at Voatz, a venture-funded startup voting app, suggest that States should consider pilots with multiple simultaneous vendors, to see which can maintain security at scale. Even in Estonia, which has had successful internet voting since 2012, only about 40% of voters choose to vote online, so the key will be to identify which voters to transition first and roll out the rest over time. Given the impetus of coronavirus, that should include any voter likely to avoid the polls due to health risks.
Many great innovations are formed during times of crisis, simply because there is no alternative. Digital voting means protecting the health of poll volunteers and voters, but also that the night-shift worker, the wheelchair bound grandmother, and the high school graduate all have renewed influence in their own government. We must see this moment for the opportunity that it is—a chance to radically redesign the fundamentals of our democracy, expand ballot access, and reinvigorate a stagnating body politic. Our great-, great- grandkids are counting on us.