Extend Early Voting & Paper Ballots

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Extend Early Voting & Paper Ballots

Vote by mail can overcome the physical hurdle of getting voters to polling places, but we can also make polling places more available to voters than just during polling hours on a Tuesday in November.

Extending early voting helps to address the time constraints that voters in the real world face. Real voters have families, children, jobs, and other pressing demands that make it difficult to drop everything on a Tuesday in November to stand in line potentially for hours. Even after standing in line for hours, many legitimate voters have been told they are not properly registered and offered a provisional ballot to cast—which may or may not be counted.

Extending early voting would help workers and caregivers find time to get to the polls—and, importantly, expanding early voting would reduce the length of lines at polling places on Election Day, not only making it easier for voters to choose a day and time that worked for them, but also giving voters the confidence that voting would be a relatively quick process because of shorter lines.

Unlike other initiatives to expand the vote and to make it easier to vote, extending early voting enjoys overwhelming bipartisan support. The Brennan Center for Justice reported in 2016:

“One recent poll found 75 percent of likely voters support early voting, with 60 percent expressing “strong” support. A 2013 poll of North Carolina voters found 85 percent of respondents back early voting, including more than 75 percent of Republicans. Americans also oppose efforts to restrict early voting—an October 2014 poll found only 11 percent of voters supported reducing early voting before Election Day.”24

The Brennan Center recommends that every state offer early voting beginning “a minimum of two full weeks before Election Day, including weekend and evening hours.”25

Paper Ballots or Paper Receipts

Back in 2002, polling showed popular Georgia Democratic Senator Max Cleland with a solid, five-point lead over his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, a week before Election Day. But when the votes were counted using electronic voting machines made and operated by a private, for-profit corporation, Chambliss emerged victorious.

So what happened? Well, it might have had something to do with a software patch that Diebold installed in machines in Democratic-leaning counties months before voters went to the polls.26 But we’ll never actually know what happened. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted in his piece on the 2002 Georgia Senate race, “It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the election in Georgia: Diebold’s machines provided no paper trail, making a recount impossible.”27

That’s the whole problem with electronic voting machines: we’ll never really know. Private companies don’t have to reveal their software secrets because they are protected under copy- right law. And again, unlike with paper ballots, you can’t see when someone messes with your touchscreen vote. It happens outside of plain sight.

Ultimately, however, the biggest problem with electronic voting machines is that they violate the core principles of our republic.

As Truthout reported, “Ireland and Canada tried out electronic voting machines and eventually abandoned them.”28

There is a movement to allow voting through an online portal or by email, which would perhaps be even less secure. These methods are subject to malicious code that can be automated, such as through denial-of-service attacks on servers or through malware.

Voters also could be fooled by “spoof sites” that looked like official voting portals but weren’t. Just as a common election trick is to mail voters cards telling them to show up in the wrong precinct or on the wrong date, emailing them the wrong link in an official-looking email would be child’s play.

Even if the vote wasn’t altered, voters’ data and metadata could be harvested by middlemen who could use or sell it. As far back as 2013, blatant issues with “e-voting” were already becoming clear in developing countries, and many developed countries and regions were already abandoning it.29

Even the US ambassador to the United Nations from 2017 to 2018, Nikki Haley, called for a return to paper ballots—at least in the Congo. The Washington Post reported in September 2018 that “Haley called on Congo to abandon its plan to use the machines for the first time in favor of paper ballots—what she called a ‘trusted, tested, transparent and easy-to-use voting method.’”

And earlier that year, she said, in her official capacity, “These elections must be held by paper ballots so there is no question by the Congolese people about the results. The U.S. has no appetite to support an electronic voting system.”30 Just two months after the Washington Post published that story, 25 states in the United States allowed voting by email or online portals, and around 350,000 voting machines were in use in the 2018 midterm elections.

What’s good for elections in the Congo would be good for elections in the United States: the best solution to the vulnerabilities of old electronic voting machines and e-voting is to do away with them completely and return to 100 percent paper ballots. Short of that, electronic voting machines should be owned by the government and programmed with open-source software.