And as we observed such would be a fine idea, but the results from that crowd-sourced reporting would be way better if the reporting were not on the “honor system.”  Without going on a security and privacy rampage, it would be better if this idea were implemented using some existing model for people to do mobile computing voter-stuff, in a way that is not trivial to abuse, unlike the honor system.

Now, back to the good news we mentioned previously: there is an existing model we could use to limit the opportunity for abuse.  You see, many U.S. voters, in a growing number of States, already have the ability to sit in a café and use their smart phone and a web site to identify themselves sufficiently to see their full voter record, and in some cases even update part of that voter record.

So, the idea is: why not extend that with a little extra record keeping of when a voter reports that they have arrived at the polls, and when they said they were done? In fact, it need not even be an extension of existing online voter services, and could be done in places that are currently without online voter services altogether.  It could even be the first online voter service in those places.

The key here is voters “sufficiently identify themselves” through some existing process, and that identification has to be based an existing voter record.  In complex online voter services (like paperless online voter registration), that involves a 3-way real-time connection between the voter’s digital device, the front-end web server that it talks to, and a privileged and controlled connection from the front-end to obtain specific voter data in the back-end.  But in a service like this, it could be even simpler, with a system that’s based on a copy of the voter record data, indeed, just that part that the voter needs to use to “identify themselves sufficiently”.

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  The fact is, State and/or local elections officials generally manage the voter database.  And our Stakeholders inform us its still likely these jurisdictions would want to operate this service in order to retain control of the data, and to control the ways and means of “sufficient identity” to be consistent with election laws, current usage practices, and other factors.  On the other hand, a polling place traffic monitor service can be a completely standalone system – a better solution we think, and more likely to be tried by everyone.

OK, that’s enough for the reasonably controlled and accurate crowd-source reporting of wait times. What about the benefits from it – the visibility on wait times?  As is almost always the case in transparent, open government computing these days, there are two parallel answers.

The first answer is that the same system that voters report into, could also provide the aggregated information to the public.  For example, using a web app, one could type in their street address (or get some help in selecting it, akin to our Digital Poll Book), and see the wait time info for a given precinct.  They could also view a list of the top-5 shortest current wait times and bottom-5 longest wait times of the precincts in their county, and see where their precinct sits in that ranking.  They could also study graphs of moving averages of wait times – well, you can ideate for yourself.  It’s really a question of what kind of information regular voters would actually value, and that local election officials would want to show.

The second answer is that this system must provide a web services API so that “other systems” can query this wait-time-reporting service.  These other systems should be able to get any slice of the raw data, or the whole thing, up to the minute.  Then they could do whatever visualization, reporting, or other services thought up by the clever people operating this other system.

For me, I’d like an app on my phone that pings like my calendar reminders, that I set to ping myself after 9am (no voting without adequate caffeine!) but before 3pm (high school lets out and street traffic becomes a sh*t show ); but oh, when the waiting time is <10 minutes.  I’d also like something that tells me if/when turn-out in my precinct (or my county, or some geographic slice) tips over 50% of non-absentee voters.  And you can imagine others.  But the main point is that we do not expect our State or local election officials to deliver that to us.  We do hope that they can deliver the basics, including that API so that others can do cool stuff with the data.

Actually, it’s an important division of labor.

Government organizations have the data and need to “get the data out” both in raw form via an API, and in some form useful for individual voters’ practical needs on Election Day.  Then other organizations or individuals can use that API with their different vision and innovation to put that data to a range of additional good uses.  That’s our view.

So, in our situation at the TrustTheVote Project, it’s actually really possible.  We already have the pieces: [1] the whole technology framework for online voter services, based on existing legacy databases; [2] the web and mobile computing technology framework with web services and APIs; [3] existing voter services that are worked examples of how to use these frameworks; and [4] some leading election officials who are already committed to using all these pieces, in real life, to help real voters.  This “voting wait-time tracker” system we call PollMon is actually one of the simplest examples of this type of computing.

We’re ready to build one.  And we told the Knight News Challenge so.  We say, let’s do this.  Wanna help?  Let us know.  We’ve already had some rockin good ideas and some important suggestions.

GAM | out

We realized a few months ago that our elections technology framework data layer could provide information that when combined with community-based information gathering might lessen the discomfort of that thorn.  Actually, that realization happened while hearing friends extol the virtues of Waze.  Simply enough, the idea was crowd-sourcing wait information to at least gain some insight on how busy a polling place might be at the time one wants to go cast their ballot.

Well, to be sure, lots of people are noodling around lots of good ideas and there is certainly no shortage of discussion on the topic of polling place performance.  And, we’re all aware that the President has taken issue with it and after a couple of mentions in speeches, created the Bauer-Ginsberg Commission.  So, it seems reasonable to assume this idea of engaging some self-reporting isn’t entirely novel.

After all, its kewl to imagine being able to tell – in real time – what the current wait time at the polling place is, so a voter can avoid the crowds, or a news organization can track the hot spots of long lines.  We do some “ideating” below but first I offer three observations from our noodling:

• It really is a good idea; but
• There’s a large lemon in it; yet
• We have the recipe for some decent lemonade.

Here’s the Ideation Part

Wouldn’t it be great if everybody could use an app on their smarty phone to say, “Hi All, its me, I just arrived at my polling place, the line looks a bit long.” and then later, “Me again, OK, just finished voting, and geesh, like 90 minutes from start to finish… not so good,” or “Me again, I’m bailing.  Need to get to airport.”

And wouldn’t it be great if all that input from every voter was gathered in the cloud somehow, so I could look-up my polling place, see the wait time, the trend line of wait times, the percentage of my precinct’s non-absentee voters who already voted, and other helpful stuff?  And wouldn’t it be interesting if the news media could show a real time view across a whole county or State?

Well, if you’re reading this, I bet you agree, “Yes, yes it would.”  Sure.  Except for one thing.  To be really useful it would have to be accurate.  And if there is a question about accuracy (ah shoot, ya know where this is going, don-cha?) Yes, there is always that Grinch called “abuse.”

Sigh. We know from recent big elections that apparently, partisan organizations are sometimes willing to spend lots of money on billboard ads, spam campaigns, robo-calls, and so on, to actually try to discourage people from going to the polls, within targeted locales and/or demographics. So, we could expect this great idea, in some cases, to fall afoul of similar abuse.  And that’s the fat lemon.

But, please read on.

Now, we can imagine some frequent readers spinning up to accuse us of wanting everything to be perfectly secure, of letting the best be the enemy of the good, and noting that nothing will ever be accomplished if first every objection must be overcome. On other days, they might be right, but not so much today.

We don’t believe this polling place traffic monitoring service idea requires the invention of some new security, or integrity, or privacy stuff.  On the other hand, relying on the honor system is probably not right either.  Instead, we think that in real life something like this would have a much better chance of launch and sustained benefit, if it were based on some existing model of voters doing mobile computing in responsible way that’s not trivial to abuse like the honor system.

And that lead us to the good news – you see, we have such an existing model, in real life. That’s the new ingredient, along with that lemon above, and a little innovative sugar, for the lemonade that I mentioned.

Stay tuned for Part 2, and while waiting you might glance at this.

For our domain savvy reader, the issues to be discussed today are on the application, sometimes overloaded application, of DPBs and their related issues of reliability, security and verifiability.  So as I head into this, I wanted to echo some thoughts here about DPBs as we are addressing them at the TrustTheVote Project.

We’ve been hearing much lately about State and local election officials’ appetite (or infatuation) for digital poll books.  We’ve been discussing various models and requirements (or objectives), while developing the core of the TrustTheVote Digital Poll Book.  But in several of these discussions, we’ve noticed that only two out of three basic purposes of poll books of any type (paper or digital, online or offline) seem to be well understood.  And we think the gap shows why physical custody is so important—especially so for digital poll books.

The first two obvious purposes of a poll book are to [1] check in a voter as a prerequisite to obtaining a ballot, and [2] to prevent a voter from having a second go at checking-in and obtaining a ballot.  That’s fine for meeting the “Eligibility” and “Non-duplication” requirements for in-person voting.

But then there is the increasingly popular absentee voting, where the role of poll books seems less well understood.  In our humble opinion, those in-person polling-place poll books are also critical for absentee and provisional voting.  Bear in mind, those “delayed-cast” ballots can’t be evaluated until after the post-election poll-book-intake process is complete.

To explain why, let’s consider one fairly typical approach to absentee evaluation.  The poll book intake process results in an update to the voter record of every voter who voted in person.  Then, the voter record system is used as one part of absentee and provisional ballot processing.  Before each ballot may be separated from its affidavit, the reviewer must check the voter identity on the affidavit, and then find the corresponding voter record.  If the voter record indicates that the voter cast their ballot in person, then the absentee or provisional ballot must not be counted.

So far, that’s a story about poll books that should be fairly well understood, but there is an interesting twist when if comes to digital poll books (DPB).

The general principle for DPB operation is that it should follow the process used with paper poll books (though other useful features may be added).  With paper poll books, both the medium (paper) and the message (who voted) are inseparable, and remain in the custody of election staff (LEOs and volunteers) throughout the entire life cycle of the poll book.

With the DPB, however, things are trickier. The medium (e.g., a tablet computer) and the message (the data that’s managed by the tablet, and that represents who voted) can be separated, although it should not.

Why not? Well, we can hope that the medium remains in the appropriate physical custody, just as paper poll books do. But if the message (the data) leaves the tablet, and/or becomes accessible to others, then we have potential problems with accuracy of the message.  It’s essential that the DPB data remain under the control of election staff, and that the data gathered during the DPB intake process is exactly the data that election staff recorded in the polling place.  Otherwise, double voting may be possible, or some valid absentee or provisional ballots may be erroneously rejected.  Similarly, the poll book data used in the polling place must be exactly as previously prepared, or legitimate voters might be barred.

That’s why digital poll books must be carefully designed for use by election staff in a way that doesn’t endanger the integrity of the data.  And this is an example of the devil in the details that’s so common for innovative election technology.

Those devilish details derail some nifty ideas, like one we heard of recently: a simple and inexpensive iPad app that provides the digital poll book UI based on poll book data downloaded (via 4G wireless network) from “cloud storage” where an election official previously put it in a simple CSV file; and where the end-of-day poll book data was put back into the cloud storage for later download by election officials.

Marvelous simplicity, right?  Oh hec, I’m sure some grant-funded project could build that right away.  But turns out that is wholly unacceptable in terms of chain of custody of data that accurate vote counts depend on.  You wouldn’t put the actual vote data in the cloud that way, and poll book data is no less critical to election integrity.

A Side Note:  This is also an example of the challenge we often face from well-intentioned innovators of the digital democracy movement who insist that we’re making a mountain out of a molehill in our efforts.  They argue that this stuff is way easier and ripe for all of the “kewl” digital innovations at our fingertips today.  Sure, there are plenty of very well designed innovations and combinations of ubiquitous technology that have driven the social web and now the emerging utility web.  And we’re leveraging and designing around elements that make sense here—for instance the powerful new touch interfaces driving today’s mobile digital devices.  But there is far more to it, than a sexy interface with a 4G connection.  Oops, I digress to a tangential gripe.

This nifty example of well-intentioned innovation illustrates why the majority of technology work in a digital poll book solution is actually in [1] the data integration (to and from the voter record system); [2] the data management (to and from each individual digital poll book), and [3] the data integrity (maintaining the same control present in paper poll books).

Without a doubt, the voter’s user experience, as well as the election poll worker or official’s user experience, is very important (note pic above)—and we’re gathering plenty of requirements and feedback based on our current work.  But before the TTV Digital Poll Book is fully baked, we need to do equal justice to those devilish details, in ways that meet the varying requirements of various States and localities.

Thoughts? Your ball (er, ballot?)
GAM | out

The OSDV Foundation is proud to be a major sponsor of this event.  We do so because it is precisely these kinds of forums where discussions about innovation in HOW America votes take place and it represents a rich opportunity for collaboration, debate, education, and sharing.  We always learn much and share our own research and development efforts as directed by our stakeholders — those State and local elections officials who are the beneficiaries of our charitable work to bring increased accuracy, transparency, verification, and security (i.e., the 4 pillars of trustworthiness) to elections technology reform through education, research and development for elections technology innovation.

Below are my opening remarks to be delivered this evening or tomorrow morning, at the pleasure of the Planning Committee depending on how they slot the major sponsors opportunities to address the attendees.  We believe there are 3 points we wanted to get across in opening remarks: [1] why we support the EVN; [2] why there is a growing energy around increased election verification efforts, and [3] how the EVN can drive that movement forward…..

Greetings Attendees!

On behalf of the EVN Planning Committee and the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation I want to welcome everyone to the 2013 Elections Verification Network Annual Conference.  As a major conference supporter, the Planning Committee asked if I, on behalf of the OSDV Foundation, would take 3 minutes to share 3 things with you:

• 1^st, why the Foundation decided to help underwrite this Conference;
• 2^nd, why we believe there is a growing energy and excitement around election verification; and
• 3^rd, how the EVN can bring significant value to this growing movement

So, we decided to make a major commitment to underwriting and participating in this conference for two reasons:

1. We want to strengthen the work of this diverse group of stakeholders and do all that we can to fortify this gathering to make it the premier event of its kind; and
2. The work of the EVN is vital to our own mission because there are 4 pillars to trustworthy elections: Accuracy, Transparency, Verification, and Security, and the goals and objectives of these four elements require enormous input from all stakeholders.  The time to raise awareness, increase visibility, and catalyze participation is now, more than ever.  Which leads to point about the movement.

We believe the new energy and excitement being felt around election verification is due primarily to 4 developments, which when viewed in the aggregate, illustrates an emerging movement.  Let’s consider them quickly:

1. First, we’re witnessing an increasing number of elections officials considering “forklift upgrades” in their elections systems, which are driving public-government partnerships to explore and ideate on real innovation – the Travis County Star Project and the LA County’s VSAP come to mind as two showcase examples, which are, in turn, catalyzing downstream activities in smaller jurisdictions;
2. The FOCE conference in CA, backed by the James Irvine Foundation was a public coming out of sorts to convene technologists, policy experts, and advocates in a collaborative fashion;
3. The recent NIST Conferences have also raised the profile as a convener of all stakeholders in an interdisciplinary fashion; and finally,
4. The President’s recent SOTU speech and the resulting Bauer-Ginsberg Commission arguably will provide the highest level of visibility to date on the topic of improving access to voting.  And this plays into EVN’s goals and objectives for elections verification.  You see, while on its face the visible driver is fair access to the ballot, the underlying aspect soon to become visible is the reliability, security, and verifiability of the processes that make fair access possible.  And that leads to my final point this morning:

The EVN can bring significant value to this increased energy, excitement, and resulting movement if we can catalyze a cross pollination of ideas and rapidly increase awareness across the country.  In fact, we spend lots of time talking amongst ourselves.  It’s time to spread the word.  This is critical because while elections are highly decentralized, there are common principles that must be woven into the fabric of every process in every jurisdiction.  That said, we think spreading the word requires 3 objectives:

1. Maintaining intellectual honesty when discussing the complicated cocktail of technology, policy, and politics;
2. Sustaining a balanced approach of guarded optimism with an embracing of the potential for innovation; and
3. Encouraging a breadth of problem awareness, possible solutions, and pragmatism in their application, because one size will never fit all.

So, welcome again, and lets make the 2013 EVN Conference a change agent for raising awareness, increasing knowledge, and catalyzing a nationwide movement to adopt the agenda of elections verification.

Thanks again, and best wishes for a productive couple of days.

Sean Greene, the election initiatives research manager at Pew Charitable Trusts, argues that structuring election data in a uniform manner should be just as important as other government data, such as statistics in public health. … The same attitude should be applied to election data. Ultimately, the ways that counties handle their election data affects the ability of journalists, researchers, lawmakers — or anyone else for that matter — to efficiently monitor our state’s election process.

Yup!

Now let me paraphrase the part that I think is wrong, where a there is a much brighter future.

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett seems to be in favor of changes to (as we say here) “get the data out“  for transparency and open-gov goodness (agreed) but pointed out that this is a county matter (true).  Yet, based on Bennet’s remarks, the authors expressed concerns over costs of the changes: “Counties are entitled to a level of autonomy and costs associated with changing any system can become prohibitive, especially if improvements are only being encouraged.” (Our emphasis in underlining added.)

Here is the very good news: those costs are small, at least measured in dollars or in hours of staff time.  What is not required is changes to any existing software or election management system — which would be costly.  What is required is some really boring basic scripting and querying to make a funky little tool that crunches over the existing database of election records (every county has one) and spits out the data in a public data format.  That’s just conversion.  What is really not required is for any election office to create new systems for mining that data.  Rather, just get the data out in some format that others can grab and mine.

But don’t take it from me. I checked with a couple very senior election technologists from two ends of the country that I rreached out to of after reading the article.  This sort of thing is really not a lot of work, and indeed election IT teams get called on to make various sorts of data extracts frequently — and sometimes have the time to make them.

The constraint is not the dollar cost. It is the opportunity costs, which are relative costs. For a large county, this is a non-issue.  For a small county with maybe a couple technical staff, the capability is there, but just not the time; they barely have enough time for their many existing responsibilities.  Only 10% of one person’s work week is actually 5% of an entire week – and probably a higher proportion of a week’s output.

This is where standards come into play.

If there were an agreed-to nationwide standard for what this data should look like, some of the larger counties would use it, and get a couple people to spend the hours to build such an export tool that works right.  And if the scripts and queries of that tool were published to share with other elections organizations — especially those that use the same voting system product, as many of the counties in Arizona do — others could benefit from the prior work with lots less effort.

But a standard is needed.

Even Better News: NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is working on one for exactly that!  And people are waiting for it to be finalized.  Our TrustTheVote Project team is waiting. I’m sure that some of the vendors have teams that are waiting.  A couple large election office’s technical teams are waiting.  And I am sure that public interest organizations — that share the sentiments of the editorial’s authors — have been waiting for a long time for the election technology people to get the data out!

As I said, we are waiting too. When there is a standard, and the early adopters are getting the data out, then we will be collaborating with them on what to do with the data once it is out.  For starters, it will be integration with the existing TTV Analytics (big picture here), but even more interesting — TTV Election Night Reporting System, which takes that data and visualizes it for members of the public, like this:

We got work to do!  But getting a bit sore from crouching in the starting blocks
More soon!

– EJS

Q: Was there any trouble with the open source nature of the software that SBE adopted? And the cloud deployment? Don’t government IT people often have problems with that?

A: No problems at all! SBE specifically required open source software when they applied for the Federal grant for this project, and specifically wanted cloud deployments.

But the complete answer explains why SBE made those choices, and why differently than other government IT people who have problems with open source or cloud. I can only provide my personal reflections on this of course, but I think that they are instructive.

Common Mis-conception on Open Source

On open source, government IT people often have the wrong problem, thinking that open source means whacked together by volunteers, and you have to deploy and support it yourself. Often true, but not in every case. In this case, the software was available under an open source license that very carefully and specifically addressed the usual concerns of government adopters. And in this case, SBE had an application hosting provider company that they contract with to do cloud deployments of web applications, and provide service and support.

Common Mis-calculation on Cloud Hosting

On cloud, there is a similar mis-understanding, very well illustrated by I.T. procurement options in the VA state government.

• One option for deploying a new application is to work with the large system integrator to whom VA has outsourced their data center operations for some years now. That is, VA is responsible for the facilities and procurement, and the SI is responsible for deploying application software, supporting the servers and networks, etc.
• Then there is the cloud option. In that option, it is the hosting company that is responsible for facilities and hardware, and also does everything the SI does in the first approach.

That’s “cloud” — your provider has the physical infrastructure, and you don’t. Once a government IT group has already outsourced data center operations to a for-profit company, then that is really the only difference.

Oh, wait, there is an important difference — cloud providers nowadays are significantly less expensive than is typical of the cost structure defined years ago during a government procurement process for data center outsourcing.

Heres’s a Good Fit

With those mis-conceptions cleared up, consider the opportunity.

• The cloud is preferable for cost and/or service.
• The cloud provider is happy to deploy and maintain either or both of
  • commercial software from a vendor,
  • an open-source application from a public software repository.
• The open-source application has a license (without fee required) that neatly takes care of a number of numbing details of license law particular to governments.

That’s not all there is to it, of course, and cloud deployment isn’t right for everything — for example, the voter record database really does need to be in the state’s datacenter under the direct control of state I.T. people. But in the case of the open-source applications SBE deployed in 2012, both open-source and cloud proved to be a good fit.

– EJS

But nevertheless, today, esteemed colleagues were asking for a “definitive statement” on i-voting, having been asked for such by folks who work for legislators interested in the topic. So I thought I’d share what I like to say when legislators, staffers, etc. ask for “definitive”. Basically 3 steps.

Look to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. government’s top authority on technology issues. They’ve studied the use of the Internet for everything in elections, including voting.

1. Read their conclusion on top half of page 69 of NIST’s “Threat Analysis of Voting Systems” (here), supported by analysis in pages 42-46.
2. Also briefly flip through NIST’s 36 pages of “Information System Security Best Practices” (here) for Internet-connected election support systems.
3. Think about whether state or local election officials would have the funding to comply with NIST guidelines, even for the lower bar of distributing blank ballots, much less the higher bar of Internet Voting.

That’s pretty much it.

– EJS

PS: While we’re on the topic, my thanks to Jeremy Epstein for tackling another topic on i-voting  (botnets, one among several i-voting topics that I am happy to leave to Jeremy and other colleagues in the security world), and for letting me put my 2 cents in for his Freedom To Tinker blog today. Thanks Jeremy, for doing the $0.98, and keep up the good work !  — ejs

We had plenty to say, based on our 2012 work with Virginia State Board of Elections (SBE), because that collaboration depends critically on CDFs. Anne and colleagues did a rather surprising amount of data wrangling over many weeks to get things all hooked up right, and the lessons learned are important for continuing work in the standards body, both NIST and the IEEE group working on CDF standards.

As requested by the attendees, here are online versions of the poster and the slides for the presentation “Bringing Transparency to Voter Registration and Absentee Voting.”

Download Slides

View Full-Size Poster

The more I thought about it, the more flummoxed I was. I had to take off the geek hat and dust off the philosopher hat, looking at the question from a viewpoint of values, rather than (as would be my wont) requirements analysis or risk analysis. I goes like this …

I think that Phil’s question is based on assumption of some shared values among voters — all voters, not just those that vote by mail — that make postal voting acceptable because ballots are a “government things” and so is postal service. Voting is in part an act of faith in government to be making a good faith effort to do the job right, and keep the operations above a minimum acceptable level of sanity. It “feels OK” to hand a marked ballot to my regular neighborhood post(wo)man, but not to some stranger dropping off a box from a delivery truck. Translate from value to feeling to expectation: it’s implied that we expect USPS staff to know that they have a special government duty in delivering ballots, and to work to honor that duty, regarding the integrity of those special envelopes as a particular trust, as well as their timely delivery.

• Having re-read all that, it sounds so very 20th century, almost as antique as lever machines for voting.

I don’t really think that USPS is “the government” anymore, not in the sense that the journey of a VBM ballot is end-to-end inside a government operation. I’m not sure that Fedex or UPS are inherently more or less trustworthy. In fact they all work for each other now! And certainly in some circumstances the for-profit operations may to some voters feel more trustworthy — whether because of bad experiences with USPS, or because of living overseas in a country that surveils US citizens and operates the postal service.

Lastly, I think that many people do share the values behind Phil’s question — I know I do. The idea makes me wobbly. I think it comes down to this:

• If you’re wobbly on for-profit VBM, then get back into the voting booth, start volunteering to help your local election officials, and if they are effectively outsourcing any election operations to for-profit voting system vendors, help them stop doing so.
• If you not wobbly, then you’re part of trend to trusting — and often doing — remote voting with significant involvement from for-profit entities – and we know where that is headed.

The issue with USPS shows that in the 21st century, any form of remote voting will involve for-profits, whether it is Fedex for VBM, or Amazon cloud services for i-voting. My personal conclusions:

• Remote voting is lower integrity no matter what, but gets more people voting because in-person voting can be such a pain.
• I need to my redouble efforts to fix the tech so that in-person voting is not only not a pain, but actually more desirable than remote voting.

– EJS

One side of the polarity sees issues like this not a problem per se, but a defect in the implementation of current rules. You might call this a “conservative” side of American political problem solving — don’t change the rules, but do act to improve the way that they’re put into practice. In this case, for this view, the issue of long lines at polling places is an issue of capacity that’s “very easily handled” as NYT quoted Sen. Grassley. The implied solution is more and smaller precincts, more polling places, more voting stations in the polling places, and faster procedures for voter check-in. (I should add that in the latter case, there are tech solutions, like our DIY voter check-in via the Voter Portal we did in 2012, or the Digital Pollbook project of this year.)

That really comes down to pumping more money into existing election operations.

The other side of the polarity, which you might call “progressive“, sees issues like this as a problem that needs a solution by changing the current rules, which currently define a system that’s not working. Further, the progressive sees such rule changes as an inherent part of a process of evolution of rules (a progression). In this case, for this view, traditional polling place operations are inherently flawed in practice; empirically, we have seen that it leads to hot spots where people wait a long time to check in to vote. The implied solution approach is to create or promote more changes in the voting processes — early voting, voting centers, more absentee voting, approaches to absentee voting that don’t depend on the USPS, separation of Federal elections form those messy local elections with mile-long ballots, … lots of ideas. (And some of them are partly technologically enabled!)

That really comes down to coming up with potentially a lot of money to run new programs to use these new voting methods.

I’m a conservative by temperament: don’t fix it unless you’re sure it’s broken, try some incremental tweaks before replacing it, keep it simple, every change brings in a host of unintended side effects, better the devil you know, and so on. But I like both of these approaches, because they both have a common factor — increased Federal spending on Federal elections. Believe me the local election officials need it!

Lastly, there’s also a tech analogy in the nethead vs. bellhead polarity. Netheads see problems not as structural but in terms of capacity and scale; if your network isn’t working right, throw in some more network capacity and compute capacity, but conserve the simplicity of the current structure. Bellheads want to implement  progressively more careful control systems. It’s a long story about how we now have both in a sort of wave/particle duality, but for this political issue, the geek approach of “both!”, is really easy to say: Throw lots more resources at the long lines problem in the current system (line up to vote in person in one specific place on election day), while at the same time doing more with alternative methods; see what happens, and use the results to drive better application of more resources where that has a positive effect, and also use the results to drive more progress in tuning the new approaches (alternate voting methods) in parallel to the existing system with its preserved simplicity. I rarely expect the political process to be informed by the geek view, but there it is.

So, in regard to this supposed political tussle coming, I say: “I hope you both win!”

– EJS