Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

And if you write, be nice so that the Post doesn't pull a NY Times on you.
http://tinyurl.com/69qxt

I wrote Anne Applebaum a missive. I didn't call anybody any names, but I was not shy about telling her why she had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. I'm sure she'll get many letters.

The sad thing is that something so blatantly uninformed could make into such a respected paper. It's a shame. Applebaum obviously didn't have the slightest grasp of what the issue was (audit trails). How does she get to there? Is there no editing for op-eds? If there was an editor, how did it get past that person?

American media is such a horrible joke. My only comfort is to hope that I'm young and foolish in thinking this is something new -- maybe it has always been this way.

No, it definitely hasn't always been that way. Airhead journalism and flirtation pieces are a sad fact of life when style replaces substance.

I read reasonably widely, with decent recall, but I can't recall a single article on the voting technologies used in western Europe. Or if any other nation uses an electronic system that doesn't generate a verifiable paper trail. I'm having a good laugh imagining what this crowd of Republicans would think if the Soviet Union tried to pull this. I always thought would-be authoritarians who claimed 99% of the vote were strangely stupid. Much smarter to only claim 51%.

I'm not asserting that there was fraud. There's no evidence. And that's exactly the problem: no paper trail.

We think The Howler might have added: "Only a Washington Post columnist could be this dumb."

Oh no. The competition is fierce. Some of it is mendacious, some (apparently including this) not.

Why oh why is not www.dailyhowler.com not absolutely required reading for all political pundits? They should be required to write an essay once a week responding to the weeks current issues.

SD, i believe the indian elections were mostly(all?) electronic with no paper trail.. and it also led to an upset victory for the party thats currently in power... although that was not the incumbent party

Fellas, if there is large scale voter fraud, it's through absentee balloting. I.e. WITH A PAPER TRAIL.

Nice example would be Washington state with its razor thin margin for governor. It's in the Democrat controlled counties where the suspicions are. 10,000 ballots magically appeared in King County (Seattle).

Similarly, it was the Democrat counties in Florida that had the problems in 2000.

Patrick - it's Democratic counties, please. when you say "Democrat controlled counties" you reveal that you're parroting a party line not participating in a discussion.

I think y'all are piling onto Anne Applebaum while missing her point. Nobody disputes that there ought to be -- needs to be -- adequate, recountable paper trails for e-voting machines. But the paranoia, if that's not too strong a word, about computerized voting technology goes far beyond paperless ballots. I think the No. 2 conspiracy theory involves Diebold or Republican hackers tinkering with the software of the op-scan counting machines -- for which there is, clearly, a paper ballot, since that is what the machine counts.

Trotsky
"Nobody disputes that there ought to be -- needs to be -- adequate, recountable paper trails for e-voting machines."

Really? Funny, Applebaum never bothered to make that point -- it is not even clear that she knew if there was an audit trail or not.

The security on at least some of these electronic voting machines is a complete farce.

It's hard to hack the computers that commit large financial transactions. It is pretty damn easy to hack Diebold voting machines -- and that's not idle conjecture, we've seen their (supposedly secret) source code (a testament to their rock solid security environment).

Nope, she has no point. E-voting, as implemented, is a real problem, and an invitation to miscounts and fraud. That is not conspiracy theory talk, that is reality. If you think otherwise, you don't understand the issue.

The fact is, even though conspiracy theorists with no grounding may have hooked onto this issue, we have no one to blame but ourselves. 2000 was a wake up call. America's solution was to rush faulty, auditless machines funded by open partisans receiving a nice contract from their Republican allies as the solution. There are a lot of Banana Republics where that wouldn't have been accepted, but Americans are just supposed to have blind faith? And as this election shows, there have been many mistakes, both with the new machines, and with our generally broken system of voting.

Even if the situation is 100% innocent, in a democracy, the appearance of impropriety is just as important as actual impropriety. The fact is, half of the electorate has lost some or all of its confidence in the voting system.

You can't write that off as just conspiracy theory nonsense. That kind of sentiment can, and will, cripple a democracy.

Sorry, Applebaum has absolutely no point. The only thing she is doing is attempting to belittle people whose point of view she completely misunderstands.

I work as in the pharma industry implementing what we call "validated" computer systems. I am currently implementing a system that will hold information about adverse events that result from our studies. The FDA won't let me implement that without a thoroughly tested audit trail.

I fail to see why drug development would be held to a higher standard than voting; as we have seen in Iraq, the choice of one candidate over another can result in significant "adverse events". It is very odd to me how voting is so disparaged in this country that it doesn't warrant the same protections as an ATM machine or a clinical study.

Timothy Klein,

There are genuinely bad practices that need to be fixed, and there are genuine nuts who will have no more faith in the voting system once those fixes are made.

Heck, a lot of people prefer good old-fashioned cash to dealing with electronic banking of various types. They've got a real problem, since even paper absentee ballots (the medium of choice for the anti-e-voting crowd) are tallied by computerized machines.

Susan wrote, "It is very odd to me how voting is so disparaged in this country that it doesn't warrant the same protections as an ATM machine or a clinical study."

It's not a matter of disparagement. Rather, it's institutional history.

Clearly, banks doing e-transactions without heavy auditing would quickly succumb to fraud.

The FDA, on the other hand, has experience with ensuring the rigor of e.g. software that analyzes MRI images, not just the safety of drugs.

Voting? While there's certainly "institutional" and historical knowledge about what to do and not do in order to have honest voting systems, the people actually in charge of chosing what to implement are high-level, incompetent public sector types. Like the elections official here in Maryland, a Democrat. (MD is one of the two states that now 100% electronic, unfortunately for me.) I presume she just believed whatever the vendors' assurances were.

Moreover, for things like banks, there are Darwinistic processes that ensure that corrupt banks won't survive. That clearly doesn't exist at the FDA; but the FDA presumably has a well-structured command authority, so that things that work well get built into a history of best practices. A kind of economy of scale of decision making.

Since decisions about elections are made locally, there's no scale to the authority. But nor is there a Darwinistic free market process---we don't see competent states taking over FL's election procedures...

I've been reading your blog for a while, and can't think of an example where you described a member of your own social category (white male, economist) as "stupid." Am I missing something or do you really reserve this term for female non-economists?

trostky wrote, "There are genuinely bad practices that need to be fixed, and there are genuine nuts who will have no more faith in the voting system once those fixes are made."

But you miss the point, which is that Applebaum---because of her own ignorance of the issues involved with e-voting systems---*conflated* people who think there are bad practices with people who are "genuine nuts."

http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=11-19-04&storyID=20116

Liberal,

Well, the two groups do overlap somewhat.

I learned that the Japanese designed a software system for elections and they offered to sell it to us after the 2000 debacle. With these guys you have to think cynical and then you will realize that this fragile patch work system benefits them . It is imperative that we have a credible voting system. I am afraid it may never come because I dont know if there will be enough of a Democratic presence to ceate the pressure.
An existing check on the voting system is exit interviews. Apparently, they can be used to detect some election fraud.
Unhappy

I learned that the Japanese designed a software system for elections and they offered to sell it to us after the 2000 debacle. With these guys you have to think cynical and then you will realize that this fragile patch work system benefits them . It is imperative that we have a credible voting system. I am afraid it may never come because I dont know if there will be enough of a Democratic presence to ceate the pressure.
An existing check on the voting system is exit interviews. Apparently, they can be used to detect some election fraud.
Unhappy

Sigh. I e-mailed Anne Applebaum about 800 AM East Coast time after scanning her article. I must confess, it was difficult to be kind while pointing out her unbeleivable ignorance, but I tried.

It will be curious to see if the WP or Anne have anything to say about this piece that is sane or rational.

But as one who is suffering from "outrage overload", I am increasingly inclined to turn the problem over to my quite capable grandchildren.

What a shame on Anne, the WP and our supposed democracy. When the richest putative democratic country in the history of the world is unable to insure the ability of citizens to have their votes counted with the best humans can do to approach accuracy, one has to question whether this form of government can survive.

Yeah, I have to agree with Sam Taylor. It's not looking good, folks.

Can we hope that "it's always darkest before dawn"?

Our system has inexplicably made itself sick and then just as inexplicably cured itself over and over during my lifetime.

But this illness seems to be in a different category.

Maybe we should call it "The Great Regression."

Folks,
I'm a banker. Applebaum is stupid, but she does have a point. Electronics--if done right--is far better than paper. Some of you may be old enough to remember the "back-office crisis" of the late '60's and early '70s. Securities transfer was a paper game back then, and keeping up with the paper volume almost took Wall Street down. Paper is slower, more error-prone, more expensive, and inherently harder to audit. The only things I can say in its favor is that paper is cheaper to implement on a small scale.
Applebaum is stupid because banks do electronics right, and voting officials don't. There are a number of reasons for this, only some of which the posters have gotten:
- Funding. Banks have more money than election officials.
- Scale. There's a lot more banking than voting. This lets bankers spread out the infrastructure and development costs.
- Audit. This occurs on at least two levels: bank supervision and the self-auditing of customers. Bank supervision works fairly well, and banks do a lot of self-supervision. The states do a miserable job of supervising the vote vendors, and the vendors have absolutely no concern with doing it right. Self-auditing is impossible for voting, because there is no such thing as an individual voting account with a running total. Which leads to:
- Interest. Hate to say it, but people care more about their bank balances than their vote.
- Expertise. Big banks have tremendous in-house systems expertise. Small banks rely on outside vendors (like voting), but the vendors are disciplined, to some extent, by the in-house expertise of the big guys.
- Disinterestedness. Banks really do view their role in the payment system as a ministerial one. They'll try to nickel and dime you on fees and loans, but are straight-shooters with accounting. (The flip side: it is often hard to convince them that they are wrong.) In contrast, election officials are often partisan beasts.

Joe S, It would be possible to allow self-auditing by voters, although to do it in a way that would stand up in court would we'd have to somewhat give up on secret ballots.

But here's a limited form that might have some value: Give each vote a code. Give each voter a receipt with his code printed on it. Publish the codes and the contents of the votes on the internet. Anybody who really wants to can look up his code and see how his vote got recorded. He will know whether his particular vote was falsified.

If he swears that his vote was falsified he could be lying, and there's no completely reliable way for him to prove it. But he'll know.

If we keep data that lets people prove how they voted, there will probably be ways to crack that database and so the votes aren't exactly secret-ballot. Is it more important to have verifiable elections or secret ballots?

Similarly, if voters get any record that can show how they voted, they can sell their votes. Or they can be intimidated into showing bosses or other intimidating people how they voted. I tend to figure that if employers etc can intimidate people into voting their way and intimidate them into proving it, then we probably don't deserve a democracy. But it's a problem. Even if people just get little ATM-receipt pieces of paper that are easy to falsify, we lose some of the advantages of secret ballot.