As California Heads to Vote-By Mail, Turnout Low and Going Lower?

Riddle me this… as Vote-By Mail percentages increase turnout is decreasing? If the postal voting enthusiasts really had it right, shouldn’t we be seeing the opposite trend? This article says a largely mail vote in California is expecting a low turnout:

http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080603/NEWS03/80603045

The California Association of Clerks and Elections Officials estimated a 31 percent turn out statewide. Riverside officials had anticipated turnout here would fall just under that.

“I’m not optimistic because what I heard from polling places today is that turnout was very low,” Dunmore said.

“Getting to the 30 percent looks like it might be a challenge.”

In contrast, the February presidential primary drew about 407,000 – or 55 percent of registered voters – to the polls.

Unlike February, when far more Democrats darkened the county’s voting booths – a total 74 percent turnout to 57 percent – slightly more Republicans voted this primary election absentee, 14 percent to Democrats’ 11 percent.

Riverside County has 763,941 registered voters.

Coachella Valley voters said tradition brought them out to the polls Tuesday.

The article also makes a great case against centralized vote-counting. Starting off by showing that trucking in the votes is a timely process. Poll-site vote counts! Yes. Centralized counts, no.

What is a secret ballot? Trust but Verify!

[Ed Note: This article is going through several revisions, major sections might change before your very eyes. Or just not make sense.]

 

What is a Secret Ballot? Ask this question, and you’re likely to get many answers. To some it’s simple, to others complex. But in essence a secret ballot must remain secret before being publicly counted. If the secrecy is by design open to intrusion then no secret ballot really existed in the first place. And if the security is controlled by private rather than public oversight, then no verifiability of the validity of the system exists on which to trust a secret ballot voting method.

Notice in the above cartoon, the Secret Ballot is fundamentally paired with a Secret Ballot Booth. This makes the secrecy of the ballot absolute, as no one is allowed to enter the ballot booth with the voter, except for cases of disability assistance. A controlling boss, or spouse, can’t force you to reveal how you vote in the privacy of the voting booth. However, if you change that system slightly, and take away the voting booth, do you really have a secret ballot?

Another aspect of a strong secret ballot is that it prevents vote-buying and selling. One of the reasons, in fact, that the secret ballot was introduced in the first place was to prevent this practice. A voting booth prevents vote-selling and vote-buying by making it impossible to verify how the person paid to vote, voted. Any system that makes it possible to attach a voter to their vote fundamentally undermines the secret ballot.

The precinct system in the United States, has, like the British System, used privacy ballot booths. The private, but public, voting booth is one key to a secret ballot system. The publicly counted precinct system is the other key to the system. However, that has been lost throughout the country, as we have moved to mostly “centrally counted” voting in which the ballots are transported to the County for central vote tabulation.

Why are both the voting booth and the precinct, preferably hand-counted systems, important? Well it’s really about the nature of trust and trustworthiness. In the precinct system , when the polls close, the ballot box is opened, and the ballots are counted in front of everyone that wants to witness it. Nowadays it could also be videotaped and webcast. Okay, so this system is fully transparent to the voting public, and therefore the public trusts in the system. Take away that transparency, and no longer can the voting public verify the system, at least where they live, with their own eyes, and participation.

As a counter example to the secret ballot precinct system, on the West Coast, the powers that be are pushing towards 100% forced mail voting from Washington to California. But a vote-by mail or absentee ballot is not “really” a strong type of secret ballot because the system is open to coercive efforts on the part of those inclined. Common examples of forced voting include employers or union representatives requiring employees to reveal their “absentee ballot” before turning it in, just as Vladimr Putin’s operatives were accused of recently. Egregious examples of the ways in which the secrecy of absentee ballots are routinely breached exist throughout the United States law books, arrests, and court cases. Plenty of examples are readily available internationally as well.

A Vote-By Mail, or Absentee Ballot, is also fundamentally open to vote-selling, because it is easy to prove how you vote under that system. How much is a vote worth anyway? If an election got close, one in which they are already spending millions to market, comes down to 500 votes, I suspect absentee ballots could become fairly expensive.

The precinct level vote count insures another level of transparency, essentially verification through public counting. Centralized vote count systems, for example when the County rather than the Precincts count the votes, intrudes upon the secret ballot by removing vote counting from public view and public control. This makes the system unverifiable by the general public and undermines the validity of the system. Under such a system the public must, “trust the system” with virtually no way to verify the validity said system.

In the precinct system, to verify the public count was seemingly legitimate, any voter can attend their local precinct, observe the counting procedures and watch the totals be publicly posted for all to verify as accurate and honest. 100% Vote-by mail and other remote voting systems inherently add limited verifiability for conducting the public-quality control that is possible through a properly regulated precinct level hand counted system.

A friend of the No Vote By Mail Project, Jason Osgood, who is apparently running for Secretary of State says it well, “Private Voting, Public Counting.” Or as Regan said, “Trust but verify.” However, with voting, I’d go a step further and say that the system itself should just be trustworthy. The precinct level “hand-counted” or “hand-audited” paper ballot voting system is the only “secret-ballot” system I know of that can truly implement any typed of secret ballot vote without fundmentally altering the very nature of the system. 

 

San Bernadino, California, “Voting By Mail Made Easy”

In the usual refrain, Vote-By Mail is being touted as the savior to the many inconveniences of poll place voting. Including, somehow it is suppose to actually decrease “over-voting.” Which is a truly amazing feat, since most paper-ballot machine counted systems, like the fill-in the circle optical scan ballots actually will automatically reject over-voted ballots, however VBM (Vote-By Mail) systems cannot take advantage of this feature.

Anyway, there’s about a half dozen totally nonsensical things in this article, see if you can spot them:

http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/news/ci_9403652

The San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters has launched its “Vote By Mail, Voting Made Easy” campaign designed to educate residents about the advantages of casting their ballots by mail as an alternative to voting in person.

The campaign touts voting by mail as a convenient, reliable way to cast a ballot.

In 2007 the California State Legislature renamed absentee voting “vote by mail.” The move was an attempt to increase overall voter turnout by appealing to residents who would ordinarily not vote due to accessibility or scheduling issues associated with voting at polling places.

The Vote By Mail campaign’s other aim is to decrease errors, such as over-voting, by providing voters the hassle-free experience of voting on their schedules and in their own homes.

“This is an ideal year to promote voting by mail with all of the interest at the presidential level. We also want to encourage voter participation in the June 3rd statewide primary,” said San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters Kari Verjil. “Now individuals have another voting option open to them, and we hope they take advantage of this opportunity to never miss an election in California.”

Verjil notes another benefit that may appeal to some.

“The first results you’ll see reported on election night reflect votes cast in advance by mail, since those can be counted prior to polls closing,” she said.

“lost mail” +usps +statistics

Occasionally my statistics page for the No Vote By Mail Project’s Website gives me an interesting bit of info. But in this case the search thread ultimately won’t take you very far.

Dear Yahoo!:

What percentage of mail is lost by the USPS?

Mike Chicago, Illinois

Dear Mike:

You’d have better luck finding Dick Cheney’s social security number. Even though the United States Postal Service routinely hires contractors to assess performance, it doesn’t release statistics on lost mail. More from Yahoo.

Montana, Ready or Not, Voting-By Mail

This editorial claims Montana is ready to vote entirely by mail, well only if they want more of this, I guess:

http://novbm.wordpress.com/2006/11/16/many-races-around-the-country-still-too-close-to-call/

In the State of Montana, a local race with just under 4000 votes ended in a tie today. 10 days after the election was held.

Vote by mail and it can take 2 weeks to count 4000 votes.

100% Forced Vote-By Mail Voting Systems

Another comon term, proposed and used mostly by election integrity activists, is Forced Mail Voting. This term denotes the intention of forcing 100% of the voters to vote-by mail in a VBM election system. Poll voters are not allowed to continue voting at the polls, rather they are forced to switch to mail ballots, for some if not all of the elections they participate in.

In reality HAVA, the Help America Vote Act, requires disabled accesible voting devices be available to the public in some form. So the 100% aspect is not the most literal, because in theory some voters will need access to a polling place with a disabled person capable voting device. This is interesting, in particular, because Vote-By Mail advocates routinely say that the “mixed system approach,” rather, the poll place and absentee system is not as easy to administer because it is in essence running two systems. Well even with forced mail voting systems there will according to this law, always be accesible voting devices somewhere in the county.

This terminology is important.

100% Vote-By Mail more problematic than absentee systems

Absentee systems are limited in nature. Those that need ballots for a reason remotely, get the ballot absentee. This system is easier to deal with, in short, because it is a smaller system. Turn absentee voting into liberalized, no-excuse, Vote-by Mail voting and the problems are amplified.

Therefore Vote-by Mail inherently has more problems than limited absentee voting systems. For more, read this.

Vote By Mail or Absentee Ballots?

There’s an ongoing problem with election integrity conversations. Vote By Mail is a term used to describe a system in which EVERYONE votes by mail, however, absentee ballots is the term used to denote when someone specifically needs to apply for an absentee ballot while opting not to vote at the polls.

The two terms do not mean the same thing anymore. Mainly because Vote-By Mail proponents have hyped the new terminology, probably because some marketer polled to find out which term played better to the voting public.

Anyway, absentee ballots are a type of voting by mail, but Vote-By Mail systems, generally either encourage their use, or mandate it. Therein lies the rub.

http://blog.oregonlive.com/elections/2008/05/vote_by_mail_take_that_idea_an.html

921 Ballots Not Counted In Ohio

From Toledo, Ohio, election officials are “heartsick”:

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080511/NEWS33/805110314

Lucas County elections officials urged voters before the March 4 primary election to vote by absentee ballot to lessen waits at the polls on election day, but The Blade has learned that hundreds of those ballots were not counted because of mistakes made by voters and because the elections board sent voters faulty ballot envelopes.

An Interesting Voting Integrity Editorial

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0805/S00179.htm