grasping at straws

I know that Kerry has conceded...but does this concession have the force of law? That is: if (due to legal challenges, counting of absentee/provisional ballots, etc.) enough electoral votes flip to Kerry, does he still win the election?

tech support for ElectionProtection, etc.

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week (about 12 hours a day, not counting travel time) as a tech support volunteer at an ElectionProtection Los Angeles County call center. EP is a nonpartisan coalition of organizations whose purpose is to record (and, where possible, correct) problems such as voter misinformation and disenfranchisement.

My nominal jobs were to teach the phone operators how to use the software that had been set up to keep track of the incidents that voters and EP "ground troops" were calling in, to keep the computers working, and to troubleshoot/report technical problems with the system as we encountered them. I also ended up answering a fair number of operators' procedural and factual questions (some of them were lawyers, but some of the others hadn't even gone through the phone training for their position that I had) and I rapidly became the "go-to" person for people who needed to find information on the web.

In the process, I became fairly familiar with the kinds of problems that were being experienced, at least in LA.

( A few scattered impressions... )

I don't know how many people were unable to vote, or improperly not permitted to vote; I can access the EP database and count incident reports of various types, but some were never reported, and some resulted in hundreds of people being turned away. I don't assume that all of these events were malicious, although some of them definitely point at least to incompetence. (LA County does not require poll workers to be trained, which tells you something right there.) In any event, I get the impression that events like this are far from new, and not particularly tied to any specific voting technology...but the next time that someone smugly tells me "I never had trouble voting, so I don't see the problem", I will be strongly tempted to belt them one in the solar plexus. As they lie gasping on the floor, I'll ask them to assume that 99% of voters, in any election, are allowed to vote and that their vote is correctly tabulated...and then to calculate (a) the expected number of errors/disenfranchisements in a single nationwide election (answer: about a million) and (b) the likelihood that at least one of their 20 closest friends would be the victim of at least one such error (answer: 18% for one election, 64% for 5 elections). They will then be left with this Slashdot thread which references a recent study which demonstrated that changing 1 vote per voting machine in the 2000 election would have changed the electoral outcome.

As a side note: in the US, the default assumption is that citizens are allowed to vote. We register voters to do a couple of things: (a) to cut down on fraud (make sure that people don't vote more than once, or to steal someone else's vote) and (b) impose a standard of eligibility (e.g., disallow people from voting that are felons, or not old enough, or haven't lived in a jurisdiction for long enough). As a computer scientist, I have to wonder whether "registration" is the best way to handle this. How hard is this to determine on the fly, given the right information?

I'm still looking for feedback on my modest proposal for addressing the problem of tabulating election results. Can anyone poke any holes in this other than "it costs too much" (which, IMO, depends on our priorities more than anything else)?

A final thought for those people that are saying "well, the good news is that Bush is going to get the rap for all the crap that will go down in the next 4 years regarding {Iraq, jobs, ...}": I wish I believed that. Unfortunately, I think that this is wishful thinking of the worst sort: Bush has had, by many measures that voters agree on, a terrible first term. I don't see that it made any substantive difference in the outcome, and I don't see that it will do any damage to the Republicans' prospects in general. I don't claim that this problem is not fixable, but holding up giant signs pointing to Bush saying "MISERABLE FAILURE" demonstrably doesn't work.