Washblog

It seems a bit incongruous to me that an election official might take it personally that people don't trust him or her.  How can we, the populace, possibly forge personal relationships with all the public officials who represent us?  Even if we did, those relationships wouldn't change their responsibility to uphold the public trust.  Public officials are supposed to serve the public -- it's not up to the public to take care of the emotional needs of public servants.  These officials serve the public trust -- the public doesn't serve their personal needs for feeling trusted.

Paradoxically, the world does run on trust.  If not for trust, we couldn't do anything -- let alone walk around with cars hurtling past us without getting run over.  So trust is central to all we do.  Our world is defined by the countless clever and beautiful and enterprising and kind acts of other people and by our basic ability to rely on the fact that the behavior of people around us will be generally predictable and honorable.

But betrayals of trust are also part of the social ecology.  I heard Peter Matthieson speak last night and he ended his evening remarks with the observation that human beings are dangerous beings who do horrible -- as well as beautiful -- things and that this is our essential nature.  Push the right buttons on almost anyone, and you get hurtful behavior.

Everyone, in my opinion, can be absolutely trusted to betray someone's trust under some conditions.  Humans aren't robots and we live in a complex world. So, for pity's sake, for the sake of the public trust itself, checks and balances are absolutely necessary.   This business of conflating the public and private gets us in a lot of trouble I think.

If drug dealers and parents get it, surely elections officials ought to get it.  It isn't about them, but about a complicated high stakes process that requires agreement on the reliability of the outcome by all interested parties.  It is the trustworthiness of the process that is at issue here, not the trustworthiness of the individuals running it.  Do the process right (with checks and balances that are fundamentally based on mistrust), and you don't have to worry about the individuals.

There are two separate issues here--transparency of the administrative processes and transparency of the technical processes.

On the first score, our state rates very highly indeed, and ought to be considered a nationwide model.  I was an elections observer last fall (overseeing the ballot duplication process) and every aspect of the process had observers from both major parties and the general public.  The elections workers were all very well informed about what they were doing, and good at explaining it to the observers.

The privately owned tabulation software is an entirely different matter.  Trusting it to do tabulation is like handing all the ballots over to someone and having them go in a room and count them with nobody allowed to watch.  This is unacceptable, as is the ownership by ANY private entity of anything having to do with elections, which are the basis for conducting all public business.

Cheating, if it happens, is going to happen only intermittently.  We know for a fact that there wasn't any funny business in the 2004 gubernatorial race because a) two machine counts and one hand counts came out within 0.01% of each other and b) all three candidates had votes added to their tally by the hand count, which is consistent with the known tendency of opscans to undercount (for the same reason your computer printer occasionally picks up more than one piece of paper).

Now, does that outcome mean it's OK to trust our current optical scanners? No, it does not.  As David Dill, eminent computer security expert, put it

It's not good enough that election results BE accurate. We have to KNOW they are accurate--and we don't.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/07/making_democracy_transparent.php

We recognize that election integrity has become a critical issue facing our democracy, and that repairing voter confidence in elections is of utmost importance.  We assert that interference in elections or systemic efforts to obstruct them is a civil rights violation subject to all the penalties available as remedy.  We support efforts to ensure that all eligible voters are fully able to exercise their right to vote without obstruction, and their votes be recorded reliably and counted accurately.  To that end we support ensuring that voting machines and vote tallies are reliable, accurate and accountable by requiring a paper ballot, and by requiring all voting and tallying software to be fully transparent and free of proprietary restrictions on review.  Further, elections, information technology, and accounting best practices are followed.

I want to note that in American political history trust has been a result of divided government and checks and balances.  These two principles are threaded through the US Constitution's structuring of the federal government, and have been reinforced throughout the early history of the US by the concept of federalism -- the concommitant operation of both the federal and state governments.

Our Constitution presupposes that trust of government is a product of the processes by which it functions.  

I think that in the current debate, trust has become an important issue; but the trust issue has come to the fore because the processes under which we cast our votes are no longer perceived by many to be accountable or transparent.

When somebody says "trust me", then I want them to define what they mean by "trust"; because I know what I mean.

"Trust" doesn't have to mean something good. If somebody does bad screwed up things, I can trust them to do those things in the future. Trust is the ability to predict future behavior based on past performance... or else it is hope of future behavior without regard to the past, an opportunity to begin to establish the history of behavior which will inform future expectations. Is there a continuum represented there?

Working elections is not something the majority of people do all year long; hopefully the people who do it bring with them transferable skills and backgrounds and motivations which allow them... nay, compel them... to execute their duties in a way which leads to fair and trustworthy elections.

But, in spite of all the concern about campaigns, I don't see people falling all over each other to be election workers.

On the other hand (how many hands do I have?) we have the people who do it all year long, the professionals, and their record doesn't seem so good... specifically with elections, but also just managing technology generally.

I mentioned the ISB Hall of Phlegm in another post. That doesn't mean that good people didn't work hard on a lot of that stuff, but somehow... that URL to the risk matrix goes nowhere now, a side effect of the reorganization of the DIS/ISB web site to improve usability and maintainability or so I am told, by someone with authority and perfectly good intentions I am sure.

I'm still waiting for a certain elections office full-timer to call me back and let me know: is it or isn't it illegal to photocopy your own filled-in ballot before mailing... and cite the statute for me, will ya? This isn't for me, because I know (I think) that it's illegal; but I can't cite the statute. It is troubling that the full-timers can't affirm or refute this, however... or feel it is important enough not to forget to follow up on. Should be a piece of cake, or am I missing something?