Washblog

Ballot Tracking

The executive's reckless plan proposes four steps in the mail balloting process, where each voter can monitor the status of their mail ballot.

1. Mail ballot sent to voter
   
2. Mail ballot received by election services
   
3. Signature verified, voter credited with voting
   
4. Mail ballot envelope opened

Only two of these steps, #2 and #3, are meaningful to voters.

Step #1 is unnecessary. All mail ballots are sent at the same time, by law. There is no need (whatsoever) for this to be tracked per voter. Voters can rely on the existing notices, such as this one from August 1st.

Steps #2 and #3 are good tracking points. Happily, this is the current system. Voters can call (phone) to verify the status of their ballots. In fact, all of the data is already available online, in bulk form. Adding a simple web interface to this existing system is the cheapest, easiest, most obvious solution. (We can already track the status of provisional ballots using the internet. What I'm proposing is no different.)

Step #4 is just silly. If the signature has been verified, there's no reason to know when the ballot envelope was opened. REALS fabricated this "requirement" to justify buying VoteHere's Mail-in Ballot Tracker.

As proof, here's the findings of the voter focus group REALS conducted (exhibit 3, under the heading "Ballot Tracking"):

Overwhelmingly, the stage people were most interested in checking was that their
envelope had been received by King County Elections.  Many people were happy
to put their faith in King County and its process as long as they could verify that
their ballot had been received. ...

...

...the majority felt confident that if their ballot had been received and
signature verified, it would be counted.  Tabulation was not as high of a priority
as these first two steps.

Batch Accountability

VoteHere's MiBT is being pitched as a labor reducing measure. I don't buy it.

The rough outline of inbound mail ballot processing can be found in exhibit 1. We care about these steps:

4. Inbound returns via USPS, ballot drop boxes, and poll sites.
   
5. Receipt and subsequent scan, sort, and batch.
   
6. Signature verification of each ballot packet.
   
7. Opening, extraction and visual check of ballots.
   
8. Ballot duplication. Canvass Board ruling.
   
9. Ballot tabulated.

Once the ballots have been sorted and placed into batches (step 5), the ballots must be counted at each processing step. Currently, those counts are written on a paper batch slip. With VoteHere's Mail-in Ballot Tracker, the counts would (presumably) be entered directly.

So the big difference is data entry (into a big spreadsheet) vs data entry (into MiBT).

Well. It hardly seems worth the upfront (over $1,200,000) and ongoing (estimated $1,320,000 per year) costs.

(I'd happily bang out a little forms entry utility and donate it to the county, if I thought it'd be used.)

Problems With Computerization Part One

Councilmember Julia Patterson believes that using computers will reduce human error. I'm sorry, but only people who don't have experience with computers (and sales people) think that. There's a cliche that applies:

To error is human;
To really mess things up, you need a computer.

Computerization (digitization) and automation are not the same. Automation is when you remove all decisions (human judgment). Only then does it sometimes make sense to computerize a process.

Too much of what our elections officials are trying to do is computerizing tasks that still require human judgment (decision making). That's when the problems happen, despite all the good intentions and will power mustered.

Problems With Computerization Part Two

If a task or process is computerized, I can't observe it. Our state constitution guarantees a public vote count. Meaning I should be able to observe the entire process.

I believe all these new fangled election technologies are unconstitutional, in spirit if not in law. That includes computerized voting, automatic signature verification, electronically modifying ballots (votes), etc.