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Citizens want to believe that the practices
in place for electing officials into government office are fair and true. After
all, what is the point of having a democracy if a voting system can be easily
tampered and hacked by outside forces, completely skewing the results of elections?
To this end, the Presidential Commission on Election Administration recently
recommended in its January 2014 report that “audits of voting equipment must be
conducted after each election, as part of a comprehensive audit program, and
that data concerning machine performance must be publicly disclosed in a common
data format.”
As more and more jurisdictions begin to
adopt electronic voting machines, particularly direct-recording electronic
(DRE) voting machines that may or may not have a voter-verifiable paper trail
for audits, it is becoming a big concern for those seeking more transparency in
election administration. The audit trail for the ballots themselves is of great
importance, as it provides a means of checking election results in the case of
a recount, but there's more to this conundrum.
Indeed, we've seen how electoral audits in
the United States are good, but they're
not perfect. The Presidential Commission on Election Administration
particularly encourages the use of post-election audits to check on the
performance of voting technology. The Commission recommends that the election
administrations in the various districts audit the voting machines after each
election to “ensure both that the vote totals match the votes cast and that any
problems related to machinery are reported and resolved.” However, this may be
only part of the solution.
If a problem with the voting machines was
discovered during the post-election audit, what could they do to rectify the
situation? If the security of the voting infrastructure was compromised, what
can do then? Instead, a better approach would be the inclusion of pre-electoral
audits to ensure the performance and security of the voting apparatus. This
way, as post-election audits can detect fraud after it has already happened,
pre-election audits can prevent them from happening in the first place.
This approach is gaining steam around the
world. Venezuela, a nation that has automated its entire electoral process, took
this exact approach, performing a robust set of pre-election audits leading
up to the actual voting day. The audits inspected the voting machine during its
configuration phase, for instance, as well as the e-voting software, the
electoral infrastructure, the biometric authentication system used to verify
the identity of voters, the data transmission network, the tallying of the
ballots, and the closure of the election, among other aspects. This comprehensive
check throughout the election stages helped to provide the transparency
citizens need.
The US Presidential Commission did not go
into that level of detail with its recommendation, but it does indicate the
importance of performing different types of audits for different functions. It
endorses the need to audit the ballots cast to ensure the correct result is
reported, but also the importance of auditing the performance of the voting
technology itself.
The results of the pre- and post-election
audits must also be publicized and open to public scrutiny. This would allow
other jurisdictions to learn from the problems experienced by other districts,
encouraging a more secure, more reliable, more problem-free and more robust
voting system for all.
