Counting Votes by Weight: Naysayer Responses
Response to criticisms of voting by weight
The balances of Justice are Blind…or so Lady Justice promises by the holding of a SCALE while blindfolded.
Counting Votes by Weight with a SCALE is a way to achieve Blind Justice.
Below I describe more details about counting votes by weight. In my small EDA subscription base, this topic has been one of the most viewed posts so apparently there is some interest. I want to elaborate on the count by weight process in more detail, especially for the Naysayers.
For this we will use the Red Team approach which is basically subjecting your ideas to public scrutiny about ways that it could FAIL. Then describing how to protect against the failure.
I invite everyone reading this to become part of the Red Team in the comments. Go ahead, take your best shot.
First, let’s make sure the assumptions from the original article are spelled out again.
Mail in voting by absentee ballot request only, no universal mail in ballots. Absentee voters would use a traditional ballot.
2,000-3,000 people per precinct.
Voting occurs in person with an ID.
Voters check in by signing a paper registration book.
You can only vote in your precinct.
Fraud Opportunities Identified by the Red Team
The Voter will pass through the voting center more than once.
This is resolved by using an ID and checking in at a precinct with a registration roster and a wet signature. No more e-poll books. Use a paper book. You can only vote in YOUR precinct. No mater what hand counting method is used, this has to be solved. Counting by Weight (CBW) does not present anymore of a challenge than any other manual counting method.
Fake voters with fake IDs will show up to vote
This has to be resolved by voter roll maintenance and clean up. If a fake person exists on a roll and they provide a fake ID, that is a type of problem that exists TODAY. It has no bearing on CBW. CBW does not present anymore of a challenge than any other manual counting method.
The voting papers stack supplied to each precinct will be UNMANAGEABLE
We can learn from other countries on this topic, like Australia and Canada who vote by hand on paper and count by hand.
To elaborate on the specific case study in my previous article on CBW, there are 29 contests in this precinct with at most 3,000 voters in a precinct. So that is 29 x 3000 = 87,000 voting papers. If each voting paper weighs 1 gram, that is roughly 191 lbs of paper that is about the size of an index card or a dollar bill let’s assume. Divided into 29 stacks for each contest, this is about 7lbs per stack. 7lbs is a very manageable amount of paper. This equates to a stack of paper several feet high per contest.
So in summary, we are asking the poll workers at each contest voting table to manage a stack of paper that weighs ~ 7lbs and is about 3’ tall. Not a big deal. Easier the shuffling around a bunch of machines from a warehouse to a precinct and back.
The voting papers can be counterfeit
Let’s not reinvent the wheel. Banks have already solved this by using fraud resistant paper and with the ability to detect fraudulent paper. Leverage that technology. Furthermore, in this use case, people are going to be given the OFFICIAL voting paper at the EXACT moment before casting a contest vote in public view.
Checking into vote at my precinct is going to take a long time
This is a staffing problem that can be solved with MONEY. Pay people enough and they will take the positions. Use civil SERVANTS. Sorry folks, you work for the government, once every two years you do your duty and work some overtime. Again, no matter what the hand counting method is used, this has to be solved. Counting by weight does not present anymore of a challenge than any other manual counting method.
Managing the que is going to be confusing
This takes some unpacking.
After you check in at the registration table, I would propose you are given an OFFICIAL voting card. Then you enter the voting area. In order to obtain a voting paper, you need to present your card to the poll worker. They look at the card and verify it DOES NOT have a stamp for the contest number on it. Remember, there are 29 contests.
The poll worker then stamps your voting card as having voted at that station and initials on the stamp. Then you are given a voting paper for that contest. You step into an area where there is enough privacy to make you choice. Then step into the OPEN view of the general public and poll workers and deposit that voting paper in the box.
You can choose any station you want in any order. But remember, no card, no voting paper, no voting. If the card already has a stamp for that contest number, no voting paper will be provided. If you are still at that station and make a mistake, you can be given a new voting paper BEFORE you deposit the first one. Stamps are applied to passports all over the world when you want to enter a new country. Why can’t we stamp people into the voting contest?
Voting is not going to be anonymous
This issue has already been resolved in other countries that vote on paper. There are many types of solutions available for giving voters some privacy when marking the paper.
The paper will end up in the wrong box
Again, this issue has been addressed in other countries like Australia. There is a green box for green voting paper and a purple one for purple paper and so on. Each box also has an alpha numeric designator. In the event some voting paper does get co-mingled, that would be an adjudication opportunity. But it would be easy enough to tell that the paper itself was legit and sort it into the correct pile. The sorting process would resolve this rare instance.
A voter will sell their paper to someone else
In order for this to happen, the person would have to go through the station and be given the voting paper then walk past the box and not cast it AND have their card stamped as having voted. This might be someone’s choice. They were issued a paper and decided to not vote that contest. Now what?
They leave the voting center and sell it someone else? What does that person do? They have to be admitted to the voting center for starters and go through the same process. The only way selling your paper would impact the vote tally is if the person casting the vote could stuff more papers in the box than ONE out in public view. That is a procedural control and perhaps even a technical control that is absolutely solvable at the point it is deposited in the box.
A voter will stuff the box with more than one piece of paper that they purchased from someone else
Firstly, understand that this problem has been addressed in other countries that we can learn from. Second, this approach to fraud is not INDUSTRIAL level fraud like the use of mail in ballots produces. But what can be done about it nonetheless?
First, you are dropping the paper into a box out in the open and bipartisan poll workers would be available to prevent stuffing. Second, a camera could be positioned on the box itself. Imagine if that is live streamed? You might have 1,000s of eyeballs on that action of dropping the paper in the slot. Lastly, I suggested in my prior article that this contest box MIGHT be setup to record the weigh deposited in it by the use of a calibrated scale. It is simple technology to have a completely local alarm (not networked) on the scale to alert a poll worker if the weigh increase for a single person is more than expected, as a safeguard.
The voting paper could be damaged by the voter when voting
While possible, the opportunity window for this is very small. Remember, the voter does not obtain the voting paper until they enter the contest station. With the exception of marking the paper, everything else is out in the open. Any papers that are damaged would need to be adjudicated during the count.
The voting paper mark itself can be viewed after it is marked before dropping it into the box thus putting at risk the secret vote
Again, this is not rocket science and other countries have figured this out. There would be no problem in folding the paper as a fold does not impact a weight analysis. The paper could also be placed in an envelope or slip cover for privacy, then deposited in the box. Taking the papers out of the envelopes would add some time to the sorting effort. But there is nothing technically difficult to this additional process step.
Manually counting is too tedious, inaccurate and time consuming
This perhaps is the easiest to refute. Humans are better at sorting than manual counting and tallying I would argue. Sorting each contestant box into different stacks based on vote, overrvote, undervote or need to adjudicate is an easy procedure. The scale does the counting. In the event a manual count was needed for a particular case, counting a sorted stack is far easier than tallying counts from ballots.
Printing the Voting Papers is too complicated
And printing the current ballot styles are not? Of course currently printing ballots is complicated because you have so may contests on a single ballot and the contests will change from precinct to precinct. Printing contest voting paper is simplified with a single contest. Each precinct then just needs to be given the correct set of papers that are relevant to that precinct.
The Process is Not Auditable
Someone making this statement would need to be more specific. Imagine you wanted to audit the sets of voting papers for a precinct. There would need to be a written procedure for how that precinct voting center is run, what the responsibilities are, how are the papers handled, how are they stamped, how are the voting cards I refer to above handed out, how the sorting and weighing works, how the tally is recorded, how the tally is reported, how the totals are posted in the precinct and how the final voting papers are boxed and stored. There, have I covered most of it? Do you think an 18 year old high school grad could understand that? I do. Now compare that to trying to understand the computer code used to tally the votes and how to administrate these complicated machines. Or trying to understand what a Logic and Accuracy Test is.
The Process Lacks a Backup Method of Counting
This is simple to solve. Remember, there is one primary scale being used to weigh ALL of the contest results so everyone is using the exact same calibration. There could easily be one or perhaps two backup scales at the precinct. This would amount to less than a $10,000 investment in scales per precinct. In addition, depending on the voting paper, once it is sorted, a manual paper count might be used to cross check or verify the count by weight numbers.
This will take too many people
There are ~ 174,000 precincts in the US. Using a round number, if there are 150MM voters that is roughly 862 voters per precinct on average. Making another reasonable ball park assumption, let’s assume there are 25 contests on any given election. So the staffing plan at a precinct and overall in the country would be:
Registration Check In - Assume 2
Obtain Voting Cards - Assume 2
Staff Voting Stations - 25 x 2 (worst case) to obtain voting paper and monitor boxes
Supervisors - 1
Support Staff - 1
Total Per Precinct ~ 50 people (worst case)
Total Overall - 174,000 x 50 = 8.7MM people
This is a BIG number but there are more than 19MM civil servants in the US working for state or local governments right now. You add to that well paid citizen positions, the staffing problem can be solved.
Also for smaller precincts, it quite conceivable that multiple voting stations could be staffed by the same people, lowering the counts significantly.
Mobilizing 8.7MM people to run our elections every two years could be a point of national PRIDE rather than a burden. Millions ALREADY work the polls.
Paying all the people would cost too much
Let’s assume worst case we are talking about say 8MM people who need to be mobilized and they each work on average 8 hours. Assume 50% are civil servants and the other half are citizens. Assume the pay rate is $20/hr for the citizens and the civil servants are paid as part of the salary. The very basic math is 8MM/2 x 8 x 20 = $640,000,000. A big number indeed, but I have shown here this is a SMALL number compared to what we spend on election machines. Also, remember this is our tax money going directly back into the community as opposed to being funneled off to Blackrock or a corporation. Given that we seem to giving away BILLIONS to Ukraine, spending $640,000,000 every two years (worst case) to have election results we can trust is any easy trade off, for me at least.
Poke holes in the logistics I describe above, you won’t be censored.
Cheers