We’re talking about counting votes, and how votes are
counted. In Part I we talked about why the Electoral College is still a good
idea and why the National Popular Vote (NPV) compact is a bad idea.
Just one of the significant reasons this is a bad idea is
that we can’t get an accurate vote total. It’s just not possible in our current
reality. Today, in Part II, we'll cover some of the details of why accurately
counting all votes is an unattainable wish.
Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located (and where I
live), has been an epicenter working toward voter integrity for a long time[i].
Alan Vera has been working for ballot security as his main battle for the past
decade—and has trained people around the country on these issues. (He trained
me as a poll watcher.) He spoke at our local Tea Party meeting a couple of
weeks ago, reporting on the legislative session, and generally about ballot
security issues.
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| Hart e-Slate machine image from here |
We have, in this county, what Vera believes is the gold
standard for electronic voting machines, the Hart e-Slate. It has passed every
test for every election, without fail. But, as of the last election, all
countywide offices were won by Democrats, and the new County Clerk isn’t about
voter integrity; she’s about getting particular results.
One of her “innovations” is countywide voting. This has been
allowed in certain counties of Texas—mainly small, rural counties, where it
makes some sense, where poll workers are likely to recognize their neighbors who
come to vote. But she initiated it here without state approval for our May
special election (a day for school boards, city councils, and other smaller
things that don’t happen at the usual November election time—an issue for
another day).
During early voting—the two weeks prior to voting day—we
have citywide voting. You can vote at any designated voting location in the
county. A computer system is set up to get the voter data and update it online supposedly immediately. People like the flexibility. But there’s a limited number of
polling places, about three dozen. They’re spread out across the county, an
area roughly the size of the state of New Jersey, so it takes a good twenty
minutes to drive from one to another. It would be hard for a nefarious voter to
vote at one place and get to another one before the system updated to prevent
him from voting at another location.
But on election day we typically have as many as 800 polling
places in the county. When they’re set up by precinct, you can more or less guarantee
that you won’t overcrowd a place too badly. But when people choose their own
voting location based on convenience to their work or whatever, you don’t know
what kind of bottlenecks you’re going to cause. That’s just one problem.
But, back to the updates. My polling place is located in a
middle school. The elementary school next door is a voting place for the adjacent
precinct. It’s a two-minute walk.
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| Alan Vera image from here |
How long does it take for the “immediate” updates? Alan Vera
and team did experiments to find out.
What needs to happen is that electronic
poll books (a handy little tablet we now use, that works pretty well, I think) needs
to register that a voter was given a code, and then relay that information to
all the other voting locations to indicate that particular voter has voted and cannot vote again. During early voting, locations are set up to have
good internet and quick updates. Training tells polling judges that they are
instantaneous, so they shouldn’t worry. But in the many locations on a regular
election day, they could be in schools, where internet access may be blocked,
or there may be interference. It took as short as around 20 minutes for a
machine to update to as long as 17 hours. The team even found that it took a half hour for the
e-pollbook to update to the adjacent machine at the very same voting location,
which should be instantaneous. Vera has the data now to prove that the county
cannot qualify for countywide voting.
There’s also a push toward throwing out the secure and
accurate e-Slate machine and spending billions of dollars on a combination of
electronic and paper system. You print out your vote, and then the machine has
no other record. What could go wrong?
There’s a requirement to use electronic systems that meet a
minimum standard, enacted eventually following the 2000 debacle in Florida. Paper ballots have always
been subject to fraud.
Back in 2004, in the Washington State governor’s race,
Christine Gregoire won against Dino Rossi, on a third recount, after Rossi had won
by 261 votes, when all of a sudden, well after the close of the election, someone
says, “Oh, my, I almost forgot. I have these boxes of ballots sitting out back
in my shed. We have to count those.” And, lo and behold, they counted and
counted until the total changed the outcome.
Look now at California. The governor has declared that they
will give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, and a driver’s license is the
only requirement to vote. In other words, they are declaring that the vote
total in California will include as many illegals as they can get to vote.
That means that, if the NPV compact were to be in effect, the vote
outcome in any state in the compact would depend on the votes of illegal voters
in California. And the outcome of the entire US presidential vote would depend
on votes that should not count.
The reality is that we do not count all votes. We count
enough to determine the outcome. All votes available and certified on election
day get counted. Provisional votes take more time and depend on case-by-case circumstances. Mail-in votes—a larger
portion and a growing fraud problem—get counted if received on time, but there
may be leeway based on postmark date (different rules in different
jurisdictions). Military votes that arrive this way tend to be left out of the
count, unless there’s a recount that requires a more accurate count of all
votes. If they’re deemed mathematically unlikely to change the outcome, they
get left uncounted.
Then there are the disputed votes. Overvotes, for example,
where more than one candidate is marked on a ballot (not possible on a
certified e-Slate machine, but common on any kind of paper ballot and some other systems). This is the
kind of detail that makes recounts slow and tedious and makes the outcome
uncertain for long periods of time.
And there are issues of fraud that come up. If, for example,
a particular voting place was found to contain an extra several hundred votes
that all have the same signature—that means a poll worker, probably in cahoots
with the presiding judge, found names from the precinct that hadn’t voted and
they input votes for those names, signing each person’s name without even
trying to disguise the signature. Yes, that has been done, in Harris County.
And that was when each precinct was separate. With countywide voting, there
could be such fraudulent voters who put in every name in the entire county at
every voting place and truly mess up the accuracy of the count.
With NPV, there would be incentive for such fraud to take
place—at any and every voting location that wasn’t run by honest Americans and
watched over by other honest Americans from the opposing party.
Imagine how much discord there would be if states used this
combination of fraud and NPV to prevent a win to a Republican president.
Constitution-loving Americans would not stand for being subjugated under a
corrupt, illegitimate ruler. It would end the centuries-long peaceful turnover
of power that our founders designed.
The national vote total is not how we elect a president. It
isn’t even possible for us to count an accurate national vote. The Electoral
College isn’t antiquated and outdated; it is more necessary than ever.
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