Vote Counts, Part II

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.

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.

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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[i] I’ve written about election integrity here, here, here, and here. 

Vote Counts, Part I

image found here

Should every vote count? Yes.

Should every vote be counted? Yes, in an ideal world.

Should the winner be the one who gets more votes than the other(s)? Not necessarily.

There’s a Tom Woods Show podcast, from November 18, 2016, just after President Trump was elected, in which Woods was talking about the Electoral College with Kevin Gutzman[i] and Brion McClanahan[ii]. Woods shares a baseball metaphor that might help here. Suppose you’ve got two teams in the baseball World Series. Team A wins three games 8-1, 8-1, 8-1, and Team B wins three games 2-1, 2-1, 2-1, and then in the final game Team B wins again 2-1. Team B wins the series.

image from here

If Team A starts complaining, “Hey, but we earned a bigger total number of absolute points: a total of 28 points. And those guys only earned a total of 11 points. We’re the real winners”—everybody rolls their eyes and calls them sore losers. Total points don’t matter. The thing that matters is games won.

The strategy would be completely different if a team were playing for most runs scored over several games. For example, as Kevin Gutzman adds,

If you think about the strategy involved in managing the World Series, your analogy is illuminating. For example, in game 1 the team that’s down 6-1 in the 8^th inning isn’t going to put in it’s best relief pitcher, because it doesn’t care what the final margin is at that point. They know they’ve lost. They want to save their best pitchers for the remaining games, and so they don’t throw their number 1 guy out there in the 9^th inning.

On the other hand, if it mattered what the margin was in game 1, if that had anything to do with who was eventually going to win the series, then you might see the ace closer come on in the 9^th inning with the score 7-1, to try to ensure that there weren’t anymore runs scored….

So that’s like Trump not spending much time campaigning in California. There’s just no reason for him to go waste money and his own time, or Pence’s time, or some Trump offspring’s time, or anyone’s time trying to get more votes in California when they know they’ve lost. So, again, you get to the 9^th inning of game 1, you’re down 6-1, you’re going to put the scrub middle reliever out there to get batted around a little bit, because you really don’t care. You just want to get the game over with, and let’s move on to game 2.

Strategy would change in a presidential campaign, because, similarly, total votes is not the way the American presidential vote is won.

Think about this. What is united in the United States? The states. We’re not the “United Individuals of America.” Our states are not provinces, or districts, or boroughs segmenting a singular larger entity, as is common in other nations. According to the online dictionary, a state is:

a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government

While we have democratic (rule by the majority of the people) aspects, we are not simply ruled by the changing whims of the majority of Americans. We safeguard against that kind of tyranny by having a republic—a representative form of government. We have representatives at the state level, and at the congressional district level. And within states we have similar levels down to very local.

The way the election of our president was set up, the states—which are independently governed entities—hold elections to decide on electors, who will represent that state’s choice for president.

Anyone who wins the presidency has to win not only a preponderance of states, but a wide variety of little societies that have their own interests and needs. Gulf states have different needs from Eastern Seaboard states. Southwestern states have different needs from Midwest states. Mountainous areas have different needs from coasts or deserts or plains. Big urban centers have different needs from smaller cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

The rules of the game are to make belonging to the United States valuable to people in all these different littler societies. This is on purpose, and by design. It was never about getting the highest number of voters, any more than winning the World Series is about getting the most total points. In fact, the first several elections didn’t even record the total number of votes.

On that Woods podcast they point out that no one tries to determine the Senate majority by seeing which party got the highest vote total. The “game” isn’t played that way.

So the strategy is different.

The biggest difference is that we don’t have candidates simply go to the biggest urban centers, where they can accumulate the most votes, and ignore the rest of the country. Every location has at least some small strategic significance. And a candidate decides where to spend time and resources based on the effort to win the most electoral college votes.

That idea that the total votes is irrelevant is important. It’s especially something to look at as there’s greater pressure to do an end-run (switching sports metaphors) around the Constitution and its amendment process by states doing a National Popular Vote (NPV) compact, in which these participating states determine their respective electors based on—not their individual state’s voters, but on the national vote total.

There are plenty of reasons this is a bad idea. And you can tell they’re not serious if you picture what they will do if/when Trump or any other Republican wins the popular vote. Will they declare their electors for that Republican winner? Or will they demur and say, “Well, the courts haven’t decided on whether we can actually do this yet”? It’s a one-way strategy only. They’re not about fairness; they’re corrupt.

One of the main reasons this is a bad idea is that we can’t get an accurate vote total. In theory it ought to be possible, but in reality it isn’t.

In Part II we'll cover some of the details of why an accurate national vote count isn't even attainable.

Electoral College by Design

The National Popular Vote movement—a work-around-that-pesky-Constitution way of eliminating the Electoral College—has been progressing apace behind the scenes[i]. It has a particular purpose: give power to Democrats.

In part this means giving power to a few large urban centers, ignoring all the rest. The debate goes back to the Great Compromise between population and state power that led to our bicameral legislature in the Constitution, and to the Electoral College.[ii]

US 2016 presidential vote by county
image from here

There were 57 counties in which Clinton won heavily (70%) in 2016.[iii] But there were 30 states out of 50, that Trump won. Trump didn’t win all those remaining counties beyond the 57 (counties aren’t a way votes are counted in a presidential election anyway), but when you exclude those high density urban Democrat strongholds and leave the other 3084 counties in play, Trump won that count by 7.5 million.

We don’t, of course, exclude urban areas. But when you give so much power to those urban areas (occupying only 24.4% of the geography), you severely discount the opinions/votes of people living outside those areas in the remaining 75.6% of the country.

So, should there be a popular vote? Is that fair?

Another question is, is it even possible?

Think back on the 2000 election, when the final decision came down to a few counties in Florida—counties that were already leaning toward Gore and there was no reason to believe they were under-counted, but they were heavy enough in his direction that there might be people there willing to scrape up some more.

So counties suspected of fraud against Gore weren’t recounted; only securely Gore-winning counties were recounted, which included precincts reporting zero votes for Bush, a statistical unlikelihood.

There was evidence that the very existence of a “hanging chad” was cause for concern. The most likely cause was someone taking a stack of that type of ballot and poking a sharp object, such as a straightened paperclip, through a particular hole, pushing through the whole stack. Any votes already for that candidate choice would be left untouched, and would legally count; any votes for an opponent would show up as a possible double vote and be considered invalid. That sharp object through the stack may be the only way to get a chad to only partially let go, leaving a hanging chad or a "pregnant chad" (indented but not punched out). Yet, there we had examiners trying to divine the intent of the voters when they were faced with a hanging chad or pregnant chad—which pretty much never went in favor of the Republican candidate. Hmm.

Meanwhile, there were questionable results in various polling places around the country. But at that point it was decided the possible errors were not enough to change the outcome of the state’s winner, and therefore not changing those states’ electoral votes. So those questionable places were not recounted.

If the popular vote had mattered—something that would also entirely change campaign strategies—a question of voter fraud anywhere would affect the outcome everywhere. In 2012 the difference was about 10 votes per polling place nationwide. I was a poll watcher in a place that was off by 20 that day. I turned in my report, of course. But it wasn’t urgently pursued, because the outcome in the state overall wasn’t in question.

There’s a particular problem with the National Popular Vote movement. It is being adopted only by those states Hillary Clinton won solidly. In other words, it’s an attempt by Democrats to enforce their votes only.

Electoral College vote 2016 (including faithless electors)
image from Wikipedia

Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Suppose the NPV movement were to obtain its 270 electoral vote total before the next election—meaning it would kick in for the 2020 election. Then suppose it’s a close election in which Donald Trump wins the popular vote by a small margin, but not the traditional Electoral College vote. Those NPV states are supposedly required by their own law to cast their electors for the popular vote winner. What do they do? If you’re guessing they’re suddenly up in arms about possible voter fraud and refuse to accept the count—or any number of recounts they can force to happen—that’s probable.

Do you see any scenario in which they say, “We really meant it when we said ‘one person one vote,’ and Trump is clearly the winner, because he won the popular vote, so of course our electors all go to him”? I don’t either.

What if Trump were to win the popular vote and the traditionally counted Electoral College vote? Does California give its electors to Trump, or back out of the compact and suddenly insist on the old system in which they at least can say their electors didn’t vote for him? There’s no mechanism in the compact to address electors who refuse to vote according to the NPV compact.

In other words, the only scenario in which they intend to go with the popular vote is when their Democrat candidate gets the popular vote. It isn’t about “fairness.” It’s a rigged game.

Let’s be clear. Rule by the National Popular Vote intentionally and forever disenfranchises voters everywhere except Democrats, who are concentrated in a relative few urban centers.

There are arguments about the legality of the NPV. I’ve heard many opinions, including pro-Constitutionalists, who believe, while it’s a dirty trick, it’s probably legal. But, if it is challenged, it will be for violating Article I, Section 10, which requires that interstate compacts receive congressional consent, which Trent England[iv], legal policy analyst and Director of Save Our States, believes will be its legal downfall. In addition, it could be challenged for ignoring the Electoral College clause, which he says “implies there is some limit on the power of state legislatures to ignore the will of their state’s people.”[v]

That is an important point: will the voters in California actually sit silent if voters in Texas and Oklahoma, for example, determine the winner contrary to California’s voters? This is not the same as feeling disenfranchised because other states’ electors voted differently; this is actually being disenfranchised because enough individual voters in other states change the votes of electors in California contrary to the voters in California.

NPV supporters are only willing to risk it, because they believe it will always fall only in their favor.

This is another case where, if you don’t see the wisdom of the founders, it’s more likely that you’re under-educated than that you’re smarter than they were.

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[i] The Harvard Review article “The Danger of the National Popular Vote Compact,” from March 13, 2019, is a good explanation.     

[ii] I discussed it in some details in “Population, Urban Thinking, and the Vote” and “Great Compromises.”

[iii] See the Breitbart article “Donald Trump Won 7.5 Million Popular Vote Landslide in Heartland” and also the Snopes Fact Check article “Did Trump Win 3,084 of 3,141 Counties in 2016, While Clinton Won Only 57?” which doesn’t dispute the Breitbart article, but only some of the math people extracted from it. I used a graphic that used the somewhat distorted county count here. The fact check article does not address the other claims in the graphic, and I have not independently verified them. Those not related to the original error are probably accurate.

[iv] Trent England, director of Save Our States, “The Danger of the Attacks on the Electoral College,” Imprimis, June 2019, Volume 48, Number 6. 

[v] William Josephson, in the New York Law Review article “17 Reason Why the National Popular Vote Initiative Is Likely to Fail,” offers his reasons, both legal and practical, that NPV will fair.