Principles: Every Voter Wins

Are there foundational principles about which everyone can agree?

Probably most would agree that the statutes, the rules, must align with the Minnesota Constitution, which is Minnesota’s founding document.

From there, principles like, one man one vote, a secret ballot, and other ideas can be taken onboard. This writer does like to enter into the details of these principles.

One man one vote seems obvious enough. The current requirement in state statutes is, any man or woman of an appropriate age (currently that is set to 18) who is a U.S. citizen and has lived in Minnesota for at least 20 days.

A secret ballot. This has multiple interpretations. For how long should the choices of the voter remain secret? For me, the original idea of the secret ballot came from a vision of removing outside influence from a voter’s selections. (Consider the story of pro-Washington voters who quickly lined up to persuade fence-sitters and even anti-Washington voters to vote for him so as not to be seen as having voted against a landslide winner.) So, a semi-private booth (or even a fully private one) to think quietly for himself and fill in the choices. After a few hours or days, I personally don’t mind if my choices become known—indeed, there are already sophisticated ways to learn an individual’s choices. For example, I tend to receive more candidate promotions in the mail from one of the two major political parties, even though I think both parties are part of the problem inherent to our current system, and when I consider labeling myself politically, which is a fairly low-priority aspect of my overall identity, it is as an independent.

Can We Show Our Work?

Perhaps most important to me is the ability to check the work. Verifiability. Proof. If a process cannot be audited, if certain parts of the overall election system are hidden (by design or through legislative acts) from public view, then the election game is no longer fair, or at least cannot be shown to have functioned as designed. Such an outcome asks voters to trust the adminstrators or the software-driven outcomes, or both, which violates the ethos of “show your work”.

So, to avoid having to show a huge amount of work, perhaps an election system should be simple. This at least reduces tension between the people and the administrators when the people are asking for data and the administrators already having more to do each year with all the extra work legislative and administrative rule changes inflict upon them. Now to an analogy to help unpack what is meant by “every voter wins”.

(So Far) The House Always Wins

When I was a semi-professional online poker player (it only lasted a few months), the online sites where I played took between 3 and 5% of every pot (or hand). So, if I won a $5 pot, the site took $0.25 leaving me with $4.75. This is called rake. Casinos do the same. Home games, playing with friends and neighbors, generally do not. In this setup, the “house”—the websites and the casinos, always win, because of their tax collection.

By analogy, if any part of the election system bars the public from viewing the data, process, or electronic audits (like ballot images, a central step in vote tabulation), then the “house”, which in this case is the Election System (capitals intended) wins. A portion of the voters will be temporarily appeased because their candidate won the election (whether for city council or US Senate); however, every voter loses because they were blocked from receiving proof in the accuracy of the results. This is our current situation: ever voter loses. Many shrug and continue voting, partially because we are addicted to politics and the idea that the government is the only solution to our myriad problems, when self-reliance and collective coordination often is successful sans government. (And governments in the current form have not been around all that long and its arguable how successful they’ve been, and for whom.)

Can an Election System be designed to show its work? Yes. Instead of an Election System which lacks real transparency, one which innately, through a carefully designed set of rules, that can demonstrably show every part of its process, including electronic systems (computers tabulators, iPad rosters, absentee ballot databases, and voter registration and history databases), that is an Election System where every voter wins, no matter if their chosen candidate wins or loses.

Achieving “Every Voter Wins”

Is this a high bar? Yes. But if government cannot prove that its elections are fair, what are the consequences? Sure, some number of voters will be disgruntled and complain, causing extra workload for county auditors and anyone responding to data requests from citizen auditors.

But the worst case is this: legislators who should not have won (but were said to have officially won) take a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives or the Minnesota Senate, and can proceed to participate in further changing the rules of the game, through legislation, by scratching, amending, or adding completely new statutes.

The legislators themselves, however, in my view, tend to be on the receiving end of authored legislation despite appearances and official indicators like ‘Bill Author’ on proposed bills—one can presume that much negotiation and discussion about what will go into an election bill occurs behind closed doors.

So, as we go into just a few of the election statutes, one by one, this is the framework for fair elections that will anchor our discussion: How can every voter win?