Voting Mechanics

Voting Mechanics

Once you figure out who can vote, you still have to run the election in a way that inspires confidence. For at least ten years, this has been a fraught subject, in at least two ways: controversies over who is registered (or is allowed to vote regardless of iffy registration status), and controversies over the accuracy or honesty of the tabulation.

Here's a headache I'm glad I don't have. Early yesterday, the warehouse holding virtually all of Houston's (Harris County) 10,000 voting machines burned to a crisp. That's $30 million worth of machines called "eSlates," and their accompanying "judge booth controllers" or JBCs, expected to be used in a county with 1.9 million registered voters in 884 precincts.

The County Clerk, Beverly Kaufman, is a capable and efficient administrator with 16 years on the job who plans to retire this December. Her last election promises to be a doozy. Early voting starts in 51 days in what is expected to be a very high-turnout election that includes a gubernatorial race.

Until the late 1990s, Harris County still used punch ballots. They had switched to the eSlates by the time of the 2000 presidential race, and now everyone is thoroughly used to them, though suspicions continue over the lack of a paper trail for this fully electronic system. I used to think those suspicions were overblown, but I've come to see the value in a paper trail. If there is controversy over an eSlate, all you can do is argue about whether programmers got improper access to the machine. My current county uses a combination of eSlate and something called eScan. The eScan machines require the voter to blacken little boxes on a paper ballot, then feed it through a scanner. If the machine has trouble reading the ballot, it spits it back for correction. If there is a later dispute over whether the scanning and tabulation process has been jimmied, the paper ballots are held in an inside box, so a spot audit could detect a discrepancy -- a prospect I would expect to deter anyone attempting to defraud the system unless he could be sure of uniform cooperation at the precinct and county level. If you get enough people in the conspiracy, any system can be gamed, but the larger it has to be, the less likely it is to be carried off successfully.

I don't envy Ms. Kaufman; I expect she will be putting out an emergency call to all the other 253 Texas counties for the loan of some eSlates. The fire department is investigating arson. As usual, there already were calls for investigations into the voting system pending, so there will be accusations flying about who was most interested in hiding the evidence.

Just before each election, the county clerk issues the voting machines to the election judges, who are expected to ensure their security overnight and during the election day. Before today I never gave any thought to how secure the machines were for the rest of the year.