Everything has its advantages and disadvantages. Even when they tilt strongly favorable, considering the unfavorable gets the most from the advantages and helps avoid unforeseen consequences that may turn out to be a bigger problem than expected.
The new computerized voting system deployed in the November election in Atlantic County and much of the rest of New Jersey is a great improvement. A state law required such machines that make a paper backup of votes by 2008 and we had urged counties to use them before then, but only now are they becoming the norm.
This countywide use in a general election was most people’s first look at these more secure voting machines. After the ballot choices are made, the machine prints a paper version of the filled-out ballot and displays it. With the voter’s approval, the vote is cast and the paper is stored to provide a secure record against which the computer count may be checked.
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One benefit is that election results can become available sooner than in the old days of hand counting paper ballots. Another is that the possibility of crude vote rigging with machine tampering, or ballots disappearing or suddenly being produced has been much reduced. Atlantic County has bought 325 of the machines, with New Jersey covering about half of the cost.
This machine’s operation is wonderful to behold, displaying the tentative ballot and then filing it away. It’s also far more complicated — physically and electronically — than prior machines. Reliability will be critical and probably become more so as dual-vote machines age. Technology is usually great when it works, and greatly frustrating when it too frequently doesn’t. If voting machine problems increase or take long to fix, they might interfere with the election.
The voting machines work seamlessly with the electronic poll books the county changed to last year. Together these technologies instantly make available information about the vote, which is a blessing for those anxious to hear the results. It also sharpens a persistent election danger and creates a new potentially transformative capability that hasn’t been publicly discussed.
The existing danger is that a partisan will illegally pass early results to a political party to help it win. This small risk would have been greater if the state had allowed counties to start counting mail-in votes (for their convenience) before Election Day, but the proposal died in the Assembly.
The electronic voting machines might create the potential for meaningful early and illegal release of results on Election Day. Ballot harvesting operations are limited in the number of votes they can produce and take chances producing them. Knowing a race is close an hour before polls close could be helpful. Someone hacking into the system might access election-wide data, whereas hacks in the past were limited to individual voting machines.
The electronic poll books are routinely making available the next best thing: real-time updates to political parties on who has voted so far during Election Day.
The major parties have long deployed poll watchers to get a rough count of how their turnout is going. In November, parties and candidates got “pulse reports” from counties across New Jersey, according to a Jersey Conservative column, “detailing who has voted (and who remains to vote) at various intervals on election day.” The piece said an advisor had told Republicans that the reports on voters are “an important tool in tracking voter turnout and monitoring potential election irregularities.”
Such reports dramatically enhance get-out-the-vote operations. The value in that can been seen in Jersey Conservative’s strong criticism of officials in Republican-leaning Sussex County for not making detailed pulse reports available. The clerk’s office released only the names of voters, not their affiliation, voter ID number, election district or town.
Discovering election irregularities would be good. This new and dramatic publication of information about voters, however, may have consequences the public doesn’t want.
Elections may become even more about who has the money and workers to run the biggest voter turnout operation, and less about who is thoughtfully chosen by voters. Public oversight of elected officials already is weak in overly corrupt New Jersey.
The two major political parties will be further empowered, possibly making it even more difficult for independent candidates to compete. Or would there be a chance that the pulse reports would level the turnout playing field, and help independents in smaller local races?
There is also a question of fundamental privacy. Why should anyone have a right to know where and when you voted, or whether you’ve voted yet?
Electronic integrated poll books and voting machines have clear advantages for voting integrity and timely results. They do strike us, though, as possibly another step in the industrialization of voting and the devaluation of meaningful choices by citizens.