American Voting

Happy Election day!

Alongside all the other reasons to be watching the American elections I have been looking at how they implement the actual voting part. In previous years a lot of the coverage in this area has been about voting machines, from hanging chads to hacking. But a number of things this year seem like they are both good ideas in general and implementable in a UK general election.

Early Voting

This is the easiest to endorse, it has even been trialed in the UK (I'll see if I can find the report later). The way the trial worked, a centralised location, marking off voters on the actual paper copies of the electoral roll that would then be issued to polling stations to prevent repeats, fitted in with the british electoral esthetic that in general thinks the most complex piece of technology in use should be a peg.

Kerbside/drive through Voting

One of the really big issues with polling stations in the UK is accessibility. So providing an alternate option that improves access to voting has to be a good thing. Given that there would be limited venues available in order to not require pre-registration it would probably need to also be a pre-election day activity. Also if we were going to stick to the idea that there is "one true copy" of the register then there would need to be a system to avoid allowing people to use both forms of early voting. Off the top of my head, the "inner envelope" part of postal voting, so until the voting lists can be cross checked the ballot can be linked to the voter and destroyed if a duplicate.

Postal Ballot Acknowledgement

A tonne of the commentary running up to the election has been that the postal service has been used as a political football. As a consequence of this there have been a lot of articles around the subject of "What to do if your postal ballot doesn't arrive or is rejected". I was intrigued that being able to check up on this was a thing. And while this would require the use of technology, it is an enhancement (assuming a general low level of ballots missing/rejected) that if broken wouldn't halt the election so it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. So a simple website that tells people their ballot has been received, signatures matched etc. would allow people to spot rejections and do something about it.

The "constituency link"

Iain Dale has said:

Several commenters in the previous post have taken issue with my assertion that Proportional Representation, and most especially the STV system, weakens the constituency link - and this is the reason why I cannot support it. Let me explain.

[...]

The trouble is, that in 3, 6, 8, 10 or 12 member constituencies no one would really know who their MP is, just in the same way that no one now knows who their MEP is.

Of course in this day and age that is quite simple to fix, for the internet crowd it already is via WriteToThem where you can "Contact your Councillors, MP, MEPs, MSPs, or Northern Ireland, Welsh and London AMs for free". For those not internet enabled it wouldn’t be difficult or that expensive to set up constituency post office boxes; you would always write to one address no matter who was elected and in multi-member constituencies it wouldn’t be a huge logistical effort to give each member a copy.

He also said

Can we also dispel the myth that AV is in any way proportional.

Which is perfectly true, but it is what we are being offered at the moment, it is a stepping stone and I don't think we can get to any of the better systems beyond it without jumping on this one.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it

In the dying days of an unpopular government a Cabinet minister resigns pledging to clear his name. Jonathan Aitken ended up serving time in prison, I wonder how far Peter Hain is willing to take the parallels?
Dizzy's suggestion of specific bank accounts is looking more and more sensible by the day. I also think the Electoral Commission should take complete control over donation registration (the register of members interests can just point at the data for each member) and be given teeth to apply immediate financial penalties and bring their own charges to the the DPP.

Weekend round up

1. Electronic Voting
   Bruce Schneier points out this article in the New York Times Magazine about the failings of electronic voting machines across America. Obviously with them having a presidential election this year it is of great concern to them. For us the horror is the fact that Brown's government still don't seem convinced of the dangers of these machines.


2. Hi Def media
   With Warner having switched to releasing exclusively in blu-ray it is looking like Sony may well win a format war for once. I don't claim to be a technical expert on the differences, but my reading is that as far as the consumers are concerned both standards support about the same set of codecs and formats. On one hand blu-ray stores more but HD DVD is not region restricted. There has been much reporting based on the premise that Microsoft is only supporting HD DVD to keep the format war alive in order to precipitate the move away from physical media.


3. Georgia
   Yet another election mired with accusations of vote rigging, this time however the OSCE is suggesting they are broadly happy that the people's will is being respected.

Voting is not the place for blind faith

The title of this post was almost "Elections are not the place for blind faith" but of course they are, the faith that this time your party will overcome the odds to win, or the faith that this time the politicians will be caring, listening people.

What shouldn't be left to faith is the collection and counting of votes and the security around this that ensures that the person voting is entitled to do so, their vote is counted but only once and they can as far as possible avoid being coerced into voting in a manner against their will or for money.

During the electronic voting pilots at the last local elections, I was one of a number of people that formed an independent observation team that then provided our feedback in turn to the Electoral Commission who produced their report in August. The government has just produced it's response to this and the Gould Report on the Scottish election fiasco debacle chaos no sorry, can't come up with a suitable word. The response, in essence says that they appreciate the work everyone has put in but as the government "believes" something different they are going to carry on as they were. This is supported by such flimsy 'self supporting arguments' as "we suggested it was a good idea in another discussion document" in this case The Governance of Britain

The Green Paper supports investigating the modernisation of voting methods, as well as explicitly supporting the continued investigation into the benefits of electronic voting including remote electronic voting.

Never mind the fact that a green paper is the starting point for a consultation, not a set of binding conclusions, "we agree with what we said" is not the most compelling use of logic I have ever seen.

Another article of faith in the response is:

All the pilots supported successful elections. The Government is not aware of any instances of alleged fraud during the elections and does not believe that the pilots increased the risk of electoral fraud.

Again with the belief, the government does not and cannot know but in this case it seems, to believe is good enough. So from now on:

• I believe that my fellow humans are all sufficiently morally decent to never attempt to infiltrate an electronic voting company and make changes inside the black box software that could influence an election.
• I believe that large software companies are sufficiently interested in the public good as opposed to the value of the public contract to have every possible safeguard against rogue employees.
• I believe that there is no-one in the world who would want to pay large amounts of money to anyone who could provide them with an electoral back door

Given my beliefs we are all safe with black box electronic voting.

Further reading on electronic voting security.

Campaign for fixed term Parliaments

I wrote what I think about fixed term Parliaments
10 days ago. Since Gordon Brown trifled with the affections of returning officers up and down the country a lot more people, from all tints and shades of the political spectrum, have said similar things. There is now an organised Campaign for Fixed Term Parliaments with an associated Facebook group, if you agree with the aims, go and join up.
There is also a new Bill before Parliament I am not as happy with this as I am with the campaign group being set up as it doesn't seam to have any provisions to deal with lame duck governments or other issues of confidence. It also seems to be technically unconstitutional as it has no provision for the monarch's right to dissolve parliament at their will which the current arrangements (the Septennial Act 1715 as amended by the Parliament Act 1911) support.

Tactical voting

Amidst the general noise about whether there will be an election at all, come the news being reported by Guido about a concerted single issue tactical voting campaign. NO2ID is "the UK-wide, non-partisan campaign opposing the government's planned ID card and National Identity Register" and is apparently looking into producing a list of ID card supporting MPs and indications of which opposing candidates have the best chance of defeating them.

The Government has claimed that ID cards will prevent

• illegal immigration
  
• unlawful employment
  
• benefit fraud
  
• abuse of public services
  

and be valuable against terrorism. NO2ID has been formed by the people that think that this is the biggest load of guff in modern politics; that even if the criminal element don't find a way to get around the checks and balances designed to stop fraud in the system, and lets face it they will, the costs both in terms of actual cash and loss of personal liberties will be far greater than the possible benefits could ever be.

Will the plan work? It all depends on whether people believe enough in this single issue to override their normal voting preferences. Of course as pointed out in Guido's reporting of the matter it could work if the government believe that this might be a credible possibility and therefore decide to drop ID cards to stop it, a big win for NO2ID and all of us who don't want a very large amount of money spent on a scheme that won't do the job it is supposed to and infringes on our basic freedoms.

That end of term feeling

Give me five reasons why we shouldn't have fixed term parliaments. I can only think of one reason why, no prime minister ever really wants to give away any of their electoral power; it is the same reason why virtually all of the other reforms to our electoral practice have never been given a serious outing on the legislative timetable. The current situation where we don't know if Gordon will or won't call a general election means that great swathes of the most important people in the country are too busy worrying about winning and loosing seats rather than doing their jobs. Every expert commentator seems to agree on one thing, that even Gordon doesn't know 100% for certain what he is going to do, and therefore all the other ministers of the crown are in the dark. While I know that jobs based on patronage aren't renowned for stability or piece of mind, but in this case there is no way that any of 30 people who attend cabinet are at this point concentrating more on their jobs than on the prospect of being out of a job before Christmas. Of course in opposition things are different, the 1992 Labour Party manifesto said:

This general election was called only after months of on-again, off-again dithering which damaged our economy and weakened our democracy. No government with a majority should be allowed to put the interests of party above government, as the Conservatives have done. Although an early election will sometimes be necessary, we will introduce as a general rule a fixed parliamentary term.

A counter example is the circus that is the electoral cycle for the President of the United States. I do feel however that this is more to do with the shear amount of money floating around and term limits than fixed terms themselves. The only way to be sure on this is through experimentation, we leave the current system running as a baseline reference and then set up several parallel supreme heads of the executive branch of the US government. We could then alter all the appropriate variables, one of the systems would have strict funding caps, one would have no fixed terms, one would have no term limits and so on. This would give us the opportunity to appraise my thesis and inform the UK government as to the likely effects.

None of this is new; in 2001 Tony Wright (Lab, Cannock Chase) introduced as a Private Members Bill the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill which in less than 800 words would have solved all these problems. Instead everyone in political life is at the equivalent of the end of term at school, fidgeting, distracted, playing games and wondering what is going to happen in the summer holidays, in fact anything other than working.