#16  Improved System to Save Democracy --
A State Sponsored Election System

Alan F Kay, 4/10/2007

Summary

Precincts and polling places become irrelevant for elections of all national and state-wide offices ( and ultimately possibly county and municipal offices too) that adopt a new "State-wide Election System". No one votes for national and state offices in person. The Supervisors of Elections and their staffs mail ballots to voters with addresses taken from the county registration list, sorted alphabetically for each zip-code. Post-offices in each county collectively handle (a) the delivery of ballot forms from the Supervisor to all registrants' postal addresses perhaps by certified mail and (b) the return of filled-out ballots to the election Supervisors' offices for vote counting. A secret- password, unique to each voter, is included on the voters' ballots that voters can later examine to confirm that their candidate selections are properly displayed in publicly available "tally-sheets" that collectively contain the vote choices of every voter in the state for all national and state candidates. In the tally-sheets voters are identifiable only by their individually-different passwords.

The System description here covers only final elections, not primaries.

The proposed "State Sponsored Election System" would achieve the highest standard for elections that will make the states that sponsor the System, and ultimately the whole nation, proud to have the best election system in the world. The System will meet all the requirements of Table 1.

The System must be
•	reliable;
•	manipulation-resistant;
•	inexpensive (reduces all costs significantly);
•	helpful during the election for people (a) with disabilities, (b) living in rural areas miles from nearest town, and (c) out of the country for business, pleasure, or government service (including military);
and
•	must reduce the growing work overload of county Supervisors of Elections (hereafter sometimes just called "Supervisors") and their staffs.
•	count votes with the same accuracy Americans now generally achieve with bank account balances -- accurate down to the last vote.
Table 1

The System initially covers all biennial and quadrennial national office elections and all statewide elections. National offices are only

• President, Vice President, House Member, and Senate Member(s)
  • From 1 to 5 offices in any national election
• Statewide Offices are generally Governor, Lt. Governor, Up to 2,
• sometimes Cabinet Officers and statewide referendums, unlimited.

The only office up for election that is not statewide in most states is the House district. It would greatly simplify the System and make fair and honest elections easier, if House district boundaries at least followed county lines, but that seems impractical. The problem exists today and will probably not be changed by a State Sponsored Election System, for reasons explained here.

House members' district boundaries in all states with multiple districts are routinely gerrymandered by the state political party in power so as to maximize the likelihood of electing their party's members. Sophisticated software, to optimize gerrymandering with no concern for how often district boundaries cut across county lines, is provided by firms like Election Data Services in Washington DC. As a result, district boundaries in many states cut through most county boundary lines, often multiple times, often including or excluding just a few residences.

The net effect is that even within a precinct (or polling place) there may well be a division between two or more house candidates, and each ballot handed to a voter today must reflect those differences. This will be less frequent in the State Sponsored Election System with elections county-wide and not by precinct.

Greater Roles for the County Supervisor

In the same way that the system works today, the county supervisor of elections must receive all information necessary to produce ballots for an election that properly includes all offices and candidates. This, of course, is subject to the possibility that the state chooses to improve the process of (a) accepting fees and filings by candidates for national and state offices and (b) of accepting statewide-referendums on the ballots. The Secretary of State and the County Supervisors of Elections are responsible for producing all the items to be voted that must go onto the System ballots.

Precincts and polling places become irrelevant when the "State-wide Election System" is operational for elections of all national and state-wide offices (and ultimately possibly county and municipal offices too). No one will vote for national and state offices in person. The Supervisor of Elections and their staffs will mail ballots to voters with addresses taken from the county registration list, sorted alphabetically for each zip-code.

The new task is this. The County Supervisor must develop a combined, unified list of all county residents who are registered to vote in each election. The name and postal address of each registrant, including its zip-code, must be on the list. No other information needs to be included. Once a good clean list is created, it must be updated for each national election to account for (a) newly arrived individual residents who wish to register, (b) newly eliminated residents due to death or incapacitation or (c) re-location out of the county. In addition, registered persons may require update of their registration information, such as name change, new address within the county, or temporary new address for those who will be out of the US during the election. In many states some people who wish to register may have to meet with the Supervisor/staff personally, present evidence that under the election laws of the state they are entitled to be registered. For the national election registration, in case (c), if re-location is to another county within the same state, the Supervisor must forward that information to the other county Supervisor, and unlike local and within-county voting, the date of the re-location is immaterial.

Having completed the countywide registration lists, to arrange for the mailing and return of ballots in each county, the Supervisor of Elections must meet separately with postmasters in all the zip-codes of the county and reach agreements on (1) getting all the election ballot envelopes into the Post Office either by postal van pick-ups at the Supervisor's office or the Supervisor delivering them to the post-office and, either way, properly bagged or boxed to lower time and cost, (2) the cost and completion date of certified ballot mailing with return receipts and (3) provisions by the post-offices for facilitating the return of filled-out ballots to the post office in a timely way. If there is any difficulty with getting an acceptable agreement with a post-office, it may be advisable for the governor or the Secretary of State, with competent advice, to straighten out the problem.

For each and every registrant, the Supervisors' staffs must enclose the appropriate ballot in a postage pre-paid envelope. The envelope has a notice in the upper-left corner from the county Supervisor on the importance for the election of opening the envelope. It also includes the registrant's postal address to the zip-code, unless it comes from a bag or box containing out-of-country delivery addresses, that the Supervisor has approved for this election only. Other than the relatively few out-of-country mailings, deliveries are all within a single county, from Supervisor's office in the county to registrants in the same county. Unlike more familiar mass mailings which typically are sent from one location to all over the nation the postmasters should be able to guarantee two day delivery for all in-county addresses. Underscoring the seriousness of the effort to achieve a flawless election is a plastic seal that minimizes the possibility that the envelope has been opened prior to its receipt by the registrant.

Inside the envelope, in addition to the ballot to be filled out and returned in a return envelope enclosed and a courtesy copy of the ballot for the registrant to keep, will be a quite personal note from the Supervisor to the registrant that (1) Explains if the seal has been broken by anyone other than the registrant, the registrant is urged to notify the Supervisor by telephone or by a note provided for delivery to the Supervisor in the return envelope, postage-paid. (2a) Urges the registrant to fill-out and return the ballot in the envelope enclosed, (2b) Thanks the registrant for voting and becoming a voter, and (2c) Advises the voter that the postage-paid return envelope must be returned by a cut-off date set by the governor and applicable statewide. This cut-off date should be at least a week after receipt of the ballot by the registrant. (Some registrants, away from their residence or not opening mail for a time, would vote in 2 or 3 weeks, if it were still possible.) (3) Explains that the ballot itself has the registrant's zip code and next to it an underline onto which the voter is urged to create and enclose a secret code (similar to a password), of three or four alpha-numeric digits, that plays a large role in keeping the System honest. The registrant may wish to keep a copy of his/her code on the retained courtesy ballot. Four digits permits 36⁴ =1,679,616 different codes. In the extremely rare case that the code on a returned ballot of one registrant is identical to the code of an earlier registrant, the county Supervisor notifies the later registrant to change code.

Filling out a ballot generally requires few check marks and takes perhaps a minute. Replacing a round-trip to a remote polling place by the simplicity and ease of voting in your own home is especially beneficial for remote or rural registrants. That alone would probably raise the percentage of registrants voting, normally in national and statewide final (not primary) elections around 50%, to a new high perhaps 80% to 90%. The simplicity and cost-saving of pre-paid postage and the personal appeal by the county Supervisor to vote, are further reasons to expect a world-record breaking development that will give new life to US democracy and democracies everywhere.

In each zip-code one of the regular letter carriers delivers registrants' envelopes to the door or mailbox, arriving by van, bike, or on foot, or whatever is customary in the area. The mailbox by law cannot be used by any other delivery service than the USPS. In a similar fashion, the custom of the area is the expected way to post a return envelope. The letter carrier may pick it up, or the voter may personally take it to the post-office, or have friends, neighbors, or family do that. If in some cases the USPS cannot provide the services the state requires for the new system, other delivery systems, like FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc., can be considered.

Whatever processes are carried out today in each county and in each state for counting paper ballots remains unchanged with the new System which has only paper ballots, in operation. Again the governor may choose to seek improvements on that process.

The final chore of the Supervisors is the preparation of "tally sheets", sorted by county and zip-code. This function could be so automated that the sheets could be available electronically by perhaps 8-10pm by the end of "election day". The media may use this data, checking the addition of the results on each sheet, for each zip-code in the county, and each county in the state to declare all the national and statewide winners. The mainstream media have shown little interest in within county and municipal results. Paper tally sheets will be posted in each participating post-office and should be bound so that all the sheets that pertain to that post-office may be viewed when the post offices are open again the next morning. The publicly available tally sheets will provide one line for every voter with check marks showing that voter's choices for every office and each state-wide referendum, if any. BUT ONLY the voter knows if his/her choices that the tally sheets show are correct because only they know the secret-codes that identify each line of choices on the tally sheets. Some counties with very large populations (e.g. big cities), may need a hundred or more sheets to cover all the voters in a zip code. To allow a voter to easily find his/her own code, the Supervisor may for each zip-code sort the tally sheets and label them by the first letter or two of voters names.

If a voter finds and can verify an error in his/her vote choices, these errors are tabulated by the Supervisor and if such errors can come close to changing the winner in any contest or contests, the Supervisor must notify the media that one or more elections are in doubt. Even if the possibility of changing a winner is not present, the Supervisor must initiate an investigation to find out who has fraudulently changed voters' choices. Helping to make such fraud rare or non-existent, penalties for fraud in the State Sponsored Election System should be very severe. This fraud treatment is similar to what makes bank balance accounts accurate to the penny. The bank is motivated to make sure it looses no money and the customer feels the same way. The accuracy has been proven so reliable that many customers no longer seriously check their statement balances.

The savings in the cost of the State Sponsored Election System are enormous. The costs of building, maintaining, or renting polling places and furnishing them are eliminated. The cost of training poll workers and paying their compensation for working during elections is eliminated. The cost of buying, replacing, repairing, testing, and maintaining electro-mechanical or electronic election machines is eliminated.

The burden on the Supervisor and staff is enormously reduced as these functions are eliminated. The duties of county Supervisors and the Secretary of State for negotiating and supervising the new mailing functions may properly increase their compensation, but the total of that will be minuscule compared to the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of costs eliminated. The cost of preparing, printing and sending out election information materials and sample ballots if all done in one mailing, may be close to the same as the cost of mailing the registrant materials in the new System.

People with disabilities do not have to leave their homes to vote. Special needs can be handled by people who live with them or come in to assist them in daily life requirements. There is no extra cost that precincts today require, such as wheel chair ramps, Braille impressions on candidate lists, special polling booths, and poll workers trained to assist disabled in each precinct.

Voters have to go to a polling place to vote in elections today. About half of all voters need transportation to a polling place on election-day. In very rural areas, some voters may not be able to travel to their voting precinct because of transportation costs and/or the business needs of their daily lives. There are significant savings here for the voters.

The cost and benefits of the goals presented in Table 1 should be straight forwardly achievable after a careful complete design has been worked out by a state whose governor chooses to adopt a new "State Sponsored Election System."

 

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