Book Report: One Person, No Vote

It's a whirlwind tour of voter suppression in the USA. Nowadays, Depending on who you ask, North Carolina is no longer considered a fully-functioning democracy; how did we land in this situation?

Nowadays, corrupt Secretaries of State ignore most kinds of election fraud, but focus on preventing one kind: Voter Fraud. Voter fraud involves getting a human being to go to a physical voting place and impersonate a voter. It would be a pretty stupid way to cheat at an election: the logistics of moving around many many fake voters is much more difficult than the logistics of, for example, moving around many many fake ballots. That's why eletion fraudsters use other means. Each election, scattered around the country you'll see new reports of a few confused folks voting twice; nowhere near enough to swing elections. But a corrupt Secretary of State will use this as an excuse to change state election rules so that only people who can show a driver's license can vote. Then the state shuts down DMV offices in carefully-chosen areas. Thus, most Black folks must travel far to get ID; white folks can pick up ID nearby. Unsurprisingly, many voters of color can't take a half-day to travel to get ID. When Alabama set up a Voter ID law, they "needed" to issue 300,000 IDs to cover every voter who didn't already have a license; but in fact Alabama only issued 5,000 of these IDs, having dissuaded the other voters via sheer hassle.

Some folks, railing against false voter fraud claims, go too far: they falsely claim that there is zero voter fraud out there. This book doesn't fall in that trap, thank goodness, instead pointing out the handful of loons who try it each year. That's good; if you're dealing with conspiracy theorists, you'd better not claim there's zero voter fraud when a quick news search will turn up a few cases.

Nowadays, corrupt Secretaries of State suppress votes by removing voters' names from the rolls. As presented, this sounds reasonable: when voters move away or pass on, you want their names off the rolls, lest fraudsters use those names for fraud a la 1960s-era Chicago. But nowadays states already remove these moved-on names from their rolls. Corrupt Secretaries of State remove many, many names of valid voters right before elections. E.g., Secretary of State Kemp removed the names of 600,000 people who had moved out of Georgia… except that 300,000 of those people hadn't actually moved out of state. By the time the courts step in, it's too late to fix the problem. Many removed-from-rolls voters figure out how to re-register in time for their vote to count, but many others don't. Somehow, the corrupt Secretary of State doesn't go to jail (in Kemp of Georgia's case, he instead went to the Governor's office); somehow, the election results are allowed stand.

Something I learned from this book: I knew that corrupt Secretaries of State removed voters from the rolls who hadn't voted for a few years. I didn't know that the NVRA specifically mentioned that this was not a valid reason to toss a voter off the rolls.

Gerrymandering is unusual in that both major parties do it. The book points out an interesting recent case: New Jersey, 2018, centrist Democrats wanted to gerrymander; progressive Democrats stopped them.

Anyhow, this book is one of those that I had to read slowly because I kept pausing to shake my fist.

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I wrote some notes about working the recent election. People wail and gnash their teeth about changes in election technology, but I was really glad to be using plastic security seals that I could close without bruising myself. OK, I guess those aren't the advances in election technology most folks are curious about, but it made a big difference to me. Anyhow, for more insights like that, follow the link.

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On Tuesday, I'll be volunteering as a poll worker at the site of a 2-Tone Game puzzle. Yes, I'll be working on an election at a place that I turned into a puzzle. This will be so very on-brand for me.

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Today I walked over to City Hall and voted. I didn't vote in the usual San Francisco way (marking pieces of paper with a pen). Instead, I used a ballot-marking device (BMD)—I interacted with a computer; basically a big tablet. It then printed out a piece of paper with my choices.

These devices are meant to ease voting for folks who have a hard time marking a piece of paper. E.g., blind folks have trouble marking pieces of paper; but a BMD can read their choices out loud and let them vote by pressing buttons.

That's not why I used one today. I was just curious. These devices show up in arguments about secure voting. BMDs are computers. Manufacturers of election-related-computers have a bad history of making insecure machines (and then suing folks who report security problems). So folks get nervous about using these computers. If you hang out on the internet, you'll run into people saying that we should do away with BMDs. (I haven't seen any great answers to the questions "How would blind folks vote?") I'd read some social-network teapot-tempests on the topic… but I'd never actually seen such a device in action.

I'd hoped to see a BMD in use when I volunteered at a polling place back in 2018, but our device had languished on a table, unused. Then at poll worker training a few weeks back, our instructor told us volunteers that ¾ of us would never see someone use a BMD. To see one in use, I used one.

I guess they really are used only rarely. The nice Department of Elections lady at city hall was surprised when I asked to use the machine…she already had a paper ballot ready for me. She struggled to set the machine up. (There's some set-up: you have to tell the machine which precinct and party to use. Voters in different parts of the cities have different contests to vote on. There's a primary election happening, so the ballot is different depending on the voter's party preference.) The nice Elections lady was supposed to enter a number, but she struggled to figure out how to enter it. I don't think she was stupid; I don't think she was part of some voting-computer-fraud conspiracy. I think folks just use these machines very rarely and she'd never set one up one before.

Once the machine was set up, I sat and interacted with its touch screen to make my choices. When I was done, I pressed a button to print out my ballot: one 8½✕11 piece of paper with a complex QR code, some numbers, and my votes in plain legible printing. That last part made me happy: my intent had been recorded on that piece of paper. Even if mean hackers disrupted the vote, auditors or recount-folks could look at that piece of paper and know what choices I'd made. Thus, this BMD-produced ballot was about the same, security-wise, as a hand-marked ballot.

That's not to say that BMDs are risk-free. Though the paper trail makes it hard to sneakily steal an election, mean hackers could still disrupt it. E.g., if I'd sat down at that computer and it had started playing the Michigan Wolverines Fight Song, I would have lost faith in the election process. It's tough to hack pieces of paper like that. But such a hack didn't happen today. Things went OK today.

It's good to try these things that folks on the internet are screaming bloody murder about to find out that, once again, the world has not ended.

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I got some snail-mail from Mike Bloomberg. I opened up the envelope, but there was no check inside. I don't understand his strategy as well as I thought I did, I guess.

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At today's Poll Worker training class, the instructor said that 80% of us volunteer election clerks would never see a ballot marking device (BMD) in action. That's too bad, since my curiosity about these devices is part of what drove me to volunteer in the first place. You might remember that when I volunteered back in '18, I was disappointed that nobody wanted to use the B.M.D.; and I chalked this up to the neighborhood's hilly nature. (Surely, I reasoned, anyone who lives in this hilly place must drive; and thus wouldn't need voting assistance from this device. All potential users would move to better neighborhoods.) But apparently, it's not just that neighborhood.

To satisfy my curiosity, I guess I could use a B.M.D. in the upcoming election. San Francisco has new devices, now with big printers. So it's plausible that the "marked ballots" it produces are actually legible. So I could double-check that it actually, y'know, marked the choices I wanted. And the upcoming election is relatively short—just a couple of sheets; so double-checking it wouldn't be such a chore.

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“Freedom isn't free.” –Guy who went to City Hall to vote early and left his bus pass by the metal detector. ...