For generations, we allowed representatives of candidates to scrutinize electoral votes to avoid error or malice from an election official. Neither bribery, nor favouritism, nor incompetence would have any effect.
Vote machines have the same vulnerabilities. They can suffer error and individuals can program them to skew results. Yet, authorities expect the public to trust them to be God-like objective, benevolent, unquestionable entities. These machines deserve no such trust.
Repeatedly, municipalities and provinces have used vote tabulators in their elections. In such instances, verification processes that would ensure public confidence are absent. This must change.
Regina recently used computerized vote tabulators to count all votes in the November 13 municipal elections, as did most cities in the province. The city subjected the machines to a test run of 16 votes and concluded on that basis to be perfectly reliable. That would be laughable if it weren’t so ridiculous and with such potentially grave consequences.
In an interview, Aleksander Essex, an associate professor of software engineering at Western University, told this author a risk-limiting audit would restore confidence in vote-tabulated elections.
“We can do a random sample of the paper that doesn’t involve a full count, and we can assure ourselves that the winner really won with high statistical precision,” Essex said of the audit procedures. “That’s what they do in the US. We should be doing it here. The fact that we’re not doing it here is, I think, a problem.”
Essex has also approached municipal and provincial officials who use tabulators to require such audits without much success.
“Tabulators are actually okay if you use mandatory, routine post-election audits of the paper trail and then invite the candidates’ representatives to witness the auditing,” Essex said. “But that’s not what they’re doing. They’re doing what in computer science we call a black box. Votes go in and a number comes out, and you can’t see what’s in between.”
Essex rightly insists this oversight fails democratic conventions. His stance has apparently led to undue pushback from people in government.
“I’ve had some things happen to me that are like that I don’t want to talk about, but if I could talk about, I think you’d agree weren’t so great. And they come down to people in power reacting badly to something that they ought to not react [to].”
The Shakespearean saying, “Thou dost protest too much,” comes to mind. Regardless, Essex refuses to speculate on the motivations or elaborate on what consequences he has faced.
The expert cooperated with legal challenges to computer and phone voting in Lambton Shores, Ontario in 2019. The attempts, one before the election and one following, failed. He says it’s difficult to convince a judge to force a corroboration from paper ballots to see the results match the electronic count.
“You would really have to come up with something extraordinary to convince the judge to let you do this. And that’s unfortunate because the burden of proof should not be on the losing candidate. It should be on the agency that conducts the election,” Essex said.
“It seems like mostly all of the avenues [for vote verification] that make the most logical sense are not the ones that would be convincing at a legal level. Go figure,” Essex added.
Essex said candidates have approached him over the years after election results were quizzically contrary to their expectations. They wondered if one can manipulate such machines, and his answer is a hypothetical yes.
“I’m not saying this is happening. I’m not saying I’ve ever heard of this happening. I am saying that it is a computer, and computers run software, and the software can be modified,” Essex explained. “At a technical level, strictly speaking, it can be done.”
Essex said it is “not cool” that machine use denies losing candidates basic assurances regarding vote counting when regular processes could lay such concerns to rest. He said anyone who wanted to perpetrate fraud could ensure such overwhelming results for a favoured candidate that a judicial recount would never be triggered.
Election officials, those elected following such elections, and those providing the machines want everyone to trust the system. That trust should not be given where it is not warranted. As it is, many voters are forced to put an undeserved, literally blind trust in a programmable machine that we would not allow any human vote-counter.
In May, Alberta passed Bill 20 that banned vote tabulators from municipal elections entirely. Although some municipalities complain about the higher costs of a hand-counted election, they should recognize the necessity of this price to pay. Reliable and indisputable elections are indispensable and the human counted, human-scrutinized system remains the best way to provide it.
Lee Harding is a Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
