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| Source: NorthJersey.com |
The 2000 elections were a turning
point in the way elections are administered in the US. After the contested race
between Al Gore and George W. Bush had to be decided by the US Supreme Court
almost a month after Election Day, numerous initiatives such as the Help
America Vote Act (HAVA), the creation of the Electoral Assistance Commission, and the
proliferation of watchdog and electoral transparency groups, dramatically improved
the electoral landscape of the US.
In spite the progress, there is still
room for improvement. Audits, a crucial step to certify the correctness of
election outcomes, are still scarce and do not cover, in most cases, the
electoral process in its entirety.
At the moment, audits standards and
procedures refer mostly to the process of hand-counting a sufficiently large
random sample of the cast paper ballots and contrasting it with the digital
record electronic voting machines provide. Although post-electoral audits are
important, instead of focusing only in detecting fraud, a greater emphasis
should be placed on preventing malfeasance of any kind of error from happening.
- Revealing when recounts are necessary to verify election outcomes.
- Finding error whether accidental or intention.
- Deterring fraud.
- Providing for continuous improvement in the conduct of elections.
- Promoting public confidence in elections.
Voting technologies, which continues to
gain popularity across the 3,600 jurisdictions of the US, provide numerous
opportunities to review the components of the voting systems, and guarantee
that the outcome of the electoral processes exactly reflect the will of voters.
Those opportunities should be exploited. From the configuration of the
electoral roll and electronic pollbooks, passing through the creation of voting
instruments, source code of voting machines, and post electoral audit, every
step of the election should be audited.
During the 2012 general elections,
more than half of the states conducted post-election audits, however,
authorities have not agreed on how to enforce pre-electoral audits. The focus
of authorities has been on certifying that the technology in use complies with
the minimum standards, but little or no attention has been given to each
election and especially to the numerous steps of the electoral cycle preceding
the event.
As voting technologies continue to
spread around the world, a considerable body of knowledge is being developed. The
US should take advantage of this by sharing experiences with Brazil, Belgium,
the Philippines, Venezuela or Estonia, and every other nation trying to improve
election administration through the adoption of technological solutions. Venezuela
stands out as an example of what can be done in terms of pre-electoral audits. In
a recent article published, available at forbes.com, Eugenio
Martinez (a seasoned Venezuelan reporter) points out that for the Presidential
Elections in Venezuela, before Election Day, more than 17 audits were performed
to certify all elements of the voting platform worked properly. This was one of
the main reasons why a contested election, in the midst of a heated campaign
and a highly polarized political environment, ended with immediate official
results being accepted by all parties minutes after polls closed. Reviewing the
Venezuelan voting platform and developing ties with Venezuelan electoral
authorities and its technology provider Smartmatic could be a great start. The
US cannot afford another electoral meltdown as it has all the means to avoid
it.
