Cuauhtemoc Cà �rdenas Solà �rzano, a progressive and outspoken opponent of the neoliberal economics/austerity that would find their embodiment in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), was an immensely popular presidential candidate. He was leading by a wide margin on Election Night. The computer tabulation was exclusively in the control of Mexico's Ministry of the Interior, which had banned all exit polling in advance of the election. Late in the evening, long after the polls closed, the computer tabulation system inexplicably crashed. When it came back online, the Ministry announced that the neoliberal "free trade" advocate Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who had deep family ties to narcotics traffickers, had won. Salinas would later serve as a signatory and outspoken proponent of NAFTA. Elections have consequences.
As previously noted, because transparency is expressly mandated by their respective constitutions, Germany and Austria have rejected "faith-based" elections. In 2009, Germany's highest court ruled that all forms of e-vote tabulation violated that nation's constitution precisely because they do not entail an observable count.
The alternative, also used by several towns in New Hampshire, entails what Brad Friedman describes as "Democracy's Gold Standard"--hand-marked paper ballots, publicly hand-counted at each precinct on election night. This not only ensures transparency but economy and efficiency. E-voting systems, especially the least reliable touch screens, are exorbitantly expensive both in terms of purchase and maintenance. In New Hampshire, citizens often complete their public hand-count faster than their machine-counting counterparts.
While, as noted, it is possible to conduct a hand-count of the paper ballots used by the optical scan systems, chain-of-custody issues arise if the hand-count takes place subsequent to the election. As Mr. Friedman and I recently discussed on his radio show, this issue arose several years ago with respect to a Wisconsin Supreme Court election, where a post-election hand-count was ordered.
On Election Night, the election officials were supposed to place the ballot bags in sealed envelopes. But, during the post-election count, many of the ballots arrived in bags that had been torn open. There was no way to know whether the ballots being hand-counted were the same ballots that had been cast on Election Night.
A similar chain-of-custody issue arose with respect to the recent decision by Austria's Constitutional Court. Unlike Oregon, where mail-in ballots are fed through the same easily hacked optical scan tabulators that other states use for their in-person ballots, Austria has strict procedures in place to ensure transparency. In each district, two people--a chief election officer and an assistant--must be personally present not only to hand-count the ballots but to slit open and remove the ballots from their voter-signed envelopes. This is required so as to ensure not only a transparent tally but to ensure that the ballots that are hand-counted are the same ballots that the voters had placed in the sealed envelopes before they were mailed.
Perhaps the most significant feature of the recent Austrian court decision relates to the thorny issue of election fraud. It is a charge that is easily made but often difficult to prove precisely because of the lack of transparency. For the Austrian court, it is irrelevant whether or not the official count was actually the product of an illicit manipulation. The only question is whether the government's election officials had failed to adhere to the strict procedures that are designed to preclude the possibility of a manipulated count. In that case, since the number of ballots in which election officials had failed to adhere to procedures was more than double the number of votes that, according to the official count, separate the two candidates, the court found it necessary to order a do-over of the election.
Politically, of course, the Austrian Constitutional Court decision is deeply troubling. It provides the head of Austria's "Freedom Party"--a party founded by former Nazis--a second chance to run for a presidency he had, according to the official count, lost by nearly 31,000 votes. The mere fact that so many Austrian citizens have been taken in by the rhetoric of the extreme right is, in fact, chilling. But, as Friedman often insists, election integrity is not about Left or Right. It's about right and wrong.
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